From Annie Lennox and David Byrne to ritual, childhood listening and Sweet Dreams, repetition in music can regulate, absorb and transform us in ways modern culture often underestimates.
Last year Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox surprised many fans when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 70. After receiving her diagnosis, she quipped, “I passed with flying colours.” Looking back on her life and career through the lens of ADHD, Lennox describes her condition this way: “It’s not an easy thing to live with but it also has a fantastic superpower.”
An increasing number of adults, especially women, are being diagnosed with ADHD later in life. Some commentators warn of diagnostic inflation, while others argue that the condition has historically been underdiagnosed. Although she chose not to take medication, Lennox believes the diagnosis helped her to better understand her behaviour.
Lennox’s experience with ADHD finds a striking parallel with Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s reflections on autism. Having never received a formal diagnosis, Byrne has spoken about reading through the characteristics of autism and thinking, “check, check, check” … He also described his behaviour in similar terms to Lennox: “I have no problem on being alone and focusing on something, That’s my superpower” and “I’ve never thought of it as a disability. It’s just a different way of processing information … and the world.”
It’s worth making a distinction between ADHD and autism. They are not the same thing, although they share common characteristics. Both can involve intense forms of attention, sensory sensitivity, and difficulties regulating experiences. They are also both associated with stimming, or self-stimulatory behaviour, which involves repetitive actions such as rocking from side to side, clicking fingers, or repeating particular words or sounds.
These forms of self-regulation are not confined to people with ADHD or autism. Music can serve a similar self-regulating function. Familiar songs and repeated rhythms provide stimulation and predictability while reducing the demands of processing new information. In Byrne’s book How Music Works, he writes that music can be both “an escape and a survival mechanism”. For Byrne, music does not simply provide an escape from worldly concerns but helps us to better live in the world.
From ‘eurhythmics’ to Eurythmics
In 1980, Lennox and her songwriter partner Dave A. Stewart came up with the band name Eurythmics. The name refers to eurhythmics, a pedagogical exercise system that Lennox encountered as a child. Its founder, Swiss musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, taught his students that there was an important correlation between rhythm, body awareness and kinaesthetic learning. He maintained that music is not simply something to be listened to and appreciated aesthetically, but something that we experience and understand through our bodies.
The influence of eurhythmics can be heard in the music Lennox and Stewart went on to create. One of the band’s most famous songs, Sweet Dreams, has only a few lines of lyrics that are repeated over and over again, accompanied by a muscular synthesiser pattern. On first listen, the lyrics are not particularly profound or poetic:
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something
Yet when Lennox sings these lines repeatedly in a low, almost monotonous voice, they have a hypnotic effect. You get drawn in. Lennox has spoken about the circumstances that brought about the creation of this song:
“It’s a very peculiar song. It’s like a little mantra. It just goes around and around, saying the same thing over and over, and people have just identified with it.”
Lennox recognises implicitly that with this song she is casting a spell. Her hypnotic repetition of these simple lyrics creates an incantation. The effect is not dissimilar to that of repeating a mantra during meditation, where the repetition of familiar sounds can alter our state of consciousness and exert an almost magical influence over the mind and body.
The sister song to Sweet Dreams is the equally hypnotic Here Comes the Rain Again. It also has childish lyrics that gain their power from Lennox’s understated delivery:
Here comes the rain again
falling on my head like a memory
falling on my head like a new emotion
After a while the repetitive chorus becomes meaningless and you become immersed in a mood, only aware of the rhythm of the phrasing. The swirling strings and sparse instrumentation add to the mood. The mechanical throb of the keyboard creates a pulse, like a heart beating during exercise.
I have always been taken with Eurythmics’ songs that repeat the same phrase over and over again until it almost drives you crazy. Recollecting this aspect of their songcraft is what makes Lennox’s recent ADHD diagnosis so fascinating. It has made me rethink why I was drawn to music when I was young.
When I was growing up, my parents did not have a big music collection. They had one record by the Beatles, which was an unusual compilation of their early songs. This was all I would listen to. Every morning I would wake up, grab two wooden rulers and rush upstairs to where the family record player was. Then for hours, sometimes days, I would play the Beatles record and bang on the cardboard boxes that I had set up like a proto-drumkit at the top of the stairs. Looking back, my parents were very understanding, but they had no idea what I was doing, or why I was doing it. They just let me get on with it.
Now that I am a lot older, I realise that I have never treated music as a decoration. It is rather a spell to keep the demons away. Or to put it in a more positive sense, it contains a spirit that transforms everyday life into something bearable.
What I was doing as a child was not simply listening to the same record because I had nothing else available. I was inhabiting a familiar musical world, one in which rhythm and repetition allowed me to become absorbed in something that was simultaneously physical and psychological. Later when I was a teenager, Eurythmics music performed the same function. They taught me that the body and consciousness are inseparable, in the same way that repetition and ritual are elemental aspects of what it is to be a human being.
Ritual, music and repetition
For tens of thousands of years, human communities have used hypnotic repetitive music, drumming, chants and dance in religious ceremonies and rituals. Many of these ceremonies continued for days on end, inducing altered states of consciousness, where participants became increasingly disconnected from their everyday concerns. To modern ears, the repetition of tribal music might sound musically unsophisticated, but it served a complex and perhaps unrecognised psychological and spiritual need.
In How Music Works, Byrne identifies this ancient type of musical immersion: “Ritualistic music has to be repeated in the same way, in more or less identical circumstances every time a ritual is performed.” Byrne writes that such music is understood as existing “outside history, like a myth”, while the role of performers and participants is simply “to keep it alive”. In this older understanding, music and ritual are not an adornment or an adjunct to life, but an essential way of regulating and connecting participants to what they understood as the spiritual realm. And unlike some modern forms of spirituality that are detached and almost unearthly, ritualistic music was embodied in human movement and nature.
With the arrival of the modern period the value of such repetition began to be called into question. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and individual freedom challenged the authority of inherited religious traditions, including the rituals and music that had structured communal life for centuries.
In our ever-burgeoning global capitalist society, we are continually encouraged to embrace the new. Marx and Engels famously said of capitalism that “all that is solid melts into the air”, arguing that capitalism’s constant innovation destroys all the traditions that rely on consistency and repetition. Spotify is the perfect conduit for capitalism. The possibilities are endless. There is always something new waiting to be discovered. Online platforms also present music as metaphysical. It is insubstantial and disembodied, far removed from tribal rhythms and the eurhythmics bodily experience of music that inspired Lennox.
Casting a spell
In a culture that constantly pushes us towards novelty, movement and endless choice, repetitive music can do the opposite. It can create limits. To counteract what Lennox perceived to be the negative feel of Sweet Dreams, she added a repetitive refrain at the end of the song:
Hold your head up (move along) Keep your head up (move along)
For critics of contemporary pop music, this repeated refrain would be another example of needless repetition. Yet through the clipped diction, subject matter and alliteration of the song’s refrain, Lennox meaningfully connects bodily movement with a psychological state. For her the song became a magical premonition:
“The day we started to work on Sweet Dreams, I was in a terrible mood. I was ready to pack it in and go back to Scotland. There was no hope whatsoever and the first line was very self-deprecating … Ironically what the song was about fulfilled itself. Which is so strange when I think about it.”
By recording this song with her band Eurythmics, Lennox was able to transform her fears of failure into a repetitive mantra that captured the world’s imagination. In casting a positive spell, especially with the refrain, she was able to bring about the very thing she had almost given up hoping for. In an expression of the connection between music, body and mind that underpins eurhythmics, she held her head up, kept her head up and moved along.
Concentrating the imagination
Inhabiting a capitalist worldview, we have become accustomed to thinking of repetition as the opposite of creativity and choice, something that prevents us from moving forward and discovering new possibilities. But music, whether it is being played in a recording studio, at a tribal ritual or at the top of the stairs, reminds us that repetition is not a failure of imagination but an essential component of it.
Adrian Rosenfeldt
Dr Adrian Rosenfeldt teaches at Melbourne University. He is a journalist, public speaker and the author of The God Debaters: New Atheist Identity-Making and the Religious Self in the New Millennium (2022). www.adrianrosenfeldt.com