Rock Lyrics Research Articles

Semantic Field "Catasprophe" in Alternative Worldviews: A Quantitative Dimension

The paper addresses language units that constitute semantic space "catastrophe" within alternative English-mediated worldviews. Designation units synonymic or contextually related to catastrophe / disaster, were chosen from the Web 2021 (enTenTen21) corpus suggested by the Sketch Engine and from the custom corpus of present-day rock lyrics processed via the Ant.Conc 3.5.8 tools. The content of the respective concept is considered through the prism of a logical model that addresses an entropic irrevocable transformation of an open system. He paper focuses on the comparative analysis of the space's composition in two worldview variants. The structure of the semantic space is identified as a field, i.e. a dynamic volumetric continuum that sports multi-level organization as well as each level's zonal segmentation. Special attention is paid to functional-semantic and semiotic properties of the space-field's components. The article employs an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the myth-oriented semiosis theory and broad inter-systemic analogies ("M-logic").

Pixies and Sexuality: The (Literary) Analysis of the Lyrics of an Alternative Rock Band

This study delves into the lyrics of three songs by the North American band Pixies. These lyrics explore the subject of sexuality, but they present a series of non-standard or traditionally unaccepted sexual practices related to sexual taboos, otherness, sexual objectification, sexual violence, and the body. Literary analysis is the approach used to examine the lyrics and the subjects explored by the band. Given that the central focus of the analysis is rock lyrics, which is a non-traditional subject of literary analysis, this study also addresses fundamental questions related to the nature of literature and literary expressions. In this sense, this article aims to demonstrate the value of rock lyrics as literary texts with a connection to poetry, both of which have music as the foundation of their form.

Club Q by James Davis, and: What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar

Reviewed by: Club Q by James Davis, and: What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar Spencer Hupp Club Q, by James Davis (Waywiser Press, 2020), 96 pp. What He Did in Solitary, by Amit Majmudar (Knopf, 2020), 160 pp. Here’s how Edward Hirsch introduces James Davis’s debut, winner of the 2020 Anthony Hecht Prize: “Club Q is a startling book. It is cleverly conceived, formally deft, musically resourceful.” Certainly; it’s funny, too, as in “Em”: Ohio boundary? My woe!You adore—booty—no?The shape of nature, sir!Dovetail! Truly tented—donkey show! But Hirsch continues: “It is also flamboyantly gay, the queerest of queer poetry books—it keeps finding closets to shred,” merely glancing at the point in an otherwise generous introduction. The closets aren’t just here to be torn down, they’re furrows (more later) for linguistic renovation; stanza, after all, means room. Every stanza here’s a closet, too. Davis takes enormous risks therein. Take the end of “Murray”: [End Page 311] In time his branding iron left a deep meridian in my limberwood gallery. He felt carefree. I felt a saddle horn. It must have been at the aeroplazawhen I slipped off his jetwing.Or was Constitution?Or was it Seton Hill? I got lost in his contrails. I think his name was Murray. Each stanza alternating quatrain and tercet, the uneven 7/4 construction presents like a musical phrase, though not purely musical because poetry deals with—or attempts—semantic meaning more directly than music, and therefore between the shape and sound of a poem is always eventually an awkward fit—and much remains to say on the virtue of awkwardness, remembering for a moment how John Clare spelled that word, “awkard” which contains everything the word implies: awkwardness gives itself to ambiguity (as though the awkward thing were missing a letter), works against logic, prefers improvisation (and every “awkward” structure is contingent, like improvisation). Davis makes here, and with Club Q more generally, an argument for—and from—invention, at whatever cost. More than that, the poem risks specificity, naming things in and out of being. Take “I think his name was Murray” (emphasis added): “think” proves decisive because it sets doubt into motion—the speaker doesn’t know his subject’s name. The poem is a mechanism for the kind of doubt that attends experience, the painful knowledge, or unknowledge, of oneself in the face of sex. There’s a Renaissance pleasure in the candor of it all, the unlikeliness of hookup. Again, this is “awkward,” as rock lyrics are on the page; Bob Dylan, for instance, is at best a disruptive force on paper, though these poems read more like Skelton, an old songwriter for whom the page was made: The panges of hatefull deathWellnye had stopped my breath.Heu, heu, me,That I am wo for the!Ad Dominum, cum tribularer, clamavi:Of God nothynge els crave I [End Page 312] Not unlike: My arrowgrass shotstraight into his burning flameHis burning pineset my bitterbush aflame. Pine/flame is downright Skeltonian as a reach-rhyme, also aping Dickinson: A narrow Fellow in the GrassOccasionally rides –You may have met Him – did you notHis notice sudden is – “Grass / rides / is” detonates with the same dull persistence as “flame / pine / aflame.” Fitting, since this poem more than anything approaches the afterlife of sex, the dim memory of moments and words (sex was always epilogue to Dickinson since it’s so close to death). And how good are those compounds? “jetwing,” “saddle horn”; sex, too, makes a compound being, bodies striving unevenly with and within one another, provoking ample counterpoint, as in music or a poem. Critics writing on books invested in form tend to catalog the forms therein. Sure there are sonnets and sestinas here—but Davis anticipates, with no small irony, the catalogical reading too often afforded formal poets: “Gainesville Sestina,” for instance, uses the following for its alternating end-words, “cowboy,” “soldier,” “Indian,” “bike,” and “police,” with some deft variation: “indie” for Indian, GPD (from the Mandarin People’s Liberation Army General Political Department, as I gloss it) for “police...

Rock narratives as space for co(being). The research report

The paper fits into the area of research over educational contexts of popular culture, which is a voice in a discussion focused on possible ways of “using” rock lyrics in formal education, on critical education through rock narratives, on a category of co(being). This paper is intended to familiarize with research on educational contexts brought by rock narratives also about involving a Recipient in the discussion on the presented issues.

Pedagogie patriotyzmu

The author of this paper argues that the discourse of patriotism in public space in Poland is dominated by right-wing and ultra-right-wing circles. The content of these narratives usually takes the form of a closed, martyrological-national patriotism. Despite this hegemony, in opposition to it, subordinate groups produce narratives of critical and open patriotism. Using various subversive strategies, they try to free themselves from this domination. The main goal of the article is to identify the content of these discordant discourses, their forms and the ways in which they are made. The units of analysis will be selected popular culture texts and cultural practices (hip-hop and rock lyrics, graffiti, murals, banners, performative activities in urban space).

Spooning Good Singing Gum: Meaning, Association, and Interpretation in Rock Music

Since at least the early 1950s, scholars and critics from widely varying backgrounds have attempted to come to terms with the musics collectively known as rock, returning again and again to the issue of meaning. Predictably, their answers to the implied question are as varied as their intellectual standpoints. Some scholars, for example, have viewed rock through the lenses of mass and youth culture, drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and a large body of sociological writing. Others, coming to rock from cultural studies and literary theory, have conceptualized it as a series of texts that comment on and reflect current debates on cultural identity, hegemony, resistance, gender and sexuality (Frith and Goodwin 1990; Hesmondhalgh 1996). Writers for the popular press, meanwhile, have tended to focus on issues of authenticity, originality and rebellion, particularly in canonizing iconic figures like Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious, or Kurt Cobain. In reading all this work, some fans or aficionados of rock (including scholars and critics) are likely to be dissatisfied. To them it might seem that (other) rock commentators are either focusing on too narrow a portion of the musical landscape-discussing it in ways that ren­ der it nearly unrecognizable-or missing the point of the music alto­ gether. Whatever the point, to such fans rock is potentially about than youth culture, the (re)production of ideology, or authenticity and rebellion. 2 The question, of course, is what more there might be and, relate dIy, how one gains access to and talks about it. In previous attempts to discern rock's meanings, three approaches have tended to dominate: content analysis of rock lyrics; study of rock's relation to varied social, historical, and cultural contexts; and examination of rock's formal and stylistic parameters. While each approach has the potential to illuminate different aspects of what rock might mean and how it achieves its effects, each is also manifestly incomplete. Their individual short­ comings cannot be addressed merely by producing analyses that combine them. To do so, in fact, would be to assume naively that in themselves those approaches exhaust all the questions that one might ask about rock. Getting at what rock means requires asking a different, but related, set of

„BESMISLENE LJUBAVNE PESMICE“: KAKO PRISTUPITI POP I ROK POEZIJI?

Priroda popularne muzike je takva da se njen tekstualni deo često zanemaruje u odnosu na njenu muzičku komponentu. Cilj ovog rada jeste da utvrdi da li je to zaista opravdano. Polazeći od veze između tradicionalne, umetničke poezije i njenog popularnog, pop i rok oblika, te istražujući sve one elemente (kao što su grafički izgled pesme, stilske figure dikcije, rima, metrika) koji doprinose boljem razumevanju poezije uopšte,može se zaključiti da ove dve poetske vrste imaju više sličnosti nego razlika. Iz ovoga sledi da se i pop tekst može analizirati na isti način kao i umetnička poezija, kroz pristupe kakav su hermeneutički ili intertekstualni.

Grave Playfulness

Grave Playfulness J. D. Smith (bio) You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored Justin Marks Barrelhouse Books www.barrelhousemag.com 74 Pages; Print, $10.00 In the long, long shadow of Confessionalism, American poetry has, in no small measure, relegated itself to a minor and poorly paid subgenre of memoir. Much of this poetry presents the minutiae of family background, bodily processes, and psychic distress as worthy of attention on the basis of their existence rather than the insight or technique the poet brings to them, blurring the line between art and art therapy. Survivors of open mics (some of whom may yet recover sufficiently to write memoirs of their own) can further share war stories of selves expressed that really needn’t have bothered, thanks. So, it is initially with some trepidation that a reviewer presses on in a book whose first poem begins with the word “I” and repeats it seven more times on the first page’s short lines. But “Voir Dire,” which begins Justin Marks’s second collection You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored, quickly allays fears of yet another book of solipsistic poetry. Taking its name from the legal term for jury selection, “Voir Dire” serves as a six-page, one-stanza introduction to Marks’s persona and technique, which in part consists of appropriation and arrangement of text and speech from sources that include Kierkegaard and Sun Tzu as well as rock lyrics and statements by fellow New York subway riders. The poet speaks of himself but without Whitmanian bombast, instead noting the self and its details in passing, and with a certain amount of detachment, as some of what Chinese lore calls the ten thousand things of this world (One is reminded of Lawrence Joseph’s Curriculum Vitae [1988]). This catalog of perceptions, presented in lines with two principal stresses, gives us sequences such as: Sometimes I fallfor things I shouldn’t.I think of my parentswith a kindof regret and sympathyfor us all. A process,like anything else.A series of questionsraised in silence. This grave playfulness of free association continues in a more lapidary way in the free verse sonnet sequence “On Happier Lawns.” How Marks moves from one thought to the next does not lend itself to rational analysis or even a conventional explication of the text, but they do not veer into the studied randomness of the faux-Ashbery that has taken over the pages of many journals like so much inky kudzu. Instead, these poems can be taken as dispatches of loopy truth from an alternative or at least interior reality that does not bludgeon the reader with deliberate alienation or self-satisfied brilliance. Thus, in the ninth poem of this group: I project myself into the futureas a slogan on a sandwichboard Tennis at 3 Homemadesex tapes I’m so happyI could puke I’m typing so hardIt feels like I chippedSome bones in my fingersAt night, wine and XanaxBursts and inconsistency If this passage lacks an argument, it can still be read as the document of a consciousness uncluttered by arcana and presented in successive excerpts. This section’s juxtapositions of content and diction can prove both aphoristic and funny, as in the tenth sonnet’s observation “The surf / is rough An agnostic audience.” Sonnet XIII similarly uses the ambiguities of enjambment, unpunctuated lines and the transitive and intransitive meanings of a common verb to encompass both the mundane and the menacing: “How many times was it we fucked / The beach The bed The national / wildlife refuge” Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from cover The success of appropriation and pastiche, though, depends critically on the texts appropriated—what the foodie world now calls “sourcing.” The single-poem section “Naïve Melody,” which serves as intermezzo and parenthetical ars poetica, goes slack in spots as Marks’s borrowed and original text displays the diffuse rhythm and content of mundane speech. To wit, “My cat wakes me every morning at 4 by hooking her claw into / my nostril...

Rebel Manhood

Southern men occupy a contradictory place in U.S. culture as the rest of the country stereotypes them as backwards and deviant, yet simultaneously celebrates Southern males as quintessential exemplars of American manhood. I explore this contradiction using interviews with musicians, participant observation of concerts, and an ethnographic content analysis of contemporary Southern rock lyrics and websites. I find marginalized men embrace a Southern rebel identity to meet hegemonic masculine ideals shared across social classes and geographic regions. Rebels reject the middle class roles and cultural capital most men use to signify their manhood by accruing authority and resources through education, career, and family. Instead, southern rebels empower the masculine self by protesting authority figures, dominating women and signifying their independence by drinking, using drugs, and brawling. While rebels define their selves in contrast to middle-class morals and practices, dismissing them as deviant and backward overlooks how rebels use the symbolic resources they have at their disposal to meet the hegemonic masculine ideals celebrated throughout the country.

Simpatías por el Mal: El discurso persuasivo en “Sympathy for the Devil” de los Rolling Stones y “Jesucristo García” de Extremoduro

Dealing with discourses produced in Contemporary Popular Music, it is usual in contemporary youth’s imaginary to find rock considered as metonymic with authenticity, remaining as a movement an outstanding extension of Romanticism. Then, when drawing out its motifs from Satanism, successful rock lyrics need a rhetorical stylization in order to construct persuading songs beyond traditional morals. The main goal of this article is to analyze and compare this kind of stylization in Rolling Stones’s Sympathy for the Devil and Jesucristo García, written by the Spanish band Extremoduro, taking them both as examples of popularized dramatic monologues that present the topic of attraction of Evil performed by devilish figures.

The poetry of rock: song lyrics are not poems but the words still matter; another look at Richard Goldstein's collection of rock lyrics

The poetry of rock: song lyrics are not poems but the words still matter; another look at Richard Goldstein's collection of rock lyrics

An Ambivalent Attraction?: Post-Punk Kinship and the Politics of Bonding in Historias del Kronen and Less Than Zero

Matthew J. Marr is an Assis tant Professor in Hispanic Studies at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent publications consider such topics as space and identity in Esther Tusquets's El mismo mar de todos los veranos and postmodern humor in the poetry of Ro ger Wolfe. He is the author of a forthcoming book en titled Postmodern Meta poetry and the Replenish ment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre: 1980-2000. Jose Angel Manas's Historias del Kronen (1994) is a novel that ostentatiously flaunts its literary kinship with other texts?with rock lyrics (The The, Nirvana), films {A Clockwork Orange, Henry: Portrait of a SerialKiller), and even a novel: namely, Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho (1991). So pronounced, in fact, is Manas's name-dropping that it has led one critic, German Gullon, to signal what he dubs pararreferencialidad as one of the book's most salient fea tures (xxiii). In short, Historias del Kronen assails its reader with a barrage of pop culture allusions in a kind of narrative offensive: one designed, it seems, to prove the author's incom parability (at least in the recent Spanish context) as a con noisseur of primarily nihilistic, violent, edgy?and almost always Anglo-American?music, film, and literature from the end of the twentieth century. This said, and especially in light of Manas's explicit attraction to the work of Bret Easton Ellis, it is curious that the former makes no direct allusion to

Sex, Potato Chips, and Media Literacy

NOW THAT I have your attention, what on earth does sex have to do with potato chips? Simple answer: sex is often used to sell things. Imagine a television commercial with Britney Spears nibbling a handful of Lay's(r) potato chips. You and I might realize that eating high-fat foods is not synonymous with bodies like Britney's, but many children and youths probably don't. When I first decided to write a column on media literacy, I thought that I would simply be offering a definition, discussing how media literacy could be incorporated into the school curriculum, and suggesting resources that might be useful. After a little research, however, I developed a sense of urgency. needed media literacy 20 years ago, we desperately need it today, and we need to move fast. In the words of UNESCO, We must prepare young people for living in a world of powerful images, words, and sounds.1 If the admonition from UNESCO doesn't convince you of the urgent need for media literacy, consider this from the American Academy of Pediatricians: Matters is a national public education campaign of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It was launched in 1997 to help pediatricians, parents, and children become more aware of the influence that media (television, movies, computer and video games, Internet, advertising, popular music, etc.) have on child and adolescent health. Issues of concern include the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs; aggression and violence; sex and sexual exploitation; obesity and poor nutrition. Matters advocates for media education, or learning how to analyze the media through critical thinking and viewing, as a way to these problems.2 Note the last few words: mitigate these problems. To document its concern, the academy has issued a number of statements that summarize the research and offer specific suggestions on such topics as Adolescents, and Television, Sexuality, Contraception, and the Media, Joint Statement on the of Entertainment Violence on Children, Media Education, Media Violence, Impact of Music Lyrics and Music Videos on Children and Youth, and Adolescents, and Advertising. Here is a short excerpt from the academy's policy statement on music videos. Music video formats are popular among children and adolescents. When music lyrics are illustrated in music videos, their potential impact is magnified. Teenagers who may not or understand rock lyrics cannot avoid the often disturbing images that characterize a growing number of videos. In addition, music videos are self-reinforcing: if viewers hear a song after having seen the video version, they immediately flash back to the visual imagery in the video. Music videos may represent a relatively new art form, but it is one that often contains an excess of sexism, violence, substance abuse, suicides, and inappropriate sexual behavior. With 70% of American households receiving cable television, most teenagers have access to Music Television (MTV) and VH-1 and watch an average of a half hour to two hours of music videos daily. Content analyses indicate that up to 75% of concept music videos (those involving a theme instead of a concert performance) contain sexually suggestive material. More than half contain violence, which often includes acts committed against women. Women are frequently portrayed in a condescending manner. Alcohol and tobacco use are also glamorized in many music videos that teenagers view. As with music lyrics, teenagers' ability to comprehend and interpret music videos may vary widely and may represent an important variable in their potential impact. A handful of experimental studies indicate that music videos may have a significant behavioral impact by desensitizing viewers to violence and by making teenagers more likely to approve of premarital sex. …

Stigma Videotape. By the Royal College of Psychiatrists. London: Royal College of Psychiatrists. 1990. 14 minutes. £5.00.

With a cheerful piano accompaniment by Nicholas Medtner (at times sounding like the arguably more appropriate Charles Alkan) and punctuated by some catchy rock lyrics, this 14-minute videotape takes off from the previous College cinema short on the same topic. Like the earlier film this attempts to

Medier och (populär) kultur

Media and (popular) cultureThis article is a discussion of media in relation to culture and popular culture. Internationally as well as in Sweden, there has been a ‘cultural turn’ in media research, where theories and methods have been increasingly influenced by cultural studies. Of particular importance is the cultural studies’ concepts of culture as lived experience or as practices through which meaning is produced and shared between people. Meaning is expressed through different symbolic forms that in our society to a high extent are carried by media. An example is rock lyrics, a genre of mediated communication, i.e. symbolic expressions mediated by media like phonograms, radio, television or video. They are also elements of popular music, which is a part of popular culture - a phenomenon closely connected to the rise of modernity. Popular culture is defined as massproduced cultural products which are used and spread among large groups of the population and which are generally classified by the dominant taste as having little value. The article ends with an analysis inspired by cultural studies of a mediated symbolic expression: two rock texts by the famous Swedish rock artist Eva Dahlgren. The author claims that it is possible to reveal crucial traits and tendencies of the cultural context through such an analysis of the unique mediated text.

ROCK MUSIC: SECULARISATION AND ITS CANCELLATION

Postmodern questioning of the sacred/secular binary, when applied to the cultural form of rock music, yields the understanding that rock music is saturated with types of weak religiosity ranging from the use of rock to convey the messages of established religions to the appearance of distinctive forms of religiosity endogenous to rock that involve the relations of artist and audience. The discussion moves from a consideration of religious symbolism and ideas in rock lyrics, through a formal analysis of rock stars as charismatic artist-heroes who are worshipped by their audiences, to an interpretation of the rock concert as a religious ritual. The religiosity found in rock music indicates that in the postmodern condition piety floats free, ready to attach itself through specific forms to a succession of transient contents.

"Just Like Eddie" or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama

“Just like Eddie”1 or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama Stephanie Barbé Hammer 1. can’t find a better man2 A feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and roll culture bandwagon, I grab the wheel and direct a critical detour from the wild and wooly trail mapped out by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces. I track his assumption that rock culture — the stars of whom have replaced both heroes and cinema icons — provides a useful, crucial set of metaphors for thinking about contemporary high-culture, and extend the route with my conviction that both high culture writers and theorists are canonized within and beyond academe in ways that mimic the vagaries of rock and roll “fame.”3 Marcus notes in his earlier work, Mystery Train, that rock music is not so much an object of interpretation as an interpretive enabler for our own particular situation — a hermeneutic which “acts upon” the listener/viewer and which produces different meanings at different moments (Street on Marcus, 157). So, I will use one man to get another; I leave Marcus I and turn on Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom I turn into an apparatus rather than a mere object (although he is this also) in order to shed light upon the work of Roland Barthes and Peter Handke. It is also apropos; Barthes repeatedly expressed his admiration for such underground masculine icons as professional wrestlers (one wonders what he would have made of grunge), while Handke has frequently cited rock lyrics in his most seemingly neo-classical works, as in the pastoral poem Beyond the Villages (Über die Dörfer), which is prefaced by a quote from Creedence Clearwater Revival. I would like Barthes and Handke to meet (and jam) on Eddie Vedder’s stage for several reasons. First, I bewail their relegation to the esoteric heights of high literary endeavor; they have become so “important” that no one knows who they are, as opposed to Vedder who is so unimportant that everyone knows about him. Like the critically acclaimed art films that no one sees and that can’t be found on video, and the avant-garde art exhibitions which no one goes to, Barthes and Handke are writers that no one reads, because their work can’t be located at Super Crown or at B. Dalton. No one, meaning, regular people; no one meaning everyone who isn’t an intellectual. Second, I distrust the fact that they have consistently been written about in such complete accordance with the stereotypes about French and German language and culture which have functioned for at least 200 years (i.e. since the Enlightenment). Third, I suspect that Eddie Vedder is indeed “important,” in spite of himself. Fourth, in my fem-fan capacity, I want to introduce questions of gender, sexuality, desire, and pleasure/pain to the mix of rock and roll, cultural studies, postmodern writing and see how they play, for play they must. Will their (my) presence wreck the party which is postmodernism/ity? Maybe, or maybe their presence make any party more interesting, as Leslie Gore once tearfully implied. Joni Mitchell, Simone de Beauvoir, Bjork, Desree, and Avital Ronell second that emotion — that it is necessary for girls to deconstruct boys who deconstruct. Clear nationalist biases are at work in the general understanding of Barthes and Handke, and these transparently “obvious,” genetic differences between the French and the German — between a wry ironic pederasty and an ascetic, parzival-like heterosexuality — are tempting, for they look very neat; Barthes and Handke become, according to such orientations, mere inverted mirrors of each other, and on the surface (if only there) this binary holds. The French one moved from semiotic criticism to a writing which increasingly proclaimed itself to be personal, eccentric, and unscientific — a creative writing which made the essay into a kind of internal theater, a critical strip-tease which resembled the disreputable joints Barthes frequented on the night he was killed. Not surprisingly, the written words about Barthes mimic the perception of him; they spill over the pages in a testimonial to bliss, they break the rules, they invoke photography...

Originality, hidden meanings and the canon: Reading Donne, Góngora and the critics in their days and ours

The poetries of John Donne and Luis de G6ngora no longer excite controversy; they are today universally accepted as representative of the highest manifestations of Baroque sensibility. A century ago, of course, this was not so; the same lyrics, far from sparking critical acclaim, were in fact reviled. "Sobre gustos no hay nada escrito", goes the Spanish proverb: the final word on taste has not been written. Yet the criterion of "taste" hardly provides a satisfactory explanation for the wholesale rejection, and then rehabilitation, of an entire aesthetic. The key lies rather, I believe, in the unspoken criteria which govern canon-making, which have less to do with taste than with fundamental attitudes toward the world, toward life, and toward the works which express such attitudes. Thus this study of the canonical status of poets like Donne and Grngora will investigate the ontology implicated in the creation, refashioning and indeed interpretation(s) of the canon. In a provocative 1988 article, Mafia Rosa Menocal challenged the uncanonical status of rock music by pointing out both that it follows the Petrarchan phenomenon of utilizing the disdained "vulgar" tongue and that its connections to the "great tradition" beginning with the troubadour trobar clus tradition are explicit and frequent. Although her often witty attack reflects a personal appreciation for rock, the issues Menocal raises are of course relevant not only to this particular form but also to the way in which the canon is created and the criteria for admission to it. Menocal's assumption that rock lyrics have canonical status because their central subject is love is, however, problematic. It is

Where is the ‘Promised Land’?: Class and Gender in Bruce Springsteen's Rock Lyrics

ABSTRACT‘New’ cultural geography is now over a decade old. Analysts have forged innovative ways to interpret landscapes. Critical geographers interested in power relations have demonstrated that culture is a process which is continually politically contested. Feminist materialist approaches are not as popular as others in the ‘new’ cultural geography, but can still contribute much to an investigation of the production of culture. By reading popular cultural media through materialist and feminist lenses, a monolithic depiction of an urban landscape, like the city being a jungle and the streets leading to a “Promised Land”, breaks down leaving in its place a complex interpretation of the assumptions underlying the construction of that landscape. In this paper, I examine a set of Bruce Springsteen's lyrics. I identify three themes around which I discuss the ways in which two sets of power relations, class and gender, manifest in the landscapes Springsteen depicts. The three themes are: (1) dichotomized notio...

Where Is the 'Promised Land'?: Class and Gender in Bruce Springsteen's Rock Lyrics

Where Is the 'Promised Land'?: Class and Gender in Bruce Springsteen's Rock Lyrics