Doctors Unable to Help Man with Song Stuck in His Head
(Thanks to Paul D’Acri)
We all love “Yesterday” by the Beatles. But the Paul McCartney-penned song has been nothing short of hell for Joeseph Burton, Leeds, England, who has had the song stuck in his head since 1993.
“I was listening to the oldies station on the radio,” said Burton. “On came ‘Yesterday.’ I was humming along. And I didn’t think anything of it.”
A few days later he realized the song was stuck in his head.
“It is a catchy melody,” says musicologist Stan Edwards. “What makes a melody catchy is movement from the dominant to the tonic. And that happens over seventy times in ‘Yesterday.’”
Burton tried the obvious — listening to other songs. Even singing other songs. But no matter what, the song would always return to his mind.
“All my troubles seemed so far away…” sings Burton with a sad face, in the clinic of the foremost expert in musical brain injury, Dr. Withstand Payne.
“Mr. Edwards is one of our most unfortunate cases,” says Payne. “We have people coming in complaining about Justin Bieber songs being stuck in their heads for a few weeks or months. We also get a lot of Adele. But for the same song to remain against the patient’s will for three decades, that’s extremely rare.”
Dr. Payne has been treating the poor suffering Burton with a combination of medication, electric shock, and paddling.
“We find that we can sometimes beat these songs out of you,” says Dr. Payne. “But it’s going to hurt. Not everybody is willing to have their ass paddled for hours on end just to rid themselves of Paul McCartney’s musical pablum.”
“It’s been hard,” says Burton. “It’s like there’s this very annoying tiny Beetle in my head, with the moptop hairdo and the insipid smile. And he’s singing this song, over and over again. Yesterday ay, ay, ay. Yesterday.”
If none of the treatments give him any relief, doctors have only one more option to try. Brain surgery. It can work, but it is also quite dangerous. Last year brain surgeons successfully removed a tiny Taylor Swift from the brain of a British teenager who had the song “Shake it Off” stuck in her head.
“She was hiding there beneath the patient’s hypothalmus, wearing that red lipstick and that tight little skirt. We pulled her out with a pair of tweezers.”
Unfortunately, Taylor Swift was severely injured during the procedure, as evidenced by her recent song, “Look What You Made Me Do,” which was horrible and frightening.
“Nobody wants to hurt that tiny Paul McCartney,” said Dr. Payne. “It would be much better if he just left Mr. Burton’s brain voluntarily. If not, we’re coming in with a circular saw and a pair of forceps.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Burton is heading home after an hour of paddling, humming softly to himself, “I’m not half the man I used to be, there’s a shadow hanging over me, oh yesterday came suddenly…”
Yesterday…
