‘Play it again Sam’: Some notes on the productivity of repetition in popular music

Abstract

Repetition, as a component of musical structure in popular songs, has long played an important part in ‘popular common-sense’ definitions, and criticisms, of the music. ‘It's monotonous’; ‘it's all the same’; ‘it's predictable’: such reactions have probably filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists. From this point of view, repetition (within a song) can be assimilated to the same category as what Adorno termed standardisation (as between songs). Of course, the significance of the role played by such techniques in the operations of the music industry – their efficacy in helping to define and hold markets, to channel types of consumption, to pre-form response and to make listening easy – can hardly be denied; it is, however, equally difficult to reduce the function of repetition simply to an analysis of the ‘political economy’ of popular music production and its ideological effects. Despite Adorno's critical assault (see Adorno 1941), despite later twists to the theory by, for instance, Fredric Jameson (1981), who argues that rather than being a negative quality of mass culture, repetition is simply a fundamental characteristic of all cultural production under contemporary capitalism, the question of repetition refuses to go away. Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again? To be able to answer this question, which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as psychoanalysis and information theory, would tell us more about the nature of popular music, and hence, mutatis mutandis, about music in general, than almost anything else. We must start by locating repetition within an overall theory of musical syntax.

An Analysis of Repetitive Motifs and Their Listening Duration in Selected Western Popular Songs from 2000 to 2013

“…Middleton (1983), Monson (1999) and Neil (2002) justify the generalization in repetition and how it associates with other elements. There are two types of repetition, musematic repetition and discursive repetition.…”

Ethnomusicological aspects

“…This does not mean that patterns of musical process in popular music analysis Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technic Authenticated Download Date | 6/23/15 12:21 PM are a simple matter (Wicke 1978). Although block shifts (that is, simultaneous changes in many parameters of musical expression within the same AO) are reasonably clear in joins between verse and chorus, A and B sections (or, in films, between scenes), the total meaning of ostensibly straightforward patterns of recurrence, either as reiteration, repetition, or recapitulation can often be far more problematic than their deceptive simplicity suggests (Tagg 1979: 217-219, Middleton 1983). The situation can become even more complex when there is incongruence between musical and extramusical processes in the same AO.…”

Les difficiles rapports du « beau » et du « vrai »

“…Elle permettrait notamment la création d'espaces-temps qui rompent -partiellement au moins -: a) la linéarité du temps horloge qui fonde la chronologie dont sont esclaves les sociétés modernes, en mettant de l'avant une certaine circularité ; b) le cloisonnement des espaces en univers géo-politiques finis dont elle procède mais qu'elle transcende et parfois, réunit (les différents auditoires, par exemple) ; et c) l'univocité de la vie sociale composée d'événements se produisant « un à la fois » , en proposant une simultanéité d'une multiplicité d'espace-temps au sein d'un même morceau. Middleton (1983) l'a bien démontré, la répétition ne saurait être réduite à sa fonction de standardisation, comme le laissait entendre Adorno. Pour reprendre les termes de Deleuze (1981), elle n'engendre ni ne procède du Même mais de la Différence.…”