10 Biggest Earworms Of All Time

If you weren't there to see it in real time, the transition between the grunge wave and the back half of the '90s is stark as hell. No matter how much you may have had a tolerance for the bizarre, the idea of having Pearl Jam being the big band one year and Smash Mouth in the same spot the next year just doesn't scan properly in most people's brains. Pop all of a sudden got happy again, and there's no pure distillation of that happiness than the Spice Girls.

Though we had been accustomed to girl groups ever since the '60s, the reign of Spice wasn't something most of us were prepared for, especially considering a song like Wannabe crawling up the charts with the force of a battering ram. As much as the chorus reads as pure bubblegum, the real hook line that refuses to die comes in the first few seconds with the hip hop inspired breakdown.

While not being the most literate sentence structure ever made, the idea of hearing about what you really really want is burrowed into the skull of every single person who was within an inch of Spice-mania at the turn of the century. Even with the charm of this song carrying it into legendary status, that sort of bubblegum has a very limited shelf life.