You're a big fan of the Pixies' 'Where Is My Mind,' you just don't know it yet

• The Pixies' iconic alt-rock song "Where Is My Mind" has been everywhere lately.
• The 36-year-old earworm has been licensed nearly 100 times, appearing in everything from Apple commercials to dystopian TV shows.

Turn on the TV or any ad-supported YouTube video in the last few months, and you've likely been confronted with a particular Apple AirPods commercial. In it, traffic floats above a futuristic city. There are flying cars, but the injustice of everyday mundanity endures for everyone except for one person—a woman wearing AirPods far below them, bobbing her head to a soundtrack of "Where Is My Mind?" It's a cover of the 1988 Pixies song by Australian-via-Zimbabwe singer-songwriter Tkay Maidza, her second biggest hit to date.

Maybe the song sounded familiar to you: it was recently used in the final episode of Donald Glover's scary stan series "Swarm" on Amazon Prime. Chloe Ting used a cover of it in a workout video. Maybe you saw Kelly Clarkson cover it in a karaoke "Kellyoke" segment on her daytime talk show. Hilariously, a Nada Surf cover of it was used by Samsung to sell their smartphone in 2016.

Decades after the remarkably catchy song was first released on the Pixies' debut LP, "Surfer Rosa", the track has become a hit the way a Top 40 track might, inescapable across every major mainstream avenue. According to one licensing expert who spoke to Insider, the song has been licensed 91 times across movies, TV, ads, and brand deals.

Somehow, a 36-year-old song from an alt-rock band has become one of the most ubiquitous songs of 2023.

Yet it remains the antithesis of most Top 40 hits, written by a bunch of alt-rock weirdos experimenting with psych guitar pop, dynamic loud/quiet shifts, and no real commercial ambition. The Pixies, fronted by Black Francis, a University of Massachusetts Amherst dropout, found real magic in his collaborators. In particular, bassist Kim Deal, who was the only person to respond to an ad Francis put out looking for a woman who loved post-punks Husker Du and folk band Peter, Paul, and Mary in equal measure.

At nearly four minutes long, "Where Is My Mind?" is a lifetime in the Pixies' short-song discography. What first draws the listener in—unmistakable, without subjectivity—is guitarist Joey Santiago's lackadaisical riff that carries the tune. As he told Music Radar in 2022, "This was actually the first thing I tried. A lazy arpeggio that instantly sounded strong and hooky."

Often, the greatest songs are the simplest: Santiago's guitar riff is replaced with a simple synth in Maidza's version, but the effects are the same. The guitar lays the foundation for Deal's off-kilter and strange ascendant vocal "hoo, oohs," the sounds you hum along to even if you haven't committed Francis' absurdist, literary lyricism to memory.

There's a reason for that: producer Steve Albini added reverb to Deal's voice, which already possessed a sort of instrumental sustain, to "make it a structural element of the song as opposed to just decoration," he told The Guardian in 2020. It moves from a major chord to a minor one, giving the track its uniquely mournful and simultaneously ebullient feel.

After the band recorded the track with Albini in 1987, "Where Is My Mind?" became the stuff of college radio legend—and an undeniable influence on alt-rock radio to come. The song's voyage into the mainstream came nearly a decade later: when it was perfectly utilized in the finale of cult classic "Fight Club" —not the scene where the Narrator (Edward Norton) learns that his other personality Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) exists only in his mind, but in the film's closing moments, where everything comes to an explosive end.

Since then, the song has become something of a go-to for dystopian, prestige television, like in "Mr. Robot," when protagonist Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) learns Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) does not exist and is an extension of himself, or in season two of HBO's "The Leftovers." When there's a big, messy moment of crisis, "Where Is My Mind?" is on the mood board.

But time shifts perspectives, and now the song has found itself in increasingly unexpected contexts: wrestler Orange Cassidy recently licensed the song for use as his entrance music and it's been featured in the soundtrack of a video game. Because even if something sounds depressing, on its surface, no one can deny the power of a thoughtful banger—especially one that soundtracks important and/or frequent moments in media, becoming a favorite song of many who might not be able to name it.

Until the marketing firms or production houses or secret Illuminatis who run the world decide that the song no longer resonates with the public, Francis will continue to allow them to sing and pay his mortgage. As he summed it up best in an interview with The Guardian three years ago. "I get offers once a week for yet another advertisement, movie, or TV show to use it. I say yes to all of them." And most of us will enjoy each version, subconsciously or otherwise.