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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I gotta say, as dumb as this sounds, there is almost nothing more satisfying than having an unidentified song stuck in your head and then after hours/days/years figuring out what it is.

Vivid memory from when I was in middle school (before internet search was common) having a song tune stuck in my head for years that I couldn’t identify. Finally years later I heard it on the radio randomly and it was like scratching the best itch of all time.

For those wondering it was Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth With Money in My Hand. I don’t even love the song that much but to figure out what it was… whew, few feelings like it.

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You’re gonna love this: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx

What's actually crazy is how relatively non-"lost" it really was. Once you know what it's called you can go find it on Amazon, and there's reviews from 2000 still just sitting there; it's probably been on sale this whole time. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2010.

It's funny how something can be so available and yet inaccessible at the same time. Reminds me a little of Borges' Library of Babel: what you want is there, but what does it matter if you can't find it?

Two things: I have diagnosed but mostly managed OCD so that was fascinating

And second: that is a WILD story - I was kind of expecting to get to the end with no pay dirt but that was fantastic.

What I believe to be the greatest podcast episode of all time.

It’s one of the greats for sure.

Here’s another contender: https://archive.org/details/The.Dollop.Ep15.Ten.Cent.Beer.Ni...

Caution: I have almost crashed a car on more than one occasion from laughing so hard!

The ending ruins it for me. The fun mystical journey was actually just a distraction from walled gardens ruining the web.

There's a jingle completely missing from the Internet or any record I can find. It's the "Sport Chalet" jingle common on Southern California radios in the late 80's and early 90's. It goes "Sport Chalet!" in this heroic way, then "we take you to the limit!". It's very distinctive, and I've found people singing it on YouTube, but no recording of the original. It probably exists on someone's random cassette tape of radio from those days, and nowhere else. Remarkable!

Not music, but in the late 90s or maybe early 2000s there was an anti-smoking PSA involving an old man encouraging a baby to take its first steps. After much encouragement, the baby starts walking, walks over to the old man, and passes right through him as he fades into partial transparency.

The message then rolls that you shouldn't smoke because your early death will deprive you of important moments like this one.

This PSA made far more of an impression than most do -- for example, it's mentioned on Friends -- and I think about it often as an example of how the same basic argument can be made in weak or strong terms. It may have been too strong for its own good; I once asked a friend for help finding a video of it and the response was "Oh, I know exactly the commercial you're talking about. I won't help you look for it; I hate that commercial and I don't want to see it again."

I never was able to find it.

Here's a commercial with that jingle at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M76ABmdbkTI

Wow! The last time I looked was more than 2 years ago, so this video was uploaded since then. Thanks for posting. I don't recall the vocal being a choral group, but rather a very masculine solo voice, but it's definitely the same jingle.

I remember it the same way you do. Maybe they had multiple versions of it?

That was a terrible commercial. But I did enjoy the teacher pulling her glasses down to check out that HOT math at the end.

A shame that Reply All is no more but it had a great run while it lasted.

Underunderstood was what I filled that gap with

That... is almost a Rick and Morty episode. Like one of those alien sidekick parasites took the form of a song instead.

What a story! Thanks for posting.

That was great, thanks

That song, which is such a great/weird one-hit wonder, has flummoxed so many people! I worked at a record store in high school in the early 2000s and people would come in all the time humming or attempting to sing various songs. I got freakishly good at identifying even the hardest/weirdest tracks. I used to keep a playlist on my iPod of the weirdest tracks, which sadly has been lost to time.

Over the last 20 years, that skill has ebbed some, but I still get friends sending me their attempts to express the earworm stuck in their ear. I have an 80% success rate and enough OCD to usually track it down unless someone just gets stuff straight wrong.

I had a similar experience. Song stuck in my head for years. Finally found it. I honestly felt a little sad when I finally found out what it was. I think I'd somehow grown attached to the mystery of it.

> ... there is almost nothing more satisfying than having an unidentified song stuck in your head and then after hours/days/years figuring out what it is

I had a song in my head and I'd whistle it at parties / dinners etc. for years before someone was able to tell me what it was.

The person couldn't tell me the name but told me something like: "It's a very old folkloric song but I don't know it's name". And with that description and, well, the nascent Youtube I've been able to find its name (not even sure that was even Google back then).

But what's funny: everybody knew it when I'd whistle it. Everybody had heard it, but nobody could tell me what it was.

Turns out it was "Greensleeves" which is really famous. Wikipedia link which has a link to the tune:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves

Besides that anecdote last one I had in my head and couldn't tell, but which I found after a few hours, was this one:

https://youtu.be/nLT1-5laF0A

When I've got one and can't tell, I record me whistling it and sent it to friends/family and asks who knows what it is.

Hah, I had Greensleeves in my head since I was a kid with a digital watch that could play that song and some others. I had the feeling that I had heard it before that somehow. Many years later I suddenly hear that one somewhere and since then it's properly stuck in my head. Now I use it to get other songs un-stuck. Works wonders :-)

Roger that. I had two songs stuck in ma haid for a couple decades(!) before I was fortunate to stumble upon them.

They're Coming to Take Me Away, Napoleon XIV

Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire

Throughout my young adulthood I enjoyed hunting down the games I played as a kid on Windows in the late 90s.

List of childhood DOS games:

- Descent

- Tyrian

- X Wing vs. Tie-Fighter

- Jazz the Jackrabbit

- Super Solvers

- Sim Theme Park

- Let’s Explore the Airport

- The Lie

- Are you Afraid of the Dark

- Lego Creator

- Lego Loco

- CartoonNetwork.com shockwave games

- Lego.com shockwave games

- A slew of shockwave games from now defunct websites that you can find on flashpoint (penack silat, area flat, etc.)

I think what's more weird is that none of their other music sounds anything like that song. It's rather unique. And the lyrics seems to make no sense anyways. Everything about that song is an enigma to me.

When I was younger (basically when the transition to Web 2.0 happened), I had the melody of „The kids aren’t alright“ from The Offspring stuck in my head for months. I was so relieved when I found it.

I can totally see why that song in particular scratched that itch. It definitely has a nostalgic vibe to it (independently of my having grown up with it, I feel).

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