Why Is Repetitiveness Accepted in Music?

I think my example might be throwing you off. This is more in the terms of, say, how the New York Times Book Review would treat an "On the Road" for Gen Y or something. It has nothing to do with marketing. Just how it is that repetitiveness in music is accepted, as it is in film, and even bragged about. How Tiffany could re-record "I Think We're Alone Now" and it could be a hit today and no one would complain. People have just accepted that this is how things work. And it's the same, if not worse, in film. True, when you get to romance novels or Tom Clancy this is the same... but those are bestsellers. The repetition is nearly as prevalent in the artsy areas of film and music as it is in the mainstream. I don't think I could same the same for literature.

But Nick, your time committment point is good one. Also, maybe that there are less fingers in the pot when it comes to writing a book than there are in the recording of an album or the making of a movie.

"it features a crisis in a marriage = it is a repetition" vs "the colour details and writing style are particular to the writer = it is non-repetitive"
and
"it is a pretty girl singing a popsong = it is a repetition" vs "the grain of her voice and manner of her dancing are particular to the popstar = it is non-repetitive"

Repetition over the course of a body of work functions the same way as repetition within a work functions - it makes the piece memorable. Another chorus, another close-up, another plot twist - it's all about style.

Feel free to kick me if I've inadvertently reiterated someone's point.

1. The popular v. critically accepted split (he is comparing thNYT Book Review to the pop charts, but it would be fairer to compare the NYT Bestseller List to the pop charts)

2. Singer : song :: reader (NOT author) : book.

I guess my pal and I were giving the literary world too much credit. To use an example that bridges the popular/critically successful genres -- could a writer get away with releasing another "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in five years? Would reviewers give them a pass? Would the public? My first instinct (last night), was no. That this wouldn't fly. That you couldn't simply rehash and repackage a novel, that you would be called out on your shit. But it probably would pass the muster. And a record like that certainly would. The Vines, anyone?

So it's a moot point that made for good dinner conversation, but fairs poorly in the unblinking eye of ILM!!!

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively
established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together with technological and social differentiation
or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city
housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly
independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more
subservient to his adversary -- the absolute power of capitalism.
Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to
be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors' incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological
terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain
reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical
needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The
technical contrast between the few production centers and the large
number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers' needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than
the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing
whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today's economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the "amateur," and
also have to accept organization from above. But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience -- real
jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony
is crudely "adapted" for a film soundtrack in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air. We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement -- or at least the determination -- of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules,their
own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

"world needs now is"(Carpenters) a decent old-fashioned return to full-rotation serialism to keep listeners awake and alive and thinking as they are hearing, to compete with good books and hooks, serialised and cooked "up"?(REM)

What, did his estate pull a VC Andrews on people?

(Also, the whole notion of "the canon" is even more pervasive in lit than music and triply pernicious -- also books are not "allowed" to be anything but *IMPORTANT* the way music is.)

I love generalizations so:

all modern novels can be reduced to Shakespeare..

all Shakespeare can be reduced to the classic Roman myths

Roman myths being reduced to Greek myths...

there you have it, repetition

"This is a sentence."

Sing it. Rap it. Hum the syllables. Be silent for the time that it would take you to say it.

I don't know. Think indifferent.

Repetition in the music and we're never gonna lose it!

This is like the ILM version of Henny Youngman's "Take my wife...please."

The Hives aren't the first garage rock band, even in Sweden, but Jonathan Franzen isn't the first guy to write about dysfunctional families, even in the Midwest. Mainstream lit fiction might have a wider working thematic range than mainstream lit rock, but has a narrower working formal range - although there are a ridiculous number of exceptions to this rule.

(ok not actually please)

"It's good to revive riffs from the past because you know kids like it" - Steven King, Wm. Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Joseph Campbell, etc. (paraphrase)

Part of the analogy fails because the scale of the objects compared is so vastly different (a song takes three minutes to hear, a novel takes a day to read, so it's really unclear what constitutes like-with-like) (is a song equivalent to a word, or a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter? most pop/groups entire life's work can be absorbed in the time it takes to read a single novel....). I'd cite Stockhausen's notion of Temporal Octaves here but I'll fuck it up if I do it from memory.

Not a very good cover version at that. A Lovecraft at the height of his powers covering "Count Magnus," that could work.

"The way the letter e is distributed in this poem is, like, competely random!! Therefore it is rubbish!!!"

Novels and poems are full of repetitions, othertwise we wouldn't be able to make sense of them: they just don't tend to happen at stanza level. Because novels and poems aren't songs.

New York, like a Christmas tree
Tonight this city belongs to me
Angel

Soul love...this love won't let me go
So long...Angel of Harlem

Birdland on fifty-three
The street sounds like a symphony
We got John Coltrane and a love supreme
Miles says she's got to be an angel

Lady Day got diamond eyes
She sees the truth behind the lies
Angel

Soul love...this love won't let me go
So long...Angel of Harlem
Angel of Harlem

She says it's heart...heart and soul...
Yeah yeah...(yeah)
Yeah yeah...(right now)

Blue light on the avenue
God knows they got to you
An empty glass, the lady sings
Eyes swollen like a bee sting
Blinded you lost your way

Through the side streets and the alleyway
Like a star exploding in the night
Falling to the city in broad daylight
An angel in Devil's shoes
Salvation in the blues
You never looked like an angel
Yeah yeah...Angel of Harlem

Angel...Angel of Harlem...