The catchiest classic rock song of the 1970s, according to science
What does it mean for a song to be catchy? Is it all down to having a hook that draws you in within an instant, having memorable lyrics that you find yourself able to learn after one listen, or simply just having this infectious quality that means it gets stuck in the listener’s head? Well, it’s kind of all three. There aren’t many successful pop or rock songs that fail to do this, and whether or not you consider yourself to have written a song to a formula or not, you’ll undoubtedly have adhered to these principles on a subconscious level.
By this metric, a song also doesn’t have to be good to be catchy. Black Lace’s ‘Agadoo’ is catchy – you know the tune, you know the words for how nonsensical they are, and you’re cursing me for planting the seed in your head because it’ll be following you around until you try going to sleep later this evening. Good luck with that.
Ultimately, if you want to make a lasting impression with your song, you’ve got to create an earworm, and the 1970s were a decade rife with some of the catchiest music ever written. Pop music was mutating in various fashions, paving the way for the birth of disco and other electronically produced records, but at the same time, rock was at its most popular and had plenty of acts capable of writing radio-friendly hits that had a harder edge.
It was a remarkable time for music due to the sheer diversity of the decade, but in the world of classic rock, there was one song that proved to have all of the aforementioned ingredients that make for a scientifically proven catchy classic rock hit. Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s 1974 smash ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ is a track that has stood the test of time in terms of its recognisability, and it’s a song that can raise you from your seat in an instant, either to hurl yourself around the room in jubilation or to race to the audio source to turn it off.
As divisive as it is, Randy Bachman’s stuttered chorus has now evicted “push pineapple, ground coffee” from its residency in your brain. There’s no denying that the track has all of the elements required to lodge itself deep into the folds of your grey matter. There’s the chorus, which not only has a refrain that you’ll have to show incredible restraint from mimicking upon hearing, but it’s got a chord sequence that embeds itself in the memory due to how simple yet effective it is.
There’s also a distinct difference between the verses, pre-chorus and chorus in terms of the dynamic and stylistic shifts, but while the muted strumming in the verse and the ingenious key change in the pre-chorus show a little more panache in terms of the songwriting chops. The words, even if stuttered at times, are sung with clarity, and they don’t use any complex vocabulary which makes for a greater sense of universality.
However, there was one person who didn’t have the same belief in the song or its catchiness. Bachman himself had allegedly only written the song for his brother, Gary, who had a stammer, and he also used to use it as a test track in the studio because of how the dynamics shift between the verse and chorus. Allegedly, it wasn’t even going to be released by the band, but when their record label were disappointed that the album they’d submitted didn’t have any hits on it, they were pressured into sharing the ‘test’, which immediately won executives over.
The fact that it went to number one in the US and number two in the UK indicates that it had the hit potential that the label saw in it, and its extensive use in several films, TV shows and advertisements over the last 50 years shows just how instant the song’s effects are. If you want to be plagued by a song for the rest of your days, stick it on and let it work its magic on you. There aren’t many other songs that have the same power.
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