Radiolab - Pop Music

Episode Date: April 21, 2008

This hour of Radiolab: pop music's pull.

This is Radio Lab. I'm Robert Krelwich. I'm Chad Abumrad. And this hour, I'm going to curse you, Chad. I'm going to ask you to just simply do this following thing. You know that song that we both hate. Which one? God, it's like the moment you start that. Keep going. Can you sing it?

There are some songs that I can stick into your head and they just won't leave. There's somebody, of course, Suzanne, who got this song somehow stuck in her head. And then there's songs that just won't go away because you didn't even invite them and they stay. This is an hour on the music in our heads. Where does the songs come from? Why do they stay a whole hour without Suzanne Vega? Thankfully. On Radio Lab.

Let me ask you a question there to get us started here. When a song gets stuck in your head, do you have one in there right now by any chance? Oliver, the Broadway show tune. Of course. What does it sound like when it's in there? What does it sound like? Yeah. Oh, no, but just think, before you answer, just think, what does it really sound like?

Describe it musically. Um, well, it does, well, it's funny that you mentioned this. It doesn't actually, I don't hear any musicians. Like, is it loud? No, it's, it's nothing. It's not loud. Does it have like a location? No.

Tamber. No, it just has a melody. A vague, foggy. Like a shadowy melody, right? Yes, exactly. Okay, well, so that's our starting point. You know, most of us get a song in our head. It's kind of like what you describe.

vague. But there are people who, when they get song stuck in their head, it's a whole different experience. It is not vague. In fact, they wish it were vague. They wish it were a shadow. And you'll know what I mean in a second. Let me introduce you to someone. Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Always has songs running through his head. Everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. He's plagued by them, actually. And he spoke with our producer Lulu Miller. And so that was going through your head just now? That's right. Mary had a little over and over again.

You know, let me have you just introduce yourself really quickly. Oh, my name is Leo Rangel and I'm not young. I just had my 94th birthday. I've been in L.A. since I was in the war, World War II. Leo's a psychoanalyst. Oh, yeah. I'm still in practice. So he finds everything that's been going on in his own head, sort of intriguing, like from a professional standpoint. I'm trying to think, what the hell am I doing? Anyway, this whole thing started for him about 12 years ago.

He just had major heart surgery, and he wakes up in his hospital bed. I wake up in the ICU, and almost as soon as I'm conscious, outside my hospital window, I hear music. And it was just, it sounded funereal like hymns. I hear these songs, I look out the window, I think, a rabbi is out there. I say to my kids, I casually say, hey, there's a rabbi out there singing. They said, what do you mean? So I said, there must be a rabbi school,

and he must be teaching young people how to be rabbis. And the kids looked at each other. Because they weren't hearing anything. But at that moment, that didn't matter to Leo, because the music was so loud and vivid to him, so totally coming through. that window, that I dismissed them as, oh, well, they could have their opinion if they want. I didn't think anything of it.

And then the rest of the week in the hospital, you know, I'm getting better and better. And as I get better, the music changes. I start being more perky. And the songs, the music out the window changes to Chattanooga-choochoochoochoo-de-da-chaternud. Chattanoo Choo Choochoo. One in the morning, two in the morning. I'm waking up with these songs. Always coming in from right outside that window.

Then I thought, Jesus, there's a pretty energetic group there across the street. At this point, Leo was beginning to suspect that something a little weird was going on. But the real coup de grace came when I was going to leave the hospital after a week or so. And this tune, I didn't know. know the words at first, but I started to hear, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And as he packed up, signed out of the hospital, and got into his car.

I was reflecting. That's when it hit him. I still was hearing the song. The song was still coming from outside a window, but now the scenery was moving. I thought it was related to the hospital and to the thing across the street. Here I am in the car listening to this. And that's when the lyrics appeared.

Finally, the words come when Johnny goes marching home again. Hurrah, hurrah. He couldn't ignore it anymore. Not only was the song following him home, it's like the song was about him. He was the Johnny. The girls will cheer. Marching home, coming home from the hospital.

I realized, I am listening to me. I am listening to me. Okay, is he really, though? I mean, is he really listening to anything? Or is he just thinking he's? hearing something. Well, there's nothing out there for him to hear. Right, but from the inside, like, is his brain actually hearing music? Well, lucky for us, there's a professor in England who had the exact same question. I called him up. Hello. Hi, can I speak to Professor Griffith,

please? Tim Griffith is his name. He is a professor of cognitive neurology at Newcastle University. Here's what he did. He took 35 people who were like Leo, who claimed to be hallucinating music. Yeah. And he scanned their brains. Very simple experiment. I just put people. on a scanner and said, what are you hearing now, what are you hearing now? When they told him, there, there, I'm hearing music, that at that moment he would snap a picture of their brain. Then he took a different group of people who have no hallucinations, played them real music,

scanned their brains, and then he compared the pictures. And if you look, they looked virtually identical. If you were to put those in front of me and say, one's people hallucinating, the other people being played music, I wouldn't be able to tell you which was which. Which tells you two things. First, this condition is real. These people are not making it up.

And second, this goes way beyond the ordinary experience the rest of us have where we get a song stuck in our head. These people are getting the full high-fi experience of listening to music. Their entire brain is lit up. The music sounds so convincingly like real-life music. What are you to think when it suddenly appears? That's Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, who's been collecting emails from hundreds of different people who hallucinate music.

One person described it in the following way. He said, imagine that you were at a rock concert standing right by loudspeaker. Well, it's louder than that. At the beginning, when I didn't know what was going to happen, I thought it was going to take over my mind. It started interfering with sleep. It's the Achesentepika and Santa Fe. Like all night.

Oh. I got mad. I used to say, stop it already. Stop it, cut it out. Come on, enough, enough, enough. But you're never free. I thought I'd never sleep again. That was the low point.

I thought I've got to get help for this. At what point did you bring it up with doctors? Oh, the doctors were completely impotent. To this day, they roll their eyes when I tell them about it. One doctor told him that maybe it was the fillings in his teeth, up the radio. Okay, I hoped it was. Right.

But it wasn't. It continued forever. Nothing he could do could make it stop. I don't have an off button. It's like there was a jukebox in his head run by an evil gremlin. And the worst part, the gremlin would mess with the tempo. Like, okay, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

The men on the flying creepies. Then it starts speeding up. That's the worst. When that started to happen, I really was getting close to panic. I had the feeling that it could go at its rate and I couldn't stop it. It's like you're on a galloping horse and the horse is running away with you. I once told that to my daughter and she said, Dad, why don't you just instead think of the song?

And I could control the tempo and instead, when that was galloping, I would go, ah, da, da, da. Da, da. Da, da. Da, da. And immediately I'm completely relaxed. And the gallop is completely gone. And I could even let it come back and it would start now being...

Oh, you know, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. And that was no longer ever a problem of the tempo running away with me. Okay, so let's just assume that Leo is not crazy. I never thought I was psychotic. Never, never. Because most people, it turns out, with this condition, are not crazy. There's nothing else wrong with them. According to Diana Deutsch.

So then the question becomes, how can a person who is otherwise sane hallucinate to such a crazy degree? Well, in the 60s, there was a Polish psychologist named Jersey Konorski who thought about this. And he came up with a simple, kind of beautiful idea based on an assumption that he couldn't prove yet, which was that between the ears and the brain, there are some connections, he thought, just a few stray connections that run backwards, brain back to ear, which would allow sound to run in reverse. Now, this was just an idea. He couldn't really test it. But many years later, neuroscientists like Tim Griffith start to poke around in the brain they start to explore.

And what they find is that he was right. Yeah. Very right. If you look at the pathway between the ears and the brain, probably about 70% of the fibres don't actually go up. They go down. They go the other way towards the ears. 70% go up. 70% go from the brain to the ears.

It's like our ears are literally wired to hear our brains. Now, Kinoorski's idea was that normally our ears wouldn't. hear what the brain was saying because it was too busy taking in all the sounds from the outside. But what if, Ethop, the sound from the outside stopped? Maybe then there would be a kind of backflow. The sounds stored in your brain would start to flow backwards. Now again, this is just an idea, but there might be something to this because it would explain why most of the people who suffer from musical hallucinations, according to Tim Griffith, have one thing in common. By far and away, the common situation you see it in, is in people who have deafness, usually in middle or later life.

And you have to take his word for it. Nearly the instant that I went deaf, I started experiencing round the clock 24-7 auditory hallucinations. This is Michael Corost. When he was 36, he lost all of his hearing. And he remembers the moment that happened. He was in the emergency room talking to a nurse. And suddenly the sound started to go.

It was like going from talking like this to talking like this to talking like this to talking like this. My ears were just draining out. like water draining out of about. I was just getting deffre and deffre and deffre and deffer. And at the same time, I was starting to hear a very loud ringing sound in my ears. It was gradually morphing into sort of formless, eerie, ethereal music.

Music of the spheres, really, I would call it. And we would slowly morphed into some version of the end. Ave Maria. It was almost as if, as a sort of recompense to being deaf, I was like plugged into some sort of deep background melody in the cosmos.

Now here's the question. What would happen if Michael suddenly got his hearing back? Well, a couple of months later, Michael got a cochlear implant installed. This is a little chip that's put into his brain, which promised to return at least part of his hearing. And he says, when the doctors turned on?

The moment. The moment. He says they turned it on. The sounds from the world came rushing in, and the music stopped. Stopped, cold. It just went away almost instantaneously. There you go.

Well, but I happened to know a woman who had a very, very different experience. What do you mean? She had the same problem. She went deaf. She started hearing music. What kind of music was it? Hems, spirituals, patriotic songs. Her name, this is not actually her real name, it's Cheryl C, who's what we're going to call her.

She wanted the music in her head to stop, and she'd heard about a patient, like your friend there. Who had musical hallucinations received a cochlear implant, and her hallucinations disappeared. So I wanted to do it. So she did it. She got the implant. She wakes up on the operating table. And? I heard the music.

It was inside me. Still there. Just was there. I can't stop it. Why in the first case, they're kind of the same situation? They are very much the same. Why would there be that difference? I don't know why there is this difference between them.

So I ask Dr. Oliver Sacks, who we often talk to on these questions. How do you explain the difference? As a physician, you know, one sees patients, you ask about their symptoms, they produce their symptoms. But it is equally important to see the relation of the symptoms of the disease to the the person themselves, to their identity. He's discovered over the years that the problem as expressed in the patient is partly a disease. I mean, the person is sick or in trouble in some way. At the same time, the disease is reflecting something about the person in front of him.

One sees an interaction and a liaison, a collusion, a collision. I don't know what word to use between the self and a symptom. And sometimes it can come out so strangely. For example, there's a patient he has who was a Jewish kid. He was a Jewish boy who'd grown up in Hamburg in the 1920s and 1930s, and he had been terrified by the Nazi youth. And for some horrible reason... He hallucinated Nazi marching songs. He was tormented.

But on the other hand, Oliver told me about an old woman he once met in a nursing home who was haunted by lullabies. One after the other, nonstop. But see, she was in order. Her father died before she was born and her mother before she was five. Orphoned, alone. She found the songs in her head deeply comforting. The music and the hallucinations, in fact, seemed to be a door into a lost part of childhood. So then the differences between people, when music floods into their head,

what's going on, says Oliver, is the disease and the person they're talking to each other. The self can be molded by hallucination, but it can mold them in turn. I wonder where Leo fits into this. Lulu. Yeah. How would you say that Leo self interacts with his symptoms or vice versa? Well, he's a psychoanalyst. So whenever he gets a song stuck in his head, which is like all the time, he analyzes it. He looks for a hidden meaning in it.

Like, you know, the way dreams reveal your inner life, the same thing with songs. Leo will tell you that every song is a message from his subconscious. Everything has an unconscious connection, pleasant or unpleasant. And he's just got to figure out what it is. I'm analyzing me like I have a patient in front of me. Like when I first called him up, he had Mary had a little lambs stuck in his head. That he told me it was because he'd been thinking about... The passivity of the American people in following a leader that misleads them.

And everywhere that Mary went, the lambs was sure to go. I mean, and the connection is obvious. Or when he first got home from the hospital, he always had America the Beautiful stuck in his head. And I'm certainly not a raving patriot, but what this meant was home, sweet home. America to me was home. Okay, it's easy to think that this is kind of a stretch.

I mean, every song has some very specific meaning for him. But I don't know, there was this one time he told me about where he woke up with a song in his head. I start going to brush my teeth. I'm singing along as I go to the bathroom. He didn't know why. And this is what it was. It was just a few years after his wife had died.

My bunny lies over the ocean. My bunny lies over the sea. My bunny lies over the ocean. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Bring back, bring back my bunny to me, to me. You know, and I realized when I, why am I singing that song? And then suddenly I realized it was our wedding anniversary that week. It was one of our major anniversaries.

You know, that song can kill me when I hear it. Even so, he told me that when that song comes, he doesn't want it to go. I found that when the song disappeared, I didn't want it to disappear. It's now been over a decade of hallucinating music for Leo. And he found that at some point, the music switched. It went from intruder to friend. Now he looks forward to the songs. Stars and steal guitars.

They keep him company. Because often he finds himself alone. It's true that one of the things about being 94 is that when you look at your telephone address book, half of them are not there anymore. You scratch out the name. And that's not easy. Just Molly and me And baby makes three

All happy in my Blue Heaven Radio Labs Lulu Miller Thanks Lulu Yeah thanks to Leo Leo has a book out about living with musical hallucinations It's called Music in the Head Living at the Brain Mind Border

And so does Michael Corost He's the guy with the cochlear implant His book is called Rebuilt My Journey Back to the Hearing World You can find links to all of those on our website, RadioLab.org. And special thanks to Oliver Sacks,

who basically gave us his Rolodex and we were able to find all these people and interview them all, thanks to Alva and Kate Edgar, his assistant. Absolutely. Now, Robert, before we go to break, I just want to play one more clip, if you don't mind.

Couldn't figure out a place to put it. From my interview with Diana Deutsch, I was asking her about musical hallucinations and where this stuff comes from, like where does the music come from? What triggers it? And she told me basically, well, it can be anything.

A striking example was somebody who wanted very much for her hallucinations to go away. Suddenly they did go away. And so she said, oh, great, this is the sound of silence. And immediately the song, the sound of silence. Simon and Guffel song was started. I've come to talk with me again. Radio Lab will continue in a moment.

Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. for public broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio. Hey, I'm Chad Appumran. And I'm Robert Crulwich. This is Radio Lab, our topic today, songs that get stuck in your head and won't unstick.

Now, in the last section, we talked about people who were invaded by music and couldn't get the music out of their heads. Now let's switch and talk about people who desire more than anything to get a tune, a melody into their heads. Specifically people who are professional songwriters. Well, like him. Hello, my name is Bob Durow and I'm visiting here with Radio Lab. Is that it? What is it?

It's radio. Not everybody is completely aware of our program, but then again, not everybody would be necessarily aware of Bob Durow. Was that good? But you may know this. And this. I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. And I'm sitting here on capital here.

And this. Well, you know zero, my hero, how wonderful you are. If you grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, which I, by the way, did not know. So everything that we've just heard, I've never heard before. But you've heard that your whole line. Oh, my God, have I heard this. So you know Schoolhouse Rock. Yeah.

And you have Bob Durow to thank for all the songs that we've. We'll not leave your head. We invited Bob over to my apartment to sit at my piano. Talk a little bit about... Hookiness. That's right. What makes a song so sticky, so sticky for your head? How does that happen?

No one ever gets there, but you could try. He told us the story of getting a call. This was back in 1972 from a fellow named David McCall. He was an advertising executive, the president of a small advertising agency. And he simply said, my little boy can't memorize the times tables, but he sings along with Jimmy Hendricks and the Rolling Stones and gets their words. Why can't we put the multiplication tables to music?

We'll call it multiplication and rock. What do you think? Looking at me. And I said, yeah. Did you say, yeah, with confidence? Well, then I did some research. I looked in the math books that I had in my. library and then I just came to me as a title three is a magic number.

Three is a magic number. Hey that's good. Yes it is. It's a magic number. Want to hear more? Yeah. Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity. And then I went to look in the Bible and I looked everywhere.

It is one of the magic numbers. And then I thought of a magic number. Buckminster Fuller. Why? Because of that GEDYZEG-Dome thing? Well, the triangle is the strongest shape there can be. Because it can't bend. A square can sag, right, and become a parallelogram or something. But a triangle is fixed by its very triangularity, right?

Every triangle has three corners. Every triangle has three sides, no more, no less. You don't have to guess when it's three. You can see it's a magic number. What is it all mean? Three, that's a magic number. Three is a magic number. As you can hear from these remakes, three really is a magic number.

In any case, at the end of this conversation, I asked Bob DeRoe to think back, way back, before you did Schoolhouse Rock, before you became a jazz musician, back to when you were a kid. Do you remember the first time you got a really good musical idea when a melody that kind of pop up? opt into your head. He said, of course I do. Let me play it for you. Sitting on the doorstep side by side. Sitting on the doorstep with my bride. Tonight, sitting on the doorstep,

tonight we'll do the four step. Sitting on the doorstep with my bride. That's all there. That's all there. That was your first song? Not a bad melody, huh? Terrible words. And I made it up plowing. I was helping Uncle John on the phone. I was riding a harrow.

I don't care what you were writing. What I care is, so right off the bat, that's a pretty good hook, isn't you? What I care about is, where did that come from? From hearing pop music, you pick up the form, even though unschooled, I would say I knew something about songs. subconsciously formed. Because it's the architecture of all those other ones.

Yeah. Do these things, like when you hit the right one, do they like shout, I'm the one? They do. They do. I'm not going to forget it. Now I can go to town and shop for groceries, go to a movie, and the next day it'll still be there because it identifies itself almost.

Kind of like it feels like it suddenly has weight. It has weight and identity. And there it is. It's there. Sometimes I get the melody, and then it's just sheer labor to make the word spit. Where does the melody come from? Melody comes, the muse. You ever met this muse? A lot of people are visited by the muse, and they don't recognize her.

When you were plowing that day way back, you had a muse, yeah. Yeah. But did you know that you had one, or did you just think it was just something like your new shoes? Yeah, and I thought it was something. that just came out of the air to me. I wonder if I stole it. That would worry me, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's one of the songwriter's main objectives.

When you think of a melody, you say, am I stealing that? See, that's how mysterious this is. You don't know whether the idea was yours as originally yours or whether you heard it in some earlier part of your life and it belongs to someone else. don't know. So the muse is a tricky kind of goddess. And you know where it really gets extra tricky?

Imagine if you write a tune and it has weight for you, and people begin to enjoy it where you live. And then very mysteriously, it begins to circle the world. And people who don't share your language, don't share your tradition, your culture,

share your tune. That is really mysterious. Okay, with that in mind, I got one for you. Here is a delightful English artist, England's popular young recording star, Petula Clark, so let's have a very fine welcome, welcome, George. This is a tune that was written by a British guy who came to New York sang by a Parisian woman who everyone thought was American,

and what they made, everybody knows. One of my favorite records is by Petula Clark. Down, down, down, down. Down, down, down, down. Just listen to the mute. And this particular record has special memories for me. Bittersweet memories, if you like, because I mean, I'll pull the record out of the case here. There we are.

This is the original single that I would have bought at the time. Pie Records. No scratches. Always looked after. Petula Clark, Downtown, written by Tony Hatch. I didn't write downtown specifically for Petula Clark. I'd beamed to New York in October 1964. I stayed on Central Park, turned left from the Essex House,

and walked down Broadway. And by the time I got down to Times Square, I thought that it was strange that there wasn't a song called Downtown. When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown. Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city. linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty. How can you lose?

It had different meanings in different places. But for me, on that first trip there, it was the centre of life. It was a great place to be. And even though I was on my own, I didn't feel lonely. That's the first line of the song. When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can't always go downtown. I brought the idea back to the UK, and in those days in between recording sessions and mixing down the recording session, I used to have about an hour in the recording studio, and I would go and sit in the studio and just doodle around it.

It was a good time after a three-hour recording session. The mind was very active, the music was flowing very freely. I actually then wrote the tune to downtown. And that was it. I left it. Well, I remember when Tony Hatch came to the apartment in Paris. That's where I was living at the time. You know, I had moved over to France. I'd married a Frenchman.

Already had two small children. And life was great. This was, I guess, in 63 or 4. And I said, well, I tell you what, I'll go make a cup of tea and you play something to me on the piano. I played her the bones of downtown, the outline of it. and the few words that I had and put the word downtown

into wherever it was going to go. And I was in the kitchen making tea when I first heard the music for downtown. And I absolutely adored it and I came back with the tea and I said That's the one I wanted to record. That could be a fantastic song and a great record.

We were in the studio maybe a couple of weeks later and recorded a monster. Now here's the interesting thing. As the song grew, something happened. the meaning began to change a bit. I mean, here's a song that was initially a celebration of the city. You'd go downtown, you see the bright lights, you're with people, you'll never be alone.

Well, after a while, Petula Clark and some of the people who sang it expanded the song to include the exact opposite meaning. Instead of comforting, the city is now a haunted place, and you are now more alone than ever. Same song, completely new flavor. It's got a lot of character and there are a lot of different angles you could take on it. The one that sprung to mind for us was a kind of blade runner and make a much darker picture of what it's like to go downtown.

As I always thought with the original that it presented a very happy bright lights thing but you always had this sense of shallowness But if you were on your own and you went downtown, you'd probably stay on your own and get quite depressed, actually, watching lots of people having fun around you. Just being out on the street and being with other people and seeing the lights.

There's a kind of slight desperation in that, I think. The lights are much brighter there. You can't forget all. all your troubles, forget all your care. I like that line. The lights are much brighter there. You can forget all your troubles, forget all your care. Well, you can't actually, but you can go out and try.

It takes your mind off stuff. Don't hang around and let your problems surround you. There are movie shows. Downtown. Maybe you know some little places to go to where they never close. Downtown. Alan Hall, the BBC, and Falling Tree Productions for that piece. You know what I think. What? If our question right now is, like, when a song falls from song heaven, why does it

find an audience, sometimes a global audience? I think it's not really the music in this case. I mean, it's catchy, sure, but the experience of going downtown in New York and you're excited, you want to see the bright lights, you want to be with people, and you get there, and it still sucks. You're still lonely. I think people in Shanghai understand that feeling, people in Bombay. everybody knows that feeling. Yeah, it's like migration music. In a way, yeah. You know, moving from one place to a new place.

Yeah. And there is interestingly precedent for this. 50 years before they wrote downtown, this was already happening on a much bigger scale than I had ever imagined. I learned about this from this guy. Aaron A. Fox. He is a professor of musicology at Columbia University in New York.

And the damn good country in Western League guitar player. Country, not that rock and roll. One, two, three. I hear that train are coming, it's rolling around the bed. Country music is a genre we normally associate with Kentucky and Nashville, West Virginia, a particular part of America. Cowboys pickups. Yeah.

But it has spread, he says, to the most unusual places. So some examples of that, and there are quite a few, include the extreme popularity of American country and Western music over the last 50 or 60 years with Aboriginal Australians. You mean Hank Williams would be recognizable to somebody, somewhere in Western Australia? Absolutely. Really? Dolly Parton being another one.

Dolly Parton? Dolly Parton is this international, global star of the world's music, especially in Southern Africa. She's revered like a saint. Yes, it's true as Zimbabweans love Dolly Parton. You can fill a venue with a band playing Dolly Parton song, and everybody will know all the words.

That was fun. You was doing good. You was into that rocky top. And most universally evolved, Don Williams. If Don Williams were to go to as Salam or to Zanzibar or to Keeney or someplace, and book a club. Don Williams has actually gone to Zimbabwe, where he

has filled a soccer stadium with 40,000 people twice in a row. Imagine 40,000 Zimbabweans crammed into a big stadium. And down there in the center in the lights, is Don Williams? From Texas?

I just I'm wondering, what exactly are they hearing? I have asked Grenadians, St. Lucians, Trinidadian, Jamaicans, Norwegians, Germans, Russian, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal, Australian, Thai, Native South American, why do you like country music? And the first answer is virtually always something along the lines of, it's the stories. Like, as in the stories in the lyrics? I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison, and I went to pick her up in the rain.

But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck, She got run over by a damned old train. That doesn't sound very aboriginal to me. You know how many Aborigines are actually run over by trains? Thousands, actually. That's not what Professor Fox is saying. He says, ignore the details and listen for the larger story, which has to do with moving, with migration, and with regret.

You're lonesome for something, and the thing you're missing is, The old hometown. The green, green grass of home. The green grass of home. Aaron Fox says you can boil much of this music down to just this feeling. You look and look around me. You long for something simpler, something that you left behind. And I realized that I was only dreaming.

What would be the best couple of examples you can think of of, I miss the farm, I miss the crickets? Oh, where do you start? The first hit country song was a nostalgic reverie for, quote, A little old log cabin in the lane performed by Jimmy Rogers and Fiddlin John Carson. The song was recorded in 1927, and that happens to be the moment. If you look at the U.S. census, as he'll tell you, when the United States crosses the threshold

from more than 50% agrarian and rural dwellers to more than 50% urban dwellers. In other words, country music really exploded, and this is not an accident, when most people no longer lived in the country. Country music is born. when the country becomes a nostalgic idea. And so, in America anyway,

suddenly there was this dreamscape of country places that no longer existed except in heads, and the music started just then. So if people in Los Angeles and in Chicago heard country in their minds, it seems just as logical that people who move from the country to the city in Asia, in Africa, and Australia

might have exactly the same experience. Yeah, but these songs are sung in English. If these people in these faraway places don't speak English, what are they hearing? Well, it's important to understand English, and the real enthusiasts around the world are English speakers. However, one explanation for its popularity elsewhere is that even if you don't speak English, the message is literally in the music itself. There is grammar here. In the vocalization, the singers, this is a very normal country-western thing.

They actually make a croaky sound that is very distinctive. It's called... One of the principal vocal articulations is what country singers call a crybreak. In my book, I parsed the crybreak into dozens of different specific articulations. And it's not just the voices, by the way, says Fox, it's the instruments. The instruments. seem to be crying. In fact, the steel guitar is the signature sound of country because it's recognized as iconic

of a crying human voice. It's called the crying steel. You can hear the lonesomeness, and what seems to come roaring through is things just aren't what they were before. And all over the world where people are leaving from the country to the city, and they are an enormous number. This is a story all kinds of people can understand. is just as much Grenadian music as it is Kentucky music.

It's just as much Hawaiian music as it is West Virginia music. Is that when you fill a football stadium with Dolly Parton listeners, are we saying that they're there in part because the songs she's singing are their stories too? Yep, yep. This is our music. I've written a lot of songs about the Smoky Mountains where I grew up. We had a good life back there in the hills. We're all going through some version of, you know, a one to two or three hundred year change. from being essentially peasants to being moderned.

I remember sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon in a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall. Professor Fox has a book on this subject, real country music and language and working class culture. You can find more information about that on our website, radio lab.org. This is Casey calling from Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hello, I'm Chad. I boomrod. I'm Robert Crowley. Today on Radio Lab, our topic is the music in our heads. How does it get there? Where does it come from? And why won't it go away? Yes. Now, you think that the music you listen to is your music.

It comes from the place you live, but there is such a thing as everybody's music. And we offer the next story as a kind of proof. It comes to us from reporter Gregory Warner. Gregory Warner, you won a journalism fellowship, and they said to you, you could go anywhere in the whole world. Where did you decide to go? So I went to Afghanistan. Have you ever been to a war zone before by any chance? I mean, I've, no.

Have you done any international reporting before? Well, actually, earlier that year, I had been in Estonia covering an accordion. Festival. So that was a prime piece of... So you play the accordion? I play accordion. Do you like an accomplished accordionist? No.

No, no. I'm just an amateur accordionist. So when you go to Afghanistan, do you bring your accordion with you? Yeah, I brought my accordion. How did that work out? Well, I show up in Afghanistan. I'm carrying my accordion, and I'm thinking, maybe this wasn't the smartest idea. Because...

It wasn't an accordion playing crowd. I mean, I was going down the street, and... Women in burkas are holding their babies, and little boys will actually sob, sob, begging you to sort of buy a piece of gum. Here I am with my shiny red accordion, and it's just not very appropriate. Does there come a time when you're actually willing to use the accordion?

Well, it was a weeknight. It was in my living room. I find Najeeb, who's my fixer and translator, he's working for me. He's lying on his back, and he's flinging his legs up into the air. A guard is catching his legs and flinging them back down. Why did he do you do that? Well, this is a kind of ab crunches. That's what we're listening to now?

Yeah, there he's throwing his legs up. Guard pushes him back down. Going up, back down. So I figured I'd help him out. So I started playing my accordion for him. And it's going well. Najeeb's bopping his head to the tune. And then he kind of looks at me.

This is, hey. How do you know Afghan music? I say, I'm not playing Afghan music And he says, yes, you are I said, no, no, I'm not Yeah, you are I said, no, no, that's like folk song From the 60s called Those Were the Days, my friend

Some song that my mom used to sing Those were the days, my friend Yeah, that's my mom We thought they'd never end We'd sing and dance Forever and a day He says, no, no, that's an Afghan song And then he's back to the ab crunches

And I'm like, no, no, no, wait, wait. Please tell me the story of those for the days, my friend. So what's the story of those for the days, my friends? That's what we call it. Tell me about that song. That song is from a singer who is famous for it in Afghanistan. His name is Ahmed Zaheyer, famous singer in Afghanistan.

It's 25 years ago. How does the lyrics go in... Tan-ha-shodam, Tan-ha-ha-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h. Then it kept happening. I would bring my accordion, play it for some people every time. People would say, hey, isn't that an Ahmad Z-Zar-H-H-I-R? How do you say, how do you spell this name? Z-A-H-R.

Amid-Z-I-R. Who is he? Well, that's what I wanted to find out. The first thing Najeeb gave me was his entire CD collection. And one night I sit down and listen to it. I'm hearing one Western riff after another. John Lennon, Knight King Cole, definitely a lot of Elvis. Like, I realized on this tune,

as an Amundale your tune, you can actually overlay the Elvis version right on top of it. Is he stealing these tunes? Is that what you're saying? It's more like he Afghanized them. Like here's one of his biggest hits, Tan Haushedem Tanha. Now, you remember this is the song that Najib sung to me, but it did sound familiar. So I emailed this tune to an old friend at St. Louis. He immediately said, oh yeah, that's that Western disco hit, El Bimbo.

Oh, that's amazing. So now this is the Western version. It's the same melody as the Amid Zaire version, same key even. Now let's just go back to the Amid Zaire version for a second. Now listen to this violin. So this is East Meets West, Amin Zaire style. And this is like the mega hit in Kabul in 1973. And this is the sound of Afghanistan in the 70s.

So I beg Najeeb to tell me more about this Amid Zayir guy. And finally he says, okay, I'll take you to meet the old childhood friend of the man himself. So we drive up to this gate. This guy with white hair opens the door. He and Najeeb chat for a bit. This guy named Sadat Dardar. Sadat Dardar. He's been friends with Ambitzai here since the fourth grade,

and he takes us inside. He closes the gate behind us. And the scene changes. Suddenly it's a garden. Birds are chirping. And then Sadat stops, and he points through this old fountain in the courtyard. And he says something to Najib, and Najeeb starts laughing. And Najeev says, you know, this is the fountain where I'm going to Saddam.

Ahmed Zaire used to play his accordion. Ahmed Zaire plays accordion, just like me. He's saying that 40 girls were lying down there and he was playing accordion here, you know? 40 girls? 40 girls! Well, they did call him Casanova for a reason. But was that okay?

Because in Afghanistan, maybe girls and boys aren't supposed to be hanging out? Yes, and no, because Afghanistan was a pretty different country in those days. It's something I didn't even realize until I, got there. This is the 70s. The women are wearing skirts and Jane Fonda haircuts. The men are wearing sideburns and they're doing their James Dean. And it's not just what people are wearing. It's that there's this sense of possibility in there. Things are opening up finally. And the poster boy for all this is Amadzai. He's a bad boy.

When he had a concert, everybody, all the boys and girls would come to his concerts, wearing new clothes. And not only all the girls of Afghanistan, but the foreign girls, they also were in love with him. Let me just play one little clip from one of his shows, and I want you to hear a little scream that comes right in here. For young Afghans at the time, especially young Afghan women, Ahmed Zayyir, he was like a god.

No mother would give birth a child as good as. And this is where the story gets a lot darker. It's 1973. The Russians start to move in. And the new president that they put in, he doesn't really like Amid Zayir at all. Why? Well, it was really in their interest

that Amid Zaire would come out publicly praising the government, and he always refused to do it. Anything political, he wouldn't play the show. And some of his songs, especially the later songs, started to actually have coded anti-government lyrics in them. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then he would have other lyrics about how freedom is the most important thing.

So what did the government do to him? They ban his songs from the radio. They start throwing him in jail kind of regularly. But even when he gets out of jail, he refuses to play any of the Communist Party events. But he plays plenty of his own shows. In fact, after one concert, he meets this beautiful woman named Fahira. The way she tells the story, he taps her on the shoulder. He says, hey, he says, can I talk to you?

I turn my face. I said, yeah? He said, no, no, never mind. He tapped you on the shoulder and he said, can I talk to you? And then he said, never mind, and you walked away? And he just walked away. That was a pretty good seduction technique.

I guess he was very good in it. He got lots of girls like that. And he got her, and they got married, and she got pregnant. Meanwhile, the political situation was getting worse and worse. All his friends are fleeing the country. There are murders, tortures. Somebody came to our house, knocked the door, and he said, can I talk to Ahmad Zaire, please?

Amazir offered them, can I get you a drink? He said, no, no, no, I've just come from the Ministry of Interior. There's a plan for you. I don't know what they're going to do to you. That's all I want to tell you to be careful. But Ahmed Zaire and his wife, they don't do anything. They don't? They don't leave.

Why? He says, oh, we'll go after the baby's born. Five days later, it's his birthday. June 14th, 1979. He's actually signing a contract for a concert that day. He went to sign a contract. And as he's driving away, he tells her to make some lunch. When we come back, we'll go shopping, and then I will make lasagna, and then we'll go out.

So she makes lasagna, and she waits for him to come back, and she waits, and then she falls asleep. I had a very weird dream. I'm somewhere very high in the mountains, and I have no shoes, and there's a very strong wind blowing, and my hair is everywhere. And I see him. Not the way he went in the morning. His beard is out like he hasn't shaved for past two days and he has something white around him and something is pulling him. And he's calling me that I don't want to go.

And suddenly I woke up, I ran down. I saw my father-in-law. He wouldn't talk. He was just bending, you know, like shaking himself and bending and just holding my hand. I didn't know anything. What happened? So what happened then?

Well, the government says that Amid Zaire had a traffic accident, but everybody else tells me he was shot in the head, probably by government operatives. And the news spreads through all the neighborhoods in town. So you have Tajik's, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, they're all getting up, and not really knowing what else to do, they come walking to Amid Zayar's house. The courtyard starts filling up with people. 50, 100, 200. They're inside the house, they're outside the house, they're on the street.

At this point, the body comes, born by six policemen on a stretcher. People start to wail, they start to push. In fact, all the windows break, the doors break. They bring the body through the courtyard into the living room, and Fahira pushes through the police, and she sees her husband's body on the stretcher. So I thought he was hurt or something. And when I pulled the sheet from his face,

that's when I fell down on top. When I fell, they took me to the hospital, and that's how Shavna was born. So does she go into labor? She goes into labor. Right there? Yeah, yeah. And she almost dies in childbirth.

But her baby's saved, she's saved, and her baby has the same birthday then. Her baby was born on that very day? That very day. So then what happened? Well, then the music basically stops. It's that winter that the Russians invade starts a long period of war. You have the jihad, then the Mujahideen, then the civil war. When the Taliban come in, they just,

band music entirely. I mean, no instruments. We're talking 20 years where the cultural life of this country basically is frozen. I can't even imagine what that's like. I can barely go a day without hearing some tunes. 2001, the Americans come in. Afghanistan's opened back up. The radio's turned back on. And who comes out of them?

Amid Zaid. So, Greg, when you turn on the radio today in Kabul, do you hear Ahmed Zaire? I'm telling you it's my main way that I connect with taxi drivers. And invariably, they're listening to an Amid Zaire song. Even now? Oh, yeah. Why? Because there's just not been a chance for a new artist to emerge, or it's just, you know, it was a deep freeze. And also Amid Zaire reminds everybody of what Kabul used to be.

I had this experience with my accordion again and again myself. Even when I played people in my music, they'd get this smile on their face, as if I was reminding them of something. they knew before me. In fact, there was one time I was up north and there was this big music festival and I had brought my accordion and they said, well, why don't you play? And I said, well, I mean, I could play for you, sure. And they said, how about right now?

And so they kick the band that's on there off. They send them to drink green tea. They shove me up on stage. I'm standing in front of 300 Afghans. And these guys, they're not from Kabul. They don't speak English. They're not wearing suits and ties. This is a very Afghan crowd.

So I figure I should play some friends. Johnny Cash. Of course. The theater was a see. It was the best crowd. You were the fire in a fire. You were the fire.

That's a good. That's a lot of person for it. Greg Warner traveled to Afghanistan with support from an international reporting project fellowship from the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And if you visit our website, RadioLab.org, you can see video, actual video footage of that Johnny Cash concert. It's worth checking out. Yeah, he shot it. So there you see them all in their strange non-country Western clothing. Well, we should. We're out of time. When you're on our website, RadioLab.org, you can also send us an email, RadioLab at WNYC.org. I'm Jad Aboumrod.

I'm Robert Prolwidge. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab is produced by Jod Abumrad. Lulu Miller, Rob Christensen, Ellen Horn, and Tony Field. Production support by Sally Herships, Sarah Pellegrini, Ariel Lasky, Heather Radke, Jesse Banco, Anna Bwarko. Linda Everett's and Soren Wheeler. Thanks to Alan Hall and Falling Tree Productions, Josh Kurtz and Dan Hershey.