5 Most Infamous Cars Of 2012

Even if Americans missed those, their kids were watching Cookie Monster parody it on Sesame Street. They faced it after the kids went to bed as Jepsen, Jimmy Fallon, The Roots and a few classroom instruments did a version of it on Late Night. Eventually it trickled down to Fox's high school karaoke show and iTunes infomercial Glee and CBS' second-to-lowest-common-denominator catch-all sitcom The Big Bang Theory (P.S. If it's network-mandated, it's not a flash mob).

If it didn't wriggle into listeners' heads through any of those channels, it likely embedded itself there after one of the nearly 370 million plays of the song's official video on YouTube. In the clip's loosely cobbled narrative, Jepsen catches a glimpse of her shirtless neighbor doing a bit of midsummer lawn maintenance. In a bid to draw his attention away from his iPhone, Camaro and other distractions, Jepsen tries washing the powder blue 1966 Mustang in her driveway. Because she graduated from the Taylor Swift School of Pretty, Unpopular Girls In Pop Music, she pratfalls her way through the fairly simple task before the cute rube-next-door takes pity on her and lets her play a song for him before she inflicts any further sponge-related bodily harm.

It's a painful experience involving Jepsen and her guy posing for the cover of a fake romance novel and Jepsen failing to consider his feelings on matters of sexual orientation, but it's not nearly as painful as trying to dislodge this song from memory once it's in there.

3. The 2012 Chrysler 300 from Breaking Bad

Back when meth-making Walter White (Bryan Cranston) was at least trying to fight cancer and teach chemistry to somebody other than the folks cooking up the next batch in his lab, his brutalist, beige 2004 Pontiac Aztek seemed appropriate.