Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
- 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files
- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’
- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography
- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock
- 10 Is anybody listening?
- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Film/Videography
- Index
3 - From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
- 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files
- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’
- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography
- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock
- 10 Is anybody listening?
- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Film/Videography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The ‘safesurfer’ of Julian Cope's song is someone who sleeps around ‘like HIV ain't never coming down’. The record turns round a commonplace of rock music: that in song, words give way to music, a voice's emotion, a guitar's virtuosity. ‘Safesurfer’ lets its instruments loose at beginning and end, enclosing this risk-taking gigolo's statements. When it arrives, his rap is determinedly prosaic, hard speech: senseless ramblings which create nothing but foreboding for what is to follow in the song. As his speech turns to song, to melody, he gets real: ‘You don't have to be afraid, love, 'cos I'm a safesurfer, darling'. But he isn't: he's lying, and the record blisters and blisses and bleeps without words to its fade.
The safesurfer rides a wave between emotion and truth: full of feeling he may be, but what someone listening to him needs to know is the fact of his experience. What bothers sociologists about the words of pop songs is any presupposition that songs ‘have inherent meanings which can be objectively identified, that the meaning of lyrics can be defined independently of their music, and that such cultural messages are effectively transmitted and received’. Peter J. Martin: ‘none of these assumptions is easy to defend’ (Martin 1995: 264). Simon Frith, too, is keen to blur any assumption of direct transmission and reception of words: songs, he says at one point, ‘provide people with the means to articulate the feelings associated with being in love’ (Frith 1996: 164).
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- Analyzing Popular Music , pp. 39 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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