REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PEOPLE: VOICES OF AUTHORITY IN POP MUSIC

Abstract

In this paper I want to explore the ways in which certain Anglo-Ameri can rock stars are taken to be singing ?for? the people they're singing to. I will argue that the ?politics? of pop depends less on what a singer says than on how she or he is heard. And this is usually a matter of ge neric not political authority. Here I will focus on specific songs by Bruce Springsteen, X-Ray Spex and Public Enemy, but my argument rests on a broader account of pop songs as speech acts (rather than speeches), as sounds in performance (rather than words on paper). Lyrics (which appear to have an autono mous semantic meaning) are made meaningful, in fact, by their rheto rical and vocal context. Song words, that is, are words being used in a special (musical) way, a way which draws attention to the problems of spoken language; they are words being sung in a voice which is, in turn, the mark of a person. Most studies of the politics of rock focus on lyrics, on what the song is about (hence the concept of the protest song); I want to suggest that rock's political effect depends on its rhetorical con ventions, on how the song is about. This has a numbre of linked consequences. The familiar distinction between ?real? and ?unreal? lyrics in pop analysis (the standard contrast of the blues and Tin Pan Alley) is mislea ding, whether ?realism? is defined in folk/documentary or personal/e motional terms. The issue is not lyrical content (though why should a sad song be more ?real? than a happy one, a protest number more ?real? than a dance track?) but lyrical convention: why are certain sorts of words heard as real or unreal? To understand this is to understand that lyrical meaning depends not on what is said (the verbal content) but also on the type of language and the voice used (the rhetorical content). The conventions of pop realism, in short, refer to the sound as well as the meaning of the words (and there was therefore a puzzled standoff