Everyone you know is going to sing this damned song about pens and pineapples

Remember this moment: the smell, the look, the sound. Like the seconds before you first danced the "Macarena" or were asked "Who Let the Dogs Out," this moment is an endpoint of a phase of your life. Because you, my dear reader, will shortly click play on the video, above, and listen to "Pen-Pineapple Apple-Pen" (or "PPAP"). You will voluntarily allow the ear-worm to wheedle its way into your brain, where it will, for the foreseeable future, make a cozy bivouac.

Why will you do this? Because "PPAP" will be inescapable. If you don’t hear it here, you will hear it somewhere else: on auto-playing Facebook videos, on a Vine embedded on Twitter, on the rowdy morning show that you don’t really like but play on the way to work, or on the episode of This American Life or Reply All or CBS Sunday Morning that explains how "PPAP" became SOTY (song of the year, obviously).

The song is by Piko-Taro, a fictional character played by Japanese musician and comedian Kazuhiko Kosaka.

There's a lot more backstory to "PPAP," and my colleague Rich McCormick will dig into that soon, but for now, simply welcome it into your ears, your heart, your soul, and your life. Watch how it spreads. Then share it with a friend, because that’s how these things work, corrupting one mind at a time, like some sort of punishment that becomes pleasurable when shared with someone else.