In this paper, I examine several aspects of pop-rock music that are characterised by the childlike use of language. Relying on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – particularly on their concept of ‘becoming-child’ – I locate, describe and analyse three distinct childlike strategies common in pop-rock: the use of gibberish and nonsense that unbinds language from sense, enabling it to release its own expressive intensities; the utilisation of baby talk and other childlike vocal mannerisms, drawing attention to the physical properties of the act of singing as bodily experimentation; and different forms of repetition that ‘shake’ sense out of words, allowing them to draw their own lines of flight. Foregrounding these strategies, I ultimately claim, expands our understanding of pop-rock music while problematising its traditional interpretation as ‘rebellious’ music, offering its positive, productive qualities and ‘minoritarian’ politics as an alternative to the restricting dichotomy between oppression and liberation implied by the concept of rebellion.
The ‘cover version’ is a quintessential yet problematic popular music phenomenon. Endemic to a cultural form in which authenticity is a central value, it also calls authenticity into question by problematizing common notions of creativity and originality. This article investigates the practice of the cover version from a socio-epistemological perspective, inquiring as to the way that knowledge is performed through it. While the romantic mythology of the creative artist attributes the musician’s inspiration to an elusive ‘feel’, the cover version threatens to expose the formalized knowledge that lies behind the façade of pure intuition. Thus, when recording cover versions, musicians often take care to perform their knowledge in specific ways that allow them to reassert an air of unexplainable creativity. These various strategies are detailed and analyzed throughout the article in order to introduce and demonstrate a new theoretical framework for analyzing the relations between knowledge, performance, and cultural production.
In this article I will ask some questions and try to suggest some answers about youth, pop-rock music, and rebellion. I will start by tracing a short genealogy of the complex relations between these three concepts. Then, I will argue that in spite of some changes in the pop-rock discourse during recent decades, in many respects our contemporary relations with pop-rock are still inherently "youth-centric". Finally, I will suggest integrating the concept of "becoming-child", formulated by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, into the way we think about music, as an alternative to the concept of youth.
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