Laughing in Tune: R.E.M. and The Post‐Confessional Lyric

Roessner, Jeffrey

doi:10.14325/mississippi/9781617031564.003.0018

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“…At least, it is absent in R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe's 'anti-confessional' early work, in which, according to Roessner (2012), he puts together phrases removed from contexts that gave them meaning, making the language itself 'generate meaning beyond his control'. Hence, in line with H3b, constraints to the complexity of song lyrics, if they exist at all, seem to be genre dependent.…”

Section: Demands Of Poetics and Cognitive Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation

Schotanus¹

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Table of contents Acknowledgments General introductionThe Musical Foregrounding Hypothesis (MFH) Sub-hypotheses to be tested Song, singing, performance and other definitions A multi-disciplinary approach Preference rules and processing fluency Participants and stimuli Gold MSI and other subject factors Overview 1. The MFH checked against existing research 1.1 The MFH in musicology and literary research 1.1.1 The relationship between words and music in a song 1.1.2 Musical meaning 1.1.3 Song and literariness 1.1.3.1 The divide 1.1.3.2 Performance on the page 1.1.3.3 Demands of poetics and cognitive constraints 1.2 MFH-related evidence in empirical research 1.2.1Music-processing influences language-processing in a disturbing way 1.2.2 Music-processing influences language processing in a beneficial way 1.

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Section: Demands Of Poetics and Cognitive Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation

Schotanus¹

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“…John Lennon was attuned to how his and Paul McCartney's songs were scoured for clues about the Beatles' personal lives and relationships, evidenced when he sang the intertextual and inter-personal 'the walrus was Paul' in 'Glass Onion'. R.E.M's Michael Stipe, in contrast, offers a more oblique and opaque, fragmentary 'postconfessional' self (see Roessner, 2012). Yet, the lyrics and performances of the confessional songwriter can be as carefully constructed in seeking to convey sincerity and truth to experience, whilst the studied post-confessional songwriter may unintentionally provide all manner of cues and clues that point to aspects of their own biographies (see Negus, 2011).…”

Section: The Lyrical I and Its Worldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

More Than a Performance: Song Lyrics and the Practices of Songwriting

Negus¹,

Astor²

2016

Popular Music Matters

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This chapter has emerged from a series of conversations about song lyrics, and our sense of frustration that the scholarly literature on lyrics tends to neglect the work of songwriters and the practices of songwriting. The most sustained critical engagement with debates about song words can be found in the writings of Simon Frith, initially through a series of essays and then in Performing Rites (1996). Frith's approach was and is insightful and influential. A critical engagement with his writings has inspired the route we have taken in this chapter, as we move from debates about lyrics as read and as expressed by the singing voice towards the circumstances and practices through which lyrics are produced. Frith is critical of the way lyrics have been treated as poetry, abstracted as verse on a page, subjected to literary criticism, and equally scathing of a type of sociological 'realism' that treats lyrics as indicators of values, beliefs and events (as a sign of the times). Frith's key claim is that lyrics should be comprehended as performances that use voice and rhetoric beyond any straightforward semantic message contained in the words; 'the issue in lyrical analysis is not words, but words in performance' (1996, p.166). He is not the only writer to argue that lyrics are different to poetry (see Booth, 1981, Griffiths, 2003, 2012, for example), and deals with this contrast by arguing that: 'poems "score" the performance or reading of the verse in the words themselves … lyrics, by contrast, are "scored" by the music itself' (1996, p.181). This leads to a central tenet in his aesthetic; the argument that the 'best pop songs, in short, are those that can be heard as a struggle between verbal and musical rhetoric, between the singer and the song' (1996, p.182). Frith introduces various convincing examples to support this. But, equally, we would counter that bad pop music can also be characterised as a struggle between singer and song, and it is that very struggle that may contribute to the negative judgement. Equally, there are numerous positively valued songs in which lyrical meaning and vocal rhetoric work more harmoniously. Indeed, there is a strand of criticism that emphasizes the way singers inhabit and become at one with a song (rather than struggle with it). This can be found in writings about Frank Sinatra and Edith Piaf-who did not compose their own words; and Bob Dylan, who did. Frith's argument about treating lyrics as performance, despite its cogency and value, has often provided an alibi for other writers to disregard lyrics entirely. An example of a now common approach is Theodore Gracyk's assertion that 'in rock music most lyrics don't matter very much' (1996, p.65). To which we would respond: if lyrics do not matter why did Paul McCartney spend so long finding words for the song he had given a working title of 'Scrambled Eggs' (the song that became 'Yesterday')? And why did Kurt Cobain write out and re-draft the lyrics to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' if their meaning was unimportant to him? In this ch...

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Laughing in Tune: R.E.M. and The Post‐Confessional Lyric

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation

Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation

More Than a Performance: Song Lyrics and the Practices of Songwriting

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