The Spice Girls' 'Wannabe' Is the U.K.'s Catchiest Song, Says Science

You’ve been warned that once you read these lyrics, they’ll be stuck in your head for the rest of the week: “If you wanna be my lover/ You gotta get with my friends/ Make it last forever/ Friendship never ends.” Sorry.

The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” was the No. 1 song in the U.S. for four straight weeks in 1997. It may also be the U.K.’s catchiest song if we’re to believe this recent study. Time reports:

Dr. John Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, sought out to determine what made a song stick in someone’s memory. To help divine the cause of an earworm, his team set up an interactive online game, called Hooked On Music, which quizzed over 12,000 participants on how quickly they could recognize a track.

Slam ya body down and zig-a-zig-AH. “Mambo No 5,” and “Eye of the Tiger” also infected the list, but keep in mind that it’s the catchiest songs “in recent history,” not of all time, and that the study applies only to the U.K. Here, the catchiest song would obviously belong to Rihanna.

Anyway, your day is now about to be wasted YouTube-ing Spice Girls hits, so here’s another one: “2 Become 1.”