Karma Police

Note: this was originally published elsewhere in 2013.

“Karma Police” is one of those songs — and, oh, what a song — and it raises a lot of questions in line with that kind of sentiment: even if the three sections that comprise the song lack a formal tonal resolve, why does the song end up feeling so resolved? Because of the way it begins? As if it were the sonic equivalent of Luther or Columbo, where you’re given the ‘who done it’ at the beginning and you’re left to try and figure out the ‘how?’ Would it add credence to the notion of giving all one can to figure out the problem, but it’s not enough because the beginning of the song keeps slipping further and further away? (Until the suddenly drawn up curtain at the end?)

That feels a little easy, though, and doesn’t quite capture why you can “lock in” to the song over and over again, as if there was a giant gear from a giant clock slowly pinning you down. And what of the dance — as this paper points out — between music’s necessary repetition, ‘verbatim encoding,’ and the phenomenon of semantic satiation? Is it because once you hear a melody line, you have to hear the entire melody line? That you can’t ‘hiccup sing it’ like you were playing ‘Name That Tune?’