Be prepared: from next week on there'll be no escaping a three-minute musical phenomenon called, innocently enough, Everyone's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). Think how Bryan Adams ruined everyone's summer a few years back with his pitiful Everything I Do (I Do It For You) song or how Wet Wet Wet had a nation gagging from over-exposure to their Love Is All Around re-heat (they've now broken up - karma or what?) and you're a fraction of the way to understanding how ubiquitous the Sunscreen ditty will be on our airwaves.
The simple enough song comes complete with its own mythology: in the US and Australia, where it's already been an uberhit, stories abound about how a mother and daughter caught up in a furious row heard Sunscreen on the radio and ended up hugging and crying together, or the anorexic teenager who was suddenly "cured" after just one exposure to the song, or the couple who were getting divorced but didn't because of its lyrical impact.
Put simply, Sunscreen is a Desiderata (that maudlin load of old "go placidly amid the noise and haste" horror) for the late 1990s, except this time out the music is dressed up in a contemporary ambient house type of style. It all began with a journalist: Mary Schmich works with the Chicago Tribune and two years ago in her weekly column, responding to a glut of graduation ceremonies in the city at that time of year, she wrote a mock graduation speech - the sort of thing she would have liked to have said all those years ago but didn't have the courage to do. Here's part of what she wrote:
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives.
Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either.
Stirring stuff indeed, and the story should have ended there except that a number of Chicago Tribune readers were suitably moved by Schmich's words to email them to friends all around the world. A benevolent type of chain mail saw the words of wisdom hit computer screens from Alaska to Australia and somewhere along the line an urban myth grew up that the words were taken from US writer Kurt Vonnegut's graduation speech, much to Mary Schmich's pleasure - she's a big fan of Vonnegut's work.
It wasn't long before someone decided there was gold in them there words. Enter maverick Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, the man responsible for Stricly Ballroom and the Leonardo DiCaprio-driven Romeo and Juliet. Luhrmann decided to put the words to music, hiring an actor (Lee Perry) to do a gentle rap of the words over a none too intrusive ambient beat. He contacted Kurt Vonnegut for copyright clearance and on being told that Vonnegut wasn't responsible he embarked on a frantic Internet search to find the real author. When he eventually tracked down Mary Schmich, she confessed she had been "totally startled" by the effect her words had had and how they had electronically gone all around the world.
The song opens with "If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it" and includes lines like "Do one thing every day that scares you" (yeh, like going to work); "Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss" alongside the metaphysical "Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room" and "Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly."
You can go either way with the Sunscreen song, either it's a singing version of a Hall- mark greeting card, complete with inane sentiments and nausea-inducing imagery or else it's a remarkably profound reflection on the state of contemporary life. The latter school is winning out at the moment - the song has already sold millions and all the evidence shows that it's set to become this year's (musical) version of The Little Book Of Calm.
There are so many homespun theories about the song's success, like: with people working longer hours/the decline of religion/ the pace of modern life, a song like Sunscreen is filling (however temporarily) a sort of "spiritual" void, it "brings people together" and has a "feel-good" sentiment. Which is all very well if you're the sort of person whose life can be changed by the scribblings of a journalist in Chicago.
When the song got a few pre-release plays on this side of the Atlantic recently, the hysteria witnessed elsewhere around the world showed no sign of abating. When it was first played on BBC Radio 1, the station reported that "our whole switchboard crashed in minutes with people ringing in wanting to know more about the song".
Enjoy the next two Sunscreen-free days because when the record is released on Monday, there'll be no escape from it - short of running for the hills.
Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) is on the EMI label.