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Description
Repeat After Me: Song Lyrics as / and Technology explores the popular song not as a poetic artifact or cultural symptom, but as a technological form, approaching lyrics as part of a wider ecology that includes sound recording, data flows, streaming platforms, and listening habits.
This book illuminates what happens when we stop treating lyrics as literary texts and start seeing them as elements within a media environment shaped by repetition, inscription, and playback. Spanning case studies from Bryan Ferry to Syd Barrett and John Cale, and drawing on thinkers from Adorno and McLuhan to Kittler and Szendy, the book offers a new framework for understanding how lyrics function in the context of media history. It asks how lyrics work when repeated, misheard, looped, or archived, when they no longer tell stories but structure attention, emotional timing, and user behavior.
This is not a book about what lyrics mean but about what they do: how they move us, position us, and sometimes lose us. As we navigate an era increasingly shaped by algorithmic short content, the pop song remains one of the most ubiquitous and underestimated technologies of feeling, memory, and repetition.
Structured as a series of interconnected essays, Repeat After Me moves between close listening, media theory, and personal reflection. It traces how the ancient form of song converges with modern systems of storage and circulation from vinyl and magnetic tape to AI recommendation engines.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
Instead of an Introduction: Walking in the Room with Bryan Ferry
No Sex, No Drugs, No Rock'n'Roll: A Note on Methodology and Structure
1. Song as Technology
2. The Rogue Voice
3. The Rogue Ear
4. Meaning, Information, Data
Post-Scriptum: A Magical Piece of Code
Sources
Index
Product details
| Published | 10 Dec 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9798216454830 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Thinking Media |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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