On the Media Menu: The Earworm Express

After his experiment with 80’s electro-pop, Conan Gray goes back to his melancholy roots with “This Song”; plus, too much good TV and not enough time to read

The downside to hearing a great new song is having the damn thing stuck in my head for the next few days. Or weeks.

My earworm problem gets bad enough that I have songs that I purposefully pull up in my mind to clear out the other ones. I even use them to clear out bad ideas and moods. Since high school, if something awful sticks in my head while I play tennis — self doubt, anxiety, yips on my backhand — I think of the opening riff to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love, a decongestant for my gray matter.

But most days I’m going with something more current. In the late teens through the early pandemic, that was generally K-Pop, specifically BTS. Post-pandemic, it’s more Olivia Rodrigo and Conan Gray.

And that’s what’s stuck in my head right now, Conan Gray’s latest song in his catalog of sad, queer boy anthems: “This Song.” As someone who grew up as a sad-on-the-inside, closeted queer boy in rural America, I probably over-identify with his thinly veiled vignettes of being the “other” in sma…