Every time I go back home, it looks like this.
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“Regularity and relentlessness,” says Arianna Huffington. “That’s how you break through the static of the 5,000-channel universe.” →
Related! (Sort of.)
On the Mainstream Top 40 chart, at least 25 out of the top 30 songs have some sort of internal repetition in the first two minutes. A few are fleeting (Train’s “hey, hey, hey” on “Hey Soul Sister” or Daughtry’s “love ever after/after the life we once knew” on “Life After You”). Others, like Taio Cruz’s “Break Your Heart,” Iyaz’s “Replay” or David Guetta & Akon’s “Sexy Chick” are more obvious.
Of the other five songs in the top 30, meanwhile, two have obvious repetition of another sort – the consecutively repeated hook. There’s no internal repetition on Adam Lambert’s “Whatya Want From Me” but with the title phrase happening so many times at the end of the chorus, there doesn’t really need to be.
Then I went to the R&B chart, where 24 out of the top 30 use internal repetition and another four repeat the full hook. Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One” has two different chants of the title phrase going on at one time, so the lack of repetition within a sentence hardly matters. Ludacris’ “How Low” reinforces its repetition with a Smurf voice. But I put that one in the internal repetition camp anyway because of the secondary “go low/go low” hook.
Maybe Arianna should get into the record business next?
