The Presentation of the Self in the Popular Song

Abstract

This work aims to explore the potentialities of Erving Goffman’s theory about the presentation of the Self in everyday life for the sociological study of popular song. Our argument is that, as other social expression forms, the popular song operates a stylization of every day’s life materials to create representations of social characters and situations. As Goffman identified self-representation codified forms in quotidian situations, there is in the popular song arrangements of representational codes to give a convincing form to the Self that is depicted in popular songs. Therefore, we can analyze the procedures used to create an “illusion of real” in the song (in the sense of convincing the listener of the authenticity of feelings and facts depicted) by using Goffman’s concepts such as “definition of the situation”, “performance”, “expression equipment” and “behavior display”. This way, it is possible to observe the popular song under the perspective of a reconstruction of the social life through the organization of expressive resources, which can consist of sounds, words or gestures. That makes from it a rich resource for the sociological study of self-representations.