earworm by jerbing
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.
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