Repeat After Me

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.