The Burden of Song

Abstract

Studies involving popular music songs have tended to overlook issues of language and music, especially when explorations between music and language reiterate questions ‘about the linguistic mediation of musical and especially timbral discourse, and connections between the singing voice and place, class, ethnicity, and identity’, which augur for a place for music ‘for the study of the mental, semiotic, communicative, expressive and discursive roles of language’ ( Feld et al. 2004 , p. 321).Consequently, choice of language in songs of popular music overlook use and user value in language not only as cultural marker but also socially constituted demarcation within communities of practice, especially when Anglophone discourses meet musical discourses. This attention (or lack) recalls Gayatri Spivak’s ( 1993 , p. 134) articulation of the concept of ‘burden’ of the teaching of English in India but has special relevance here.In this article, I draw on my work on Rudra, a local melodic Death Metal group in Singapore, who identify their creative endeavour as Vedic Metal since their songs are seen to f/use English and Sanskrit text/s. I examine their practice in relation to Spivak’s concept of burden.