I had a couple of songs thought of before you mentioned that one. I sang back-up for a RS cover band for a short while, and that was the most BORING song to perform! I used to actually find some enjoyment in it, but sing it every performance, even just for four or five gigs in a month, and it wears HARD on the nerves.

That and Midnight Rambler. Sheesh. Those first 16 bars or so are great, but only the first time.

For an example of a great opening that does go somewhere, Toots & The Maytals’ 54-46 Was My Number just goes from strength to strength. There’s that awesome opening, and then the “give it to me one time…” part and then they go into the chorus and it’s the greatest 1 & 1/2 minutes of ska ever and it never fizzles out…well, except that it does fade out, but that’s ok.

Trivia bit: what everybody thinks is “that amazing intro to Gimme Shelter” is listed on the original innersleeve as “Hard Knocks and Durty Sox”. Look it up.

Klaus Schulze, one of the members of Tangerine Dream, had a solo album called Mirage (1977) with two thirty-minutes “songs” on it. Both of them were like this, but especially the piece on the second side, Crystal Lake. Still I like it for the same reasons I like gamelan.

If you have ever listened to Javanese gamelan music, you could say the same thing about it. There is a style of gamelan where a phrase is played very slowly, then repeated ever faster until it all “comes crashing down” at the end. Considering the other structural elements (where high-note gongs are hit two-or four times more often than medium gongs, all the way down the scale, so that the largest gongs are hit only every 64th note, for example), it actually makes for a hypnotic effect.

I hope I’m not too far off topic by not talking about “pop” songs, but really, there are almost too many of them that don’t go anywhere to mention. I wanted to point out, as someone did above, that sometimes the repetition does serve a purpose.

No middle eight — it fits the pattern.