earworms in the afterlife

 1.A couple of days ago, I was shopping in the Franprix when, over the P.A. system, they played a song from my past, a song from the 90s, Ace of Base’s “All that she wants is another baby”.

The beat is the thing with this song. But you can’t ignore the words, even if in memory’s afterwards, you can’t remember all of them. The lyrics are puzzlingly, maddeningly stupid – stupid in the deepest, classical sense, stupid as truisms are stupid, stupid as the stereotypical speech of the bourgeoisie (which Leon Bloy savaged) is stupid. Stupid as an aggressive act, making it, momentarily, impossible to think.

However, the stupidity did not prevent this song from sticking in my head. On the contrary, like certain classically sticky songs – I’m looking at you, Tiffany, and “I think we’re alone now”, or a multitude of Christmas songs involving snow and Santa – the stupidity is a large component of the stickiness. So what did I do? I started playing the song on the phone while I cooked – which is when I also, discretely, rock out.

2. The phenomenon of the sticky song must go back a long way in our songline laden species history. But the inflexion point was reached, I’d say, in the 19th century, when both mass production (of gramophone records) and nationalism (of school singing) emerged in everybody’s life.
Although a folk or street song or opera aria might well have stuck in the head of some paysan de Paris, we don’t read much about this “diabolical” aspect of song culture before the 19th century. At most, we have Orsino, Duke of Illyria:
“That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough; no more;
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”
Like that other mass produced product that quickly loses its sweetness – chewing gum – we hear it and we hear it in our head, the sticky song, and feel that somehow, it is chewing us.
3.The mystery of the relation between the coveted object and the collector is treated by Walter Benjamin in his essay from 1931, “Unpacking my library”, which starts off with the nicely realized scene of unpacking boxes and strewing packaging about the floor. That unpacking is taken to another level when Benjamin tries to peel away the use and exchange value from the books he has – revealing the object as a magical-sexual thing, a showplace or theatre that enthralls the collector. The order of the collector is revealed to be a “magic encyclopedia, whose quintessence is the fate of the object”. The order, here, is a convergence between the death-drive and the libido, between the mastery of the collector and the surrender to the captured prey.

The sticky song is, I think, another “magic object” – but one that inverses the mastery of the collector. Instead, the mastering gesture somehow belongs to the song, accidentally heard and hard, very hard, to discard.

The sticky song has been dubbed an “earworm”, or more technically an INMI – involuntary musicial imagery. Tristam Adams has written a book about it: Horrors of a Voice (object a). This is a long trawl through the archetypal horror of a thing crawling into the ear – which, as author after author reminds us, is not equipped with lids, like the eye. It seems that earworm entered the language via Stephen King. But the phenomenon has been studied by psychologists like Oliver Sacks and going back in time to the psychologists of the 19th century. Adams quotes this rather brilliant observation of Nietzsche’s (and can one write a book about horror without quoting Nietzsche?):
Night and music—the ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. This is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight. – Nietzsche
If only Nietzsche had had a car, a trip before him, and a cassette player, circa 1992. I did. Night and twilight and distance.
4. One of the standard experiences of education in the U.S. – or so I say, having been long out of it but assuming that certain structures stick – is the learning of patriotic songs. God Bless America or the Star Spangled Banner.
In France, it is La Marseillaise. My son approves of the Marseillaise, and could, if forced, probably sing a bit of it.
The attempt to put into the ears of the young various official songs is next to the attempt to put into the playlist on spotify or elsewhere songs that will “ride” and stick with the listener, parasite them – although these experiences are not just horrors, as envisioned by Tristam Adams, but also memories, a head library of turns.
The Marseillaise is a very studied national anthem. Most national anthems lead decorous ceremonial existences, but not that song. composed in the moment in which the popular army was crystallizing in France in 1792, it was bound up with the fortunes of that army. Goethe, hearing soldiers sing it on the field of Valmy, called it the Te Deum of the revolution. Eugene Weber wrote an essay asking the question, who were these singers? For as Weber knew, the French in 1792 were not all French speakers. He traces the fortunes of the song, which are, as well, the fortunes of singing in public places:
“… on June 17 [1792 – shortly after it was composed] it is sung at Montpellier; and within a few days a delegate of the Constitutional Society (that is of the Girondists) of Montpellier carries it to Marseille. The delegate was Mireur, who was destined to become a general of the Republic; for the moment, he was trying to encourage the Marseillais to respond to a Paris appeal for 500 man ‘qui sachent mourir’; and, since he was not beyond using audio-visual aids in a tricky task, on June 22 he sings the new song at the end of a Constitutional banquet.
People sang a lot in those days - popular deputations would visit the Convention and sing patriotic songs of their own composing, which rather hampered proceedings; and Danton had to intervene several times to establish that the Convention was not a place for singing songs3). But banquets were, and this one met with great enthusiasm.”
The National Assembly took as one of its great projects the frenchifying of France. In 1792, the majority of the population inside the Hexagon did not speak French, or at least spoke it badly, as a second language. They spoke langue d’oc, or Breton, or something close to Catalan. High culture did speak French – as high culture spoke it in Spain and Germany and Russia. Weber’s point is that songs were one of the great, unheralded instruments for making the French French. Singing was a part of the rhythm of everyday life. In fact, as Weber points out, the National Assembly was always getting visited by delegates from this or that group who sang to them. Laura Masson has written a whole book about the song culture of the revolution, from which I will cull a quote:
“A deputation from the Piques section arrived to ask the deputies [of the Convention] to attend their celebration of the ‘martyrs of lbierty’ several days hence. One of their members sang a ‘patriotic song of his composition,’ and the deputy Laloi moved that the deputation’s speech and song be included in the Convention’s bulletin. Danton objected, “the Bulletin of the Convention is in no way meant to carry verse throughout the Republic, but rather good laws written in good prose. Moreover, a decree requires the Committee of Public Instruction to give preliminary consideration to all that concerns the arts and education."
It is an interesting thing, the cross between song and language – the latter being perhaps the ultimate earworm.
However, songlines are infinitely fungible. Hearing the opening strains of the Marseilles does not make me think of “aux armes, citoyens!” Rather (such is the songline that traverses my generation), it makes me think: Love, love love… all you need is love!” In one sense, this Beatles song could be defended as a chip off the old Lucretian block.

But for someone not of my generation, this song might be as stupid as Ace of Base’s “All she really wants…” For Adam, my son, it is the Beatles who are a no go of kitsch. Or rather, they are like something dusty brought down from the attic, smelling of mothballs and faded perfume. Which I consider a bit strange: when he was little, I would walk my two year old son, often in his stroller, to his preschool singing Beatles songs over him. And he himself enjoyed The Yellow Submarine movie.
Yet there they are, the long dead earworms, the repressed earworms. In that moment when the repressed returns, that inflection of reaction or revolution, they will be in the throng of the dead, crowding round us explorers of the afterlife, too.
Mine will be singing: I got you babe.