Out, damned song! out, I say!

I got a song stuck in my head
walking down street number nine
I sing it out loud with my friends
and we're all having a good time
- The Bouncing Souls

How does it come to be that we get songs stuck in our heads? Or, song lyrics? I rarely get a full song in my head; it's usually one, maybe two or three lines. Over and over. And over.

I did some research (yes, I googled; this is implied now, isn't it?) (unless Wikipedia is more appropriate; by the way, why don't we have a good verb for the act of looking things up in Wikipedia? I'mma get on that) and discovered that there is actually a term for the phenomenon: an earworm. I always thought that was a physical creature that killed you from inside your head. Wait, that's an earwig. That makes no sense.

According to this article (you could also go here, here, or here for more):

Certain songs—simple, repetitive, or oddly incongruous—have properties that act as mental mosquito bites in that they produce a cognitive "itch." The condition also arises when people struggle to remember forgotten lyrics or how a song ends. To scratch a cognitive itch, the brain repeats the song, which then traps the hapless victim in a repeated cycle of itching and scratching.

I've always thought that the way to kill an earworm (until now, of course, I only thought of it as "getting that damned song out of my head") is to actually play the song, particularly if I can't remember a lyric or if I had recently played the song but cut it off too soon. So says the same article:

How can you make an earworm go away? Thinking of something else or actually listening to the song in question are thought to help, but there is presently no research evidence showing what works best.

Obviously, I'm not going to continue using something based on my experience if research hasn't proven it yet. What do you think this is? The Dark Ages? (I bet that would have been a fun time, despite the name. I mean, if you were a scholar or something. In what age has it been fun being a peasant?)

I suppose you're wondering by now what song has me so incensed that I had to find out why songs get stuck at all:

Allll of my exes live in Texas...

Freakin' Nashville Star. It's not so much that I don't like the sound of country music, either; something about it just makes me uncomfortable. For more on this, you'll just have to look for my post entitled, "Country gives me the willies (and pop gave me worms)."