Literary Loops: Mariah Stovall on the Role of Repetition in Music and Fiction

Without repetition, there is no music. Entire genres—trap; bachata—rely on reworking characteristic instrumentations, rhythms, and beats, beats that are themselves the stuff of repetition. Blues has its signature chord progressions. Disco and its danceable descendants lean into the power of synthesized loops. Harsh or ambient, noise music confidently gazes in on and repeats itself. Themes, canons, and variations comprise classical compositions. Yes, jazz improvises—on standardized heads that its players train themselves to return to and riff on a dime. When we love a song, we listen to it more than once. We want to wear out the (now mostly proverbial) tape. Some of us stream albums, beginning to end and then again, until our accounts get flagged on suspicions of being bots. We run a record back until it makes us want to run into traffic, because we love repetition until we don’t. I needed to see the relationship as one between two dynamic characters, not between a person and an inanimate object. When I set out to write a novel rooted in 2010s punk, emo, and hardcore, I knew music would be figuratively (and often literally) playing in the background of the story. That story follows a pair of on-and-off-again best friends who are stuck on the carousel—onset, recovery, relapse, repeat—that is living with an eating disorder and other mental health issues. Between that musical context and that narrative content, it was going to be a really repetitive book. Readers might be on my side the first time I described a mosh pit or the way that malnutrition fogs up your brain, but seven DIY shows and ten strained lunches later, they might want to hurl my book, and themselves, into the bus lane. I realized music could show me how to balance consistency and novelty. From the beginning, I thought of my manuscript as an album and my chapters as songs. In one sense, it’s a forty-one track annotated mixtape. But first and foremost, it’s a novel. With three hundred pages to fill, I couldn’t write exactly like a musician might. I couldn’t turn the most shining, […]

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