Random Topic Generator: Am I Crazy?

It’s impossible to escape adverts, either on TV or online. Today, I want to talk exclusively about TV adverts. I’m not complaining about them being there, I’m merely talking about their content, or to be more specific, the music. Every advert has some music, but the majority has popular mainstream songs playing in the background that best suits the product the advert is trying to get us to buy.

During a one-hour program, there’s usually four breaks every fifteen minutes that’s filled with approximately five minutes of adverts before returning to the scheduled program. A company can buy certain slots for their advert to play in, and it will be played a certain number of times over the course of the day, meaning we, the viewers sees the same advert many times. Depending on what advert is repeated, it can get annoyingly repetitive. But instead of accidentally going off on a rant about how I do get annoyed with certain adverts, I’m going to keep to the topic I want to discuss and focus on the music within the adverts.

We don’t hear the entirety of those popular mainstream songs, merely just a couple of lines at most. I’m extremely fussy when it comes to my music, but even I, upon hearing the same song over and over again can fall into that trap of starting to like the song. The more you hear the song, you start analysing each instrument, and the lyrics, and soon you find yourself actually liking what you originally didn’t. There are plenty of songs that I don’t particularly like playing in the background of adverts, but over the course of many days and after seeing the advert about a dozen times during the day, I start to like the music.

However, because I’m extremely fussy, I’ve fallen into a weird hole that I hope at least one of you has experienced before. The process starts off with me liking what’s playing in the background, and ends with hearing the song in its entirety on the radio. The problem I’ll be facing is, I will only like that specific section of the song – that one section I’ve been hearing over and over again on the radio, that I’ve found myself liking all of a sudden.

It can be the chorus, or one or two lines in a verse, but it’ll only be that section of the song I’ll like, whereas the rest of it doesn’t quite click with me. With how many times you’ve heard that section, if it has lyrics, you start learning them, and find yourself singing along with them whenever the advert is playing. So when you listen to the song on the radio, you only ever sing that part that’s ingrained in your memory. Singing only half a verse or half a chorus, or even half a line can feel weird at times.

When you’re listening to the radio during the day, and you’re working at the same time, it’s just there to kill the silence; you’re not really listening to it, but then that one song comes on, and you know it’s that song, and for the next two to three minutes, your brain is forcing you to listen to this song that you don’t particularly like for that one specific section that you do and can sing along to. Once that section is over, you go back to being silent, waiting for the song to be over so you can carry on with your day. But the only problem you’ll have there is because it’s a popular mainstream song, the radio plays it just as often as the TV plays the advert. Every couple of hours you’re experiencing this strange phenomenon.

Then it slowly moves to next and final step. Once you’ve listened to a song over and over and over again, you transition from disliking it, to liking it, to hating it. There’s no middle ground between the second and third step. You just find yourself hating the song. Your brain has had enough, it doesn’t want to process the music and lyrics anymore; all it does is let it through – in one ear and out the other. You just hate it.

You dislike every part of that song except for this one section. You’re already on the second stage there, but on the first everywhere else. That can only mean you will also reach the third and final step with that section and only be on the second with the rest, and that can have a weird effect. That section of the song stands out from the rest. You know it off by heart. It’s that knowledge that keeps it somewhere else in your brain. That section doesn’t fit with the song. If they removed that section from the song, it would make it better.

There is a fourth step, but that comes much later when you haven’t heard the song in a good few years until that one day when it suddenly pops up on the radio, triggering the memories and nostalgia. But for the time being, once you hate a song, there’s no going back or further forward. That’s the end. Unfortunately, once you’ve made that leap to the final step with that specific section, you just have to wait until the rest has caught up. Once the entire song has made that jump, and you hate it, can you start feeling free from this phenomenon.

I want to ask, am I the only one that experiences this? Am I crazy? Do only fussy music listeners experience this strangeness, or does everyone? Nowadays, there’s a name for everything, including these experiences, so I would be surprised if no one had assigned a name to this process. Maybe I just haven’t found it yet, but I have been looking. I had a quick look before writing this article, but I couldn’t find anything. Someone, somewhere knows what I’m talking about and what it’s called, if it does have a name.

I can’t really blame the companies who put the music in their adverts, I guess I have only myself to blame for starting the process off by not making myself a sandwich, or checking my phone, or doing something other than actually watch the adverts. I could save myself so much weirdness, probably.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)