Catchy

People who write 'catchy' songs are writers who can override their internal editors. Most songwriters who would come up with something insanely catchy bin it for being too cheezy and embarrassing. To come up with ultimate pop hooks you need to be utterly unconcerned with being cool and maintaining cred.

No, you do not have to like a song in order for it to be catchy. The fact that I have had a Wibbling Blue Stars song stuck in my head since Saturday night, and I most emphatically do NOT like Wibbling Blue Stars is proof positive of this.

At a basic level, the keys to catchiness are simplicity and repetition. I mean, ultimately, anything repeated enough times will be stuck in your head, as evidenced by the fact that I can and do get doorbells, train alerts and car alarms stuck in my head.

And then there is a very basic musical root to catchiness- certain intervals and resolutions are simply *expected* by the Western ear, almost as if we have an inbuilt or learned gravitation towards certain melodic trends, eg, resolving a seventh chord back to its appropriate root. Good natural (ie untrained) songwriters *know* these things as instinctually as the ones trained in songwriting and musical technique.

Trying to think of some utter doozies in terms of sheer catchiness. Erm, at the moment, Paul is forbidden from playing "Seniors, Juniors" by the Marshmallow Coast in the house, for fear it will end up in my head. Will think of more (that aren't by the Monkees, as they are Kings Of Catchiness) when I wake up.

The sure way to remove Spirit in the the Sky — and many many other things — is to hum to yourself the chorus of Red Red Wine.

I reckon catchiness and quality are unrelated. The former is to do with sets of notes/rhythms that the brain remembers easily, usually attached to equally memorable words. It's purely about the brain retaining the information. The management and A&R people out hunting for hits - particularly dance one-offs - get excited by a line of words that expresses very familiar stuff in (somehow) a new way, or slightly twisted. Like Spiller's "If this ain't love, why does it feel so good?" or something.

I don't agree with Tarden that most songwriters who can do it avoid it: I think it's incredibly difficult to capture something that simple. And songwriters who can will, since a) that's how they're built in terms of songwriting and b) it's where the money is.

Kate: it's nice here but if you feel squished, please email me offline and I'll vanish without resentment. xx

Mr T-T!!! It is an utter DELIGHT to see you here! Join in the fun, by all means, and welcome!

Oh, and I got so happy at seeing Chris here that I forgot to add my response...

I've never been "cool" in my life, and have long since stopped even bothering about being cool since I passed my teens, so perhaps I am excused from Tarden's observations. But personally, for me, it is *much* harder for me to write an "unlistenable" or "tuneless" song than it is for me to write pop hooks.

This may be because of my writing technique- I refuse to carry a pocket tape recorder (or sometimes even *write down* or tab) many of my songs any more - because I believe that if a song is not catchy enough for *me* to remember it once I've written the thing, and stay around in my head for the few days or weeks before I demo the thing, then it's not really catchy enough for it to be a pop song anyway.

I really would *like* to be able to write something tuneless and difficult and avante guard and noisy one of these days, but I've never really succeeded. :-(

I dunno, I really don't think that good pop writer and good avant- garde writers are jsut notches on the scale of song-writing talent. Certain people can write good pop music, but write bad "avant garde", some people write good "avant garde", but write bad pop, some do both well, most do both badly.

I believe there was a length Feed article by Franklin Bruno (of Nothing Painted Blue) dissecting this very question. His conclusion had a "game" element to it---in order to stick around, a melody has to be simple enough for the mind to wrap around, but complex enough for that memorization to be a bit of an enjoyable challenge.

Repetition, of course, helps.

I always thought if a song is catchy and can stay in your head, it must be good. Although I had Garth Brooks "Friends in low places" stuck in my head one day for no reason so maybe I'm wrong.

a song being catchy, remaining in your head after some time, is not a mark of artistic success, if that is its lone merit. what they have done is create successful product.

I always thought if a song is catchy and can stay in your head, it must be good.

I tend to think that songs that are only irritatingly catchy are the ones that get stuck in your head. I think everyone has heard a song that gets stuck in their head all day that they wish would just go away.

Last song to get stuck in my head: theme song to "That's My Bush!" (Parker and Stone do a great job of pastiching 80's sitcom themes, unfortunately -- it has the same irritating cheeseball factor that those songs did).

I get The Lady In Red stuck in my head all the time. Clearly, this is a wicked awful song, it's just there in the back, ready to spring at all times. In fact, even discussing it makes me wary that it'll come get me for the rest of the day. *shivers*

See, it's definitely a memorable song, which to me gives it some merit - but that doesn't necessarily make it likable. I mean, Stalin is memorable but I don't wanna be hanging out with him necessarily.

The last song I had stuck in my head was ONE BLOODY LINE of If You Tolerate This... because I forced two people to watch some Manics interview on Much Music (ps James Bradfield - did he die and get replaced by some REALLY AWFUL LOOKING OLD MAN?), and they kept playing that song and ever since I keep saying to myself, "If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot facists". It is driving me nuts. I'd like to stab myself with a letter opener at this point.

Catchy tunes are usually good tunes. I like "Friends in Low Places," despite the fact that it is Garth. I just hate the call-n-response live version.

However, regarding "catchy" and marketing/selling music: I don't think there is any correlation between "catchiness" and modern pop-chart success. Some songs on the charts are catchy, but I think these cases are coincidences.

Listeners (especially modern ones) want attitude, looks, funny lyrics, slang, electro-distorted vocals, and big beats, but they aren't interested in melody. Most of Brittany Spears/The Love Stop Boys(?)/Christina Agguileraiiaia tunes are not catchy. I can't remember what any of them sound like.

And most of the recent catchy tunes that I can remember from the charts had some kind of lyric/gimmick to go with them: that "One Week" song by Barenaked Ladies was incredibly catchy, but it was full of pop-culture references. "Buddy Holly" was uber-catchy, but it had that Happy Days video. The lack of such videos is probably why none of the (blushworthily catchy) tunes from "Pinkerton" did well. (sorry that Weezer and Barenaked Ladies are the most current examples I can think of)

So my question: did general listeners from the 40s-60s have more of an ear for melody than today's average listener?

Catchiness is a mark of the strength of the melody line / commercial appeal of a song. Often it is the songs I like the least that stick in my mind the most - 80s AOR is particularly persistent like this, songs like "Take My Breath Away" and "Living On A Prayer" almost seem to have been deliberately written to include chord changes that played the strongest on the heartstrings, and that instantly stuck in your consciousness.

I know what Tom means about "Spirit In The Sky". The funniest thing about that version is that, at the time, Gary Davies said on air that it was originally by T.Rex, as though it had *always* been glam rock (but first-gen glam, not pastiche) rather than singer-songwriter territory (Norman Greenbaum, as if anyone cared).

Well, there was less aggressive promotion around pop songs from the 40s-60s, and the melodies themselves were less embellished. I think you're right inasmuch as that, before rock established its hegemony in the 60s, mainstream audiences thought much more in terms of melody and less in terms of that which surrounds it.

I'm having a hell of a time thinking of a recent "catchy" song that doesn't have a strong & indelible image / gimmick / marketing campaign attached to it. Words are definitely integral, too - not even the words so much as the lyrical meter. Would that be considered part of the melody?

For instance, "Bootylicious" - the part that Beyonce sings right before the 1st chorus, with the words going rat-a-tat-tat. The rhythm of the words stuck with me right after I heard the song for the 1st time, even though I couldn't recall a damn word she shot out.

Of course, copying / judiciously appropriating a song that was once catchy is an easy way to ensure catchiness. Will Smith & P. Puff the Diddy Do Wah have the bank statements to support this claim.

Actually, the VERY BEST and MOST GLAM ROCK VERSION EVER of "Spirit In The Sky" is by Bauhaus. Pre-dates Dr and the Medics by nearly a decade. Just the sheer delerium with which Peter Murphy shrieks "Goin' up!!!" and "Jeeeeeee-SUS!" is worth, erm, me trying to remember which single is was a B-side to so I can find the bloody thing.

Good luck. It only ever surfaced as the B-side to a fan club only single, the A-side of which was "The Sanity Assassin." Insanely small print run, and remains the rarest Bauhaus track ever, as it's the only one never to have been officially rereleased on CD. I say find a Napster clone. ;-)

OK, that makes it even more embarrassing that I've heard it. Actually, very hard for me to dig out- as it's on a B-sides compilation tape that I made off the collection of an EXTREMELY obsessed and extremely rich fan. I mean, she even had the Sinister Ducks 7"! - and said tape compilation is in storage in upstate NY. Dammit!

A few years ago Public Radio (of course) did some quirky HI-piece on songs that ingrain themselves... I could have sworn (but I am not entirely sure) they said that Jobim (namely "Girl from Ipanema") acted as a mental sponge for any annoying-catchy song.

I am now quite angry at the ILM Thread: "Do you do you do you do you wanna dance?", to which I replied earlier today, as I came in to work, and which caused me to have that godawful - BUT ANNOYINGLY CATCHY - tune stuck in my head all day.

That's almost 8 hours - full shift.

AAAARRRGH! "Does that mean that, on some level, I like it?" - NO WAY.

Once I went for a long hike in the woods with the entire greatest hits of Helen Reddy playing in my head. I don't know where they came from or how I remembered them all, but I do know that I did not like it.

MWAHAHAHAH!!

Robin, I reckon that the concentration on melody in pre-1960's pop might be an artefact of the lo-fi nature of mono AM radio and the average record player. That is: songs had to have strong and relatively simple melodies to be hits because anything dependent on the stuff surrounding the melody didn't stand out amidst the murk and static of the radio.

So with better technology we've lost good tunes on the radio? For shame! This makes me mad. I'm pouting!!

I did think of a recent tune on the radio that is very catchy and which doesn't have much gimmickry attached to it: Green Day's "Warning." I was so shocked to hear a good Green Day song. Is the rest of this album good?

That Green Day song bears a striking resemblance to the Kinks's "Picture Book"

Picture Book- I think you're right. The rhythm guitar in Warning is all about Picture Book. Can't believe I didn't notice this.

You've got a point there, Richard. Specifically: that pop was less central in the culture and less exposed, and as you say the context in which people heard it was fuzzier and less clear. Therefore melody *had* to stand out, because there was so much more white noise interfering with pop's possible cultural dominance than there is today.

So, now that Pop Music is so intrenched in culture people needn't be arsed with writing a tune anymore? This would explain a LOT about the Radio 1 playlist at the moment.

I think CatchiNESS acts independently of quality, some of my favourite tunes are DEAD catchy, HOWEVER i have had BLOODY BLOODY BLOODY "Have a nice day" by the sodding shitophonics in my head for a FORTNIGHT. And it isn't very nice.

I'm trying the "Red Red Wine" cure, though i feel this might be like amputating a foot to cure a veruka...