Alvin and the Chipmunks - Witch Doctor

When novelty gibberishness becomes an earworm

One of the most liberating lessons I’ve learned in my life is this:

You are not responsible for the content of your imagination.

I don’t know where I first heard or read this statement. I want to say it was around 30 years ago. Maybe it was from a therapist. Perhaps it was something I read in a book. Most likely, it was a message in a fortune cookie.

I wrote mainly fiction back then, and some of my stories were pretty dark. I was worried that my thoughts, and by association, my imagination, were defining who I was as a person. That deep down, I was seriously fucked up.

Yet, having read more than a dozen Stephen King and Clive Barker novels and watched countless horror films, I’d never questioned the sanity of said creators of these gory, twisted, deliciously creepy works of literature and cinema.

I lived in a relatively safe, boring, suburban neighborhood—not unlike King’s fictional Castle Rock or Derry, Maine. So maybe it was the perfect setting for my dark and stormy stories.

As a quiet, shy kid, losing myself in books was my refuge. It was a way to interact with the scary world without having to directly interact with the scary world.

Sadly, my book reading has dropped off precipitously. I want to blame mobile devices, the internet, my worsening eyesight, television, work, sleep, showering, and my wife. Pretty much in that order.

But that’s a topic for a different post.

It was only a matter of time before my hyperactive youngster mindstate would manifest in the form of earworms.

I don’t have a clear memory of my first earworm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” or “Ring Around the Rosie.”

Nursery rhymes, as I’m sure you are aware, can be some of the most pernicious earworms of all. I would bet they are directly responsible for the majority of our later-in-life song-based earworms.

There ought to be a study of adults who did not grow up with nursery rhymes to see if they get earworms at a lower rate than those of us raised on them.

Chris Dalla Riva

, this seems like something up your alley!

I’ve written previously about forms of earworms that fall outside the traditional “song” structure.

I’ve written about jingles:

Jingles That Give You Shingles

I’ve written about TV theme songs:

The Family Ties That Bind

I’ve written about words that become earworms:

It Took a Lot of Gumption to Write This

But I haven’t written about earworms made up of gibberish.

Gibberish

Gibberish songs can cover a wide range of genres.

For example, the musical:

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” from Mary Poppins:

Or books turned into song:

“Tikki Tikki Tembo,” written by Arlene Mosel (1968). Song attributed to Canadian composer Harry Freedman (1971).

This song/story has a complicated, racist history that likely dates back hundreds of years and is too big for this post. It’s essentially the classic boy-fell-in-a-well tale, but in this story, the boy is Chinese, and because his name is so long, he almost drowns because his brother, with a shorter name, has to recite it all to the adults who don’t know what happened to the boy who fell in the well.

His name, as told in the book and song:

Tikki Tikki Tembo-No Sa Rembo-Chari Bari Ruchi-Pip Peri Pembo.

To learn more, click here to read the Wikipedia entry on this tune. I couldn’t find the version I’ve had appear to me as an earworm numerous times, but this one is the closest:

“Tikki Tikki Tembo” would be remade/bastardized into countless variations. Here’s a version that actually pre-dates the book, recorded by Shari Lewis (of Lambchop fame):

It’s probably pretty obvious what the issue of this song/story is, but if not, comedienne Sabrina Wu captures it in less than a minute.

Witch Doctor

Another problematic gibberish tune, one that set me on this path of highly inappropriate earworm children’s songs, dates back to 1958. Attributed to David Seville (whose real name was Ross Bagdasarian), “Witch Doctor” is a widely recognized song adored (and perhaps reviled) by generations.

My earliest memory of the tune was not the original but a later version from Alvin and the Chipmunks in 1968.

This is probably the case for most people, except for those under 35, who likely became familiar with the version used in the 2007 live-action CGI film Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Although the original version does have chipmunk-like voices in it, they are relegated to the background and don’t appear on screen. Initially, it wasn’t meant to be a children’s song, as it’s about a man going to a witch doctor for a spell to get a particular lady to fall in love with him. Or, more likely, to have sex with him.

It wouldn’t be repurposed for kids for another three years. Running out of money, and under pressure to pen another hit single, Seville was inspired to create Alvin and the Chipmunks after a chipmunk ran in front of his car, stopped, and stared at him. The first Chipmunks version of “Witch Doctor” appears on the 1960 album Sing Again with The Chipmunks.

The 1959 video for the original Seville song (above) comes across as more silly than sexist or racist.

The version below, the one from The Alvin Show in 1967, though, is much harder to defend.

This version removes all visual sexual references, but the lyrics remain unchanged, though an adult male (Seville) sings them.

The Chipmunks dancing around with a variety of tribal masks is more than a little cringe-worthy. It was a different world in the 1960s, though it’s hard to overlook the fact that witch doctors were (and perhaps still are) generally thought of as black members of a primitive African tribe.

If one can move past this, there’s no denying that the tune was and is immensely catchy. It reached #1 on the US and Canada Billboard and Hit Parade charts, where it remained for three weeks.

It’s likely that Gen Y and Gen Z, if they know the “Witch Doctor” song at all, recognize the version from the 2007 Alvin and the Chipmunks movie starring Jason Lee, David Cross, Jane Lynch, Justin Long, and other notable actors.

It’s a pretty awful version, borderline unlistenable, and I imagine it’s not on either Jason Lee or David Cross’ actor’s reels.

To appease the Chipmunk superfans and completists, I must mention that in addition to countless television series, the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie has had three sequels.

1. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)

2. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked (2011), and

3. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (2015)

Watch them at your own peril.

To end this on a slightly more pleasing note, I’ll leave you with a version of “Witch Doctor” by the band Cartoons (1998). Your mileage may vary whether you find this any less annoying than the movie version, but I personally got a kick out of it. It has the proper balance of camp and reverence.

• What other gibberish children’s songs have become earworms for you or your kids?

• What other beloved kids’ songs have not aged well?

• Though many people have described me as childish, I don’t have any kids, so I am not up on anything that has come out in the last 25 years.

• I’ll be exploring rock and roll gibberish earworm songs in a later post, so look for that coming soon.