Reflections on an Earworm

earworm by jerbing 

society6.com

 

 

I. 

 

I don't know if anyone has ever died from that common form of involuntary cognition known as an earworm [1], but having the same song play over and over in one's head can certainly drive you crazy after a while. 

 

And that's something I can attest to, having had Michael Jackson's 'Smooth Criminal' on repeat for the last few days - and not even the original track [2], but the if-anything-even-catchier version by Alien Ant Farm [3].    

 

I'm pretty sure that, eventually, it will stop. But I do sometimes worry about being reduced to a catatonic state like Gilbert Lister [4]. 

 

For if Greil Marcus is right and listening to the radio is a potentially suicidal gesture [5], then I imagine that sitting alone for hours watching music videos on YouTube "with a blank, entranced expression" like Sir Clifford Chatterley is equally self-destructive [6].

 

Síomón Solomon touched on these ideas in relation to his own audiopoetics, in Hölderlin's Poltergeists (2021): click here. But the theorist who has comprehensively developed ideas of listening and written a fascinating history of the ear, is the French philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy [7] ...  

 

 

II.

 

In his histoire de nos oreilles (2001), Szendy critiques the Romantic and Modernist conceptions of listening and offers an alternative (poststructuralist) model informed by the work of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, and so full of ideas to do with otherness and issues of power, for example. 

 

And in his philosophie dans le juk-box (2008), Szendy analyses how haunting popular melodies can form a bridge between the individual's unconscious and the workings of the global market, as their thoughts feelings, dreams, and desires are all captured and expressed in three-minutes of pop perfection. 

 

We think we are listening to the soundtrack of our lives when we play our favourite songs over and over, but, actually, the banging tunes that worm their way into our heads and hearts are produced by a recorded music industry with an annual revenue of around $20 billion [8].

 

The hit song, Szendy argues, functions like a myth; a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. And it is also an insidious form of bio-melo-technology which is there to produce a docile subject happy and free to sing along. 

 

Of course, this is not a new insight: the artist Jamie Reid recognised long ago that music keeps you under control ... Why d'you think they pipe it out in the shopping malls?

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The term, earworm, is a loan translation - or what linguists like to call a calque - from the German Ohrwurm and was coined by the English journalist and writer Desmond Bagley in his 1978 novel Flyaway.

 

[2] Michael Jackson, 'Smooth Criminal', 1988 single release from the album Bad, (Epic, 1987): click here for the official full-length video, dir. Colin Chilvers.

 

[3] Alien Ant Farm, 'Smooth Criminal', single release from the album Anthology, (Dreamworks, 2001): click here for Marc Klasfeld's video, which pays an amusing homage to Jackson.     

[4] In Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Ultimate Melody' (1957), scientist Gilbert Lister develops a tune that is so perfectly synchronised with the electrical rhythms of the brain that its listener becomes fatally enraptured by it. This is a surprisingly familiar theme within fiction.

 

[5] Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 33. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110. 

 

[7] See, for example, the following works by Peter Szendy available in English translation:

      - Listen: a history of our ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell, (Fordham University Press, 2008).

      - Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, trans. Will Bishop, (Fordham University Press, 2011).

      - All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage, trans. Roland Végső, (Fordham University Press, 2017).  

 

[8] According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the recorded music market grew by 7.4% in 2020, mostly thanks to streaming, and figures released in their 2021 Global Music Report show total revenues for 2020 were $21.6 billion. Readers who are interested in knowing more can click here and go to the IFPI website.  

Ghost Variations: Notes on the Madness of Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) 

German Romantic composer, critic, and madman

In the season two episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Jacket' [1], George has a catchy tune from Les Misérables stuck in his head which he can't stop singing: Master of the house, doling out the charm / Ready with a handshake and an open palm ...

Jerry warns him that the ninteenth century composer Robert Schumann went mad after just a single note earwormed its way into his mind and he involuntarily heard it playing over and over again. Obviously, George doesn't find this story very reassuring - Oh that I really needed to hear! - but is it true?

The short answer is yes: Schumann did go insane and have to be institutionalised; and he did hear a persistent A-note at the end of his life as well as other increasingly disturbing auditory hallucinations.

Thus it was, for example, that on one cold winter's night in February 1854, the composer leapt from his bed and began feverishly attempting to set down a melody that he believed at first was being dictated by the very angels of heaven. By morning, however, he was convinced that what he actually heard were the hideous cries of demonic beasts.

Whatever the true source of his inspiration [2], the melody became the basis of the six piano variations - known today as the Geistervariationen - that were the last thing he wrote before his final crack-up. They thus occupy a unique (and somewhat disturbing) place in his body of work - as, indeed, in the history of classical music. 

On 27 February, Schumann attempted suicide by throwing himself from a bridge into the Rhine. Rescued by a passing boat and taken home, he requested that he be admitted to an asylum for the insane. Here he remained until his death, aged 46, in the summer of 1856. During his confinement, although his friend Brahms had permission to visit, Schumann wasn't allowed to see his wife, Clara, until two days before his death.

The cause of his death - just like the cause of his madness [3] - is something that has been endlessly discussed ever since; was he schizophrenic or syphilitic? Did he have a bipolar disorder or were his neurological problems the result of a brain tumour of some kind? Was it pneumonia or mercury poisoning - mercury being a common treatment for syphilis at the time - which finally did him in?   

I suppose we'll never really know. But what we might do - and should do - is resist the urge of some commentators to regurgitate the romantic vomit and tired narratives regarding the genius and madness of artists ...

The view that creativity is rooted in or fatefully tied to madness is such bullshit. Artists may well think differently from most other people - that is to say, they may be neurologically divergent and able to experience the world from a wide array of queer perspectives (to delight in paradox, inconsistency, and even chaos), - but it's banal (and mistaken) to reduce this (or their heightened sensitivity) to mental illness.       

Ultimately, I return to Michel Foucault's conclusion in Madness and Civilization: the onset of madness marks the point at which creative work ends; a moment of abolition that dissolves the truth of the work of art [4].  

Notes

[1] Seinfeld, 'The Jacket' [S2/E3], dir. Tom Cherones, written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, (first broadcast 6 February 1991). Click here to watch a clip from the episode on YouTube.

[2] Sadly, Schumann's mind had deteriorated to such a degree by this point, that he was unable to recognise that - far from being the work of angels, ghosts, or demons - the melody was in fact one of his own, written several months earlier.

[3] I'm taking Schumann's mental health issues - evident from a young age - as a given here, but, interestingly, there are critics such as John Worthen who vigorously challenge this idea. For Worthen the composer's tragic deterioration was rooted in a physical condition (syphilis) and was not a form of madness per se. See: Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (Yale University Press, 2007).

[4] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage Books, 1988), p. 287.