Abstract
AbstractThis article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness of the two-way traffic between life and lyrical craft. A poetics of song should pay increased attention to this intricate relationship – not reducing lyrics to biographical contingencies, but rather viewing autobiography itself as a complex process of self-reading, a public act of autobiographical making. My argument is illustrated with reference to three contemporary singer-songwriters who have interpreted aspects of their lives through song: Vic Chesnutt, Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) and Anohni (formerly of Antony and the Johnsons). Their work ultimately traverses and obscures the interstices between experience and imagination.
Highlights
This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity
I trace a longstanding mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality
To quote Jonathan Culler, poetics is less concerned with context or what texts mean than how their effects are achieved, seeking to understand ‘the techniques that make meaning possible’
Summary
This is only half the story – what Nattiez (after Paul Valéry) labels as the ‘esthesic’ dimension in which listeners perceive the meaning of something through their own lived experience. The kind of stance that Frith had decided to take aim at was epitomized by works such as Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, first published in 1972 and reprinted in expanded form a decade later and again in 2000.8 Gray’s book, Frith argues, is ‘a tour-de-force ragout of pop criticism, New Criticism, and Leavisism’ unhelpfully mired in the elitist values of literary modernism – a theme to which we shall return.[9] Frith’s antidote to this propensity to locate meaning solely in the written lyrics was to emphasize that, ‘How words work in song depends not just on what is said, the verbal content, and on how it is said – on the type of language used and its rhetorical significance; on the kind of voice in which it is spoken.’[10] In short, expression, characterization, role play and performance are just as integral to establishing a song’s meaning as the minutiae of lyrical craft Frith developed this idea by arguing that the voice we hear in popular song is always multifaceted, at once a versatile musical instrument mediated by microphone and/or studio technology, the signifier of a particular body (with all those ingrained overtones of race, gender, sexuality and eroticism) and something more mercurial or deceptive. Performance studies inadvertently echoes the discourse of textual autonomy it yearns to escape
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