Spiders from Mars. (Re)-configuring musicians’ stories through their songs

Abstract

The present article investigates the idea of movement in terms of re-generation, re-writing and re-semiotization, where movement is not to be intended only as the one from one code to another, but from one dimension to another (from experiential to textual), from one position to another (from surface to core, from general to particular, and vice versa), from one discursive perspective to another (from extended to brief, from detailed to synthetic, from articulated to simple, and vice versa). More specifically, this analysis focusses on Popular Music artists’ biographies and autobiographies, where the artist’s life experience is morphed into a textual artefact, a story, and, notably, the focus will be on the type of titles that writers choose for these stories. Being musicians known for their musical output – simply put, their songs – the present investigations seeks to see how biographers and autobiographers resort to song references in order to provide impactful and coherent handles for their stories, that is to say, titles that will, firstly, help identify the artist in connection to a recognizable part of their production, secondly, that may embody and condense the sense of such stories in catchy one-liners and, thirdly, that will anticipate and cohere with the contents to be found in the ensuing texts.