Number nine. Number nine. Number nine.
Inductee No. 9 into the Earworm Hall of Fame is, fittingly enough, the Beatles. Why fittingly? Beatle John Lennon was obsessed with the number 9. He was born on the 9th. He was born in October, which, if you are fixated on the Number 9 (as Lennon was), you note as being the 9th month of the year ... according to the Chinese calendar. He was raised in a house at 9 Newcastle Road in Liverpool. His best solo song, my opinion, was "#9 Dream," which peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at, you guessed it, #9.
The Beatles biggest hit on the U.S. pop charts was, of course, "Hey Jude". It went to #1, where it spent, yes, nine weeks at the top of the charts, from September 28, 1968, through the week of November 23. And September is the ninth month! The nines keep on coming! Yes, it is a Paul McCartney song, but it allegedly is about (or at least inspired by) John Lennon's first-born son, Julian.
And so we have at Inductee No. 9, "Hey Jude." Lists of the Beatles biggest earworms routinely have two of their songs as the earwormiest. "Yellow Submarine," a likely future inductee, and this, their biggest hit. The earworm is the lengthy -- very lengthy -- outro "Na na na nananana nananana, hey Jude," which goes on for nearly four minutes at the end of the 7 minute, 11 seconds song (then the longest timed #1 hit in the history of the Billboard charts, a record later broken by Don McLean's "American Pie," and much more recently, and much sadly, by some Taylor Swift song). Both the longest and the earwormiest outro in the history of pop music!
The best cover of "Hey Jude"? The gospel-tinged version by Wilson Pickett, featuring guitar work from Duane Allman.
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