Joyful mayhem: Bakhtin, football songs, and the carnivalesque

Abstract

Any social force as commonly stigmatized as the subculture of the football song must necessarily be powerful in the ways it threatens and disrupts all levels and elements of society. Bakhtin's theories of carnival and the carnivalesque are applied to recent British football songs in order to shed new light upon the relationship between lyric and performance, between magic mantras and identity, between chants and challenges, and between allegiances and enemies. This reading entails an examination of some of the ways in which football songs work to demolish fear and piety through confrontation and contemporizing, thus disrupting the official solemnity of the status quo. Insights into the nature of carnivalesque laughter, uncrowning rituals, and performative disorder lead to a new understanding of football chants and their associations with radical resistance, counterculture, and reclaiming the issue of misrule. The impulse to carnival expressed in the football song dramatizes and enlivens an otherwise mute ...