| Contents |
Preface: Especially for the english-language reader -- Chapter 1: Earworms: Life's soundtrack -- Chapter 2: The banal and the singular -- A tune just like that: The secret of the commodity -- Parole, Parole, Parole: The desire for self -- Repetition, or the ordeal of enthusiasm -- Chapter 3: The filmography of hits -- I have come to tell you ... : Same old song -- The market and the psyche: Fritz Lang's M -- Shadow of a doubt: Some songs by Hitchcock -- Chapter 4: Capital's Intimate Hymn -- Forbidden Melody -- Money: Music, Money, and Wit -- Fame -- Chapter 5: Around the world: Around oneself -- Chapter 6: The blood of the cut and the promise of the breakthrough -- Chapter 7: Da Capo: Follow the notes -- Chapter 8: Kafka at the star academy: Nothing's anthem -- Chapter 9: Musicology and Melology: Prince, eros, and copyright -- Chapter 10: This is it: The king of pop. |
| Abstract |
This is an extraordinary foray into what apple has convinced us is "the soundtrack of our lives." How does music come to inhabit us, to possess and haunt us? What does it mean that a piece of music can insert itself--Szendy's term for this, borrowed from German, is the earworm--into our ears and minds? The author probes the ever-growing and ever more global phenomenon of the hit song. This book is the culmination of years of singular attentiveness to the unheard, the unheard-of, and the overheard, as well as of listening as it occurs when one pays anything but attention. The author takes us through our musical bodies, by way of members and instruments, playing and governing apparatuses, psychic and cinematic doublings, political and economic musings. The hit song, he concludes, functions like a myth, a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. In the repetition generated by the song's relation to itself, he locates its production as a fetishized commodity, a self-producing structure, and a self-desiring machine. Like a Deleuzian machine, then, the hit song is a technology of the self, or better, a technology of rule, a bio-melo-technology. After reading this book, one can no longer avoid realizing that music is more than a soundtrack: It is the condition of our lives. We are all melomaniacs, the author tells us in his unique style of writing and of thought. We are melo-obsessive subjects, not so much driven to a frenzy by a music we hardly have time to listen to as governed and ruled by it. |
