The five catchiest classic rock songs, according to science
Catchiness is the key to a good musical career. If Elvis Presley didn’t have such a knack for hefty hooks, then maybe the King would’ve been just another servant.
The hook is the element of music that makes something notable, it’s the element that has us humming a tune in the shower despite not having heard the song for years. It’s the driving force behind the impulse to press play on a track we apparently don’t even like that much.
But what, exactly, is catchiness? Well, in essence, it doesn’t have anything to do with the music itself but rather with the listener’s interaction with it. In other words, catchiness pertains to how easily we gauge a tune and how well we remember it. But science has proven that the musical triggers for this can be anything. A drum beat can be as catchy as a piano melody, and a certain vocal delivery can be catchier than the harmonics of the topline itself.
Take, for instance, the difference between these two lines: a) ‘Talking about my generation’, and b) ‘Talkin’ ‘bout my ge-generation’. Through a few characterful quirks, Roger Daltrey made the second line catchier and more unique by magnitudes. Now, people still sing the line over half a century later on an idle Tuesday.
There are various ways a record can weave its way into your head, but it is there where the notion of ‘catchiness’ occurs. Of course, this sounds very nebulous and vague, which is why it caught the attention of Dr Ashley Burgoyne from the University of Amsterdam, who explained, “You may only hear something a couple of times, yet 10 years later, you immediately realise that you have heard it before. Yet other songs, even if you have heard them a lot, do not have this effect.”
So, in order to find out what catchiness actually is in a musical sense and why certain songs and sounds are lodged in our psyche, we must first find out what songs are deemed commonly catchy by the general public. To decipher this, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester set up a study to test both the cognition and recognisability of a repository of songs.
In order to do this, they invented two different games: one involved a track being played for a period, followed by a stretch of silence during which participants had to hum the missing section from memory, testing our retention and cognition of tunes. The second involved simply playing a song and seeing how quickly people recognised the track, testing how reactionary we are to certain pieces of music. In essence, this showed how ingrained these songs are in our psyche. Or rather, how deeply they have their hooks in us.
Five of the tracks that fared well in the study were classic rock tunes. This is interesting in itself. Pop is the genre you most closely relate to catchiness, yet classic rock’s presence in the mix proves how earworms can arise in a variety of different ways. However, based on the tracks themselves and my recent chat with the psychologist, Dr Concetta Tomaino, the executive director of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, there might be a few potential threads of commonality between them.
So, what makes a song catchy?
It seems nailing the brief is important for catchiness. For instance, the catchiest classic rock song in the study was ‘Eye of the Tiger’ by Survivor. The classic 1982, admittedly pop-adjacent slice of cheese is now perfectly synonymous with fighting. Any time you think of some sort of blood-pumping activity, ‘Eve of the Tiger’ won’t be far from your mind.
As Dr Tomaino explained, this is often how tracks lodge themselves in our brains: “You know how the images in dreams are really metaphors for something else? These songs that come to mind spontaneously usually pop up because there is either an emotional or some other significance to them. They don’t just pop up for nothing. Something in your brain in the back of your mind is processing something, and it goes, ‘Boom, there’s an association with that song’. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have a reason for popping up.”
Can that association also be societal rather than personal? Well, with no scientific backing at all, I am about the spurious suppose it can be owing to the fact that the third classic rock song on the list – shortly behind ‘Pretty Woman’ by Roy Orbison – is ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ by Aerosmith. This track has been assimilated by pop culture at large to signify cheesiness and melodrama.
Countless slo-mo parodies and comedy montages have ingrained it into the wider psyche of society, proving that the drumming-in effect of ubiquity surely aids catchiness, too. The more we are exposed to something, the more knowable it becomes, and our brains store that information in the brain’s retention centre, known to neurologists as the Hippocampus.
Then there’s the anthems that are slightly harder to explain. Sure, ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ by Bachman-Turner Overdrive and ‘Devil in Disguise’ by Elvis Presley are both ubiquitous, socially ingrained and sentimentalised enough to play into the previous discussions, but there also seems to be something that is simply musically catchy, too.
The pause and sudden syncopation before Elvis croons, “You’re the devil in disguise…” just lodges itself in the cranium, the classic “B-b-b-baby” delivery in ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ clings in there with crampons. And perhaps those oddities are the key. After all, a separate study analysing number one singles found that the trait they most commonly shared was subverting familiar structures just enough to surprise us.
Simply put, you give us something we’ve heard before, so we’re pleasantly placated, and then you tweak it with a dynamic touch of the unfamiliar to surprise and excite us. That way, we’re stimulated and satisfied. Our brain can log it easily, but it also thinks it is novel enough to be worthwhile to remember. Or at least something like that is going on… because lord knows, a track most certainly doesn’t have to be good to be catchy. Yet, we clearly love catchiness at least in a commercial sense because all of these tracks were top tens in the US and UK.
As for the catchiest song of all time of any genre… Well, a separate study declared that to be none other than ‘Wannabe’ by the bloody Spice Girls.
The five catchiest classic rock songs, according to science:
- ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – Survivor
- ‘Pretty Woman’ – Roy Orbison
- ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ – Aerosmith
- ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
- ‘Devil in Disguise’ – Elvis Presley
