Neuro-radiology

Our nation's neurologists are jerking us around, studying minutiae while ignoring the issues that affect all our lives. Recently, researchers in a field called "neuro-theology" have been investigating how certain structures of our brains are pre-wired to respond to religious ritual and prayer, with what they think are stimulating results. Of course, if we are pre-wired to love God, a lot of atheists will be pissed. These investigations won't do anything except stir up trouble; one anticipates the founding of a group proposing to ban neurology, presumably in Kansas, where outlawing science is considered a civic duty.

Another group of neurologists has discovered that laboratory rats spend their nights dreaming of the mazes that they had been forced to navigate during the day, at least when neurologists scan their brains with tiny electrodes while they sleep. Guys, the rats are dreaming of getting out of your nightmarish, maze-ridden, brain-scanning death trap of a lab, and into a wider world where they are free to contract rabies and eat your discarded food.

While neurologists play around with rodents and religion, however, they ignore a problem that affects every American and which has only become more deadly with the advent of a certain file-sharing service whose name sounds like something you'd call a lazy dog: the pain all Americans suffer from awful music which they cannot forget.

As we all know by now, commerical radio programmers are both very powerful and very cautious, and they are more inclined to play one song fifteen times than to play fifteen songs once. Furthermore, they are often influenced by the opinions of people who are either drunk or stupid and call into a station forty-five times a day asking for the same idiotic song. Those of us who wish to listen to the radio, and who do not have a college radio station within antenna-shot, are therefore consigned to a seemingly endless parade of nausea. Endless exposure breeds eventual memory, and as a result many of us are walking around with the lyrics and music to demonstrably retarded songs taking up valuable space in our brains.

I haven't listened to commerical radio in years, but I fell victim to the vicissitudes of memory anyway when I received an MP3 file of a song by Adina Howard called "Freak Like Me" from my lovely and talented sister. (This is where Napster enters into the equation: Songs you would never pay actual money for are now available free of charge, for what you think will be a momentary blast of nostalgia. It never ends well.) "Freak Like Me," for those of you who did not listen to R&B stations during the early 1990s, was a song about a freak and the people like her that used to be absurdly popular for absolutely no reason, besides a moderately phat bassline. I thought I would have a listen, feel the kitsch, and delete the file.

I was shocked and sickened to realize that I remembered every single lyric to the song. To be fair, "Freak Like Me" does not contain lyrics so much as a succession of successful catchphrases from other, better songs, like "it's all about the dog in me," "I got you shook up on your knees," and "we don't give a damn about a thing," so the lyrics could be said to be memorable in a vastly insipid way. But I didn't just remember the lyrics; every ornamental melodic twist of Adina Howard's underpowered alto had somehow survived the passage of time in my brain. And furthermore, the song has activated some sort of insatiable masochistic pleasure center which will not let me stop playing the goddamned song, and even forces me to mimic the overproduced swells of the chorus with my own voice, meaning that I actually say things "Cause we can BOOM BOOM any time, it's all good for me" out loud. People could theoretically hear me. I am abashed, to say the least.

Of course, if this were just me, I would take some sort of powerful tranquilizer and be done with it. But apparently almost all of us have had pop-music traumas embedded in our brains by overly promiscuous airplay, and when the traumas are unearthed, they prove quite obstinately memorable. My mother - my dear mother - provided a particularly moving example with the long-ago popular song "Tammy's In Love." She actually sang a couple verses of it, after which I asked her to stop because I could not stand to see her in such pain. They say time heals all wounds, but my mom has been suffering for thirty years! How much longer does she need to wait?

Nevertheless, commerical radio isn't getting any less stupid, as evidenced by the current popularity of talentless teens and groups thereof. And Internet file-sharing, despite the legal slings and arrows directed its way, probably isn't going anywhere either. So I call on our great nation's neurologists: Stop torturing vermin and venerators and have a look inside our brains to find and eliminate the neurons that contain our memories of these songs. This will be a dangerous process for the first few subjects, of course. May I suggest that we begin with a test population of radio programmers?

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