Interpreting Contemporary Cultural Ideas and Themes
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INTERPRETING CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL IDEAS AND THEMES THROUGH POPULAR MUSIC Angela Jones Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours ‘This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Arts of The University of Western Australia’ English, Communications and Cultural Studies 2010 ABSTRACT: “Interpreting Contemporary Cultural Ideas and Themes through Popular Music” by Angela Jones (University of Western Australia) The aim of this thesis is to use a selection of albums by various artists as a means to explore the ways in which popular music can be understood as enabling new and different perspectives on some well-established cultural themes. Thus, the first chapter will look at Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) in relation to the idea of ‘the city’ as it has evolved throughout various twentieth-century discourses and art forms, focusing specifically on the notion of the ‘postmodern metropolis’ (or “postmetropolis”) as it has been theorised by writers such as Edward Soja, Paul Virilio, and Celeste Olalquiaga, amongst others. The second chapter explores Tom Waits’ Bone Machine (1992) as a musical registration of the Apocalyptic theme, once again attending to how various ideas of the Apocalypse put forward in the work Frank Kermode and Jacques Derrida can be illuminated through reference to Waits’ album. My final chapter will study Bjork’s all-vocal album Medulla (2004) in relation to a range of theoretical writings on ‘the voice’ (Steven Connor, Joseph Auner, Michel Poizat and Simon Frith), in order to discuss the way in which the album can be understood as calling attention to the voice as a ‘gesture’ – that which both articulates and displaces the threshold between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. While all of these cultural themes – ‘the city,’ ‘the apocalypse’ and ‘the voice’ – continue to incite scholarly discussion across a range of disciplines and art-forms (whether literature, poetry, cinema or the visual arts), thus far there has been very little written about the way in which such ideas might be registered sonically – through music. This is, perhaps, not surprising, given that music, as so many theorists have testified, is a particularly slippery medium to analyse, and popular music is arguably even more so. For where classical musicology at least has the advantage of musical notation (which is itself a kind of language), and a lexicon of critical terminology used to interpret and classify its various stylistic devices and aesthetic practices, the study of popular music tends to exist, in the words of Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “in a methodological vacuum”. Moreover, in analyses of pop music there is often a significant tension between its status as a ‘mass’ cultural art form and ‘commodity’, and the desire to take it ‘seriously’ as an object of study; a tension which can lead to “counterclaims of greatness” – whereby pop music is elevated to the status of capital ‘A’ ‘Art’ (effectively ignoring the “popular” part of the equation); or, alternately, to discussions of the ‘mass culture industry’ – the record business, the star system, music videos, fashion and subcultural studies – in short, everything but the “music” itself. Some of these issues have already been raised within a number of academic studies of popular music, and there is evidence of a growing awareness of the need for closer ‘textual’ analysis of the music itself, whilst bearing in mind the difficulties inherent in separating popular music from its social and cultural context. By foregrounding the ‘album’ format as my primary object of study throughout this thesis, I hope that the discussions conducted herein can help towards the formulation of alternate ‘textual’ models for the analysis of popular music, demonstrating that popular albums can be critiqued and analysed in much the same way as other kinds of cultural ‘texts’ (for example, in terms of composition and thematic development, cultural context and so on), whilst attending to the specificities of the medium which necessarily mark it out as different to these other kinds of texts. In doing so, I would like to think that each of the analyses presented here can contribute equally to both the ongoing development of popular music studies, as well as to the existing literature on these highly complex yet ever-enduring cultural themes. TABLE OF CONTENTS INERPRETING CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL IDEAS AND THEMES THROUGH POPULAR MUSIC: INRODUCTION 1 - 68 ‘OF LOVE AND THE CITY’: WILCO’S YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT 69 - 118 ‘MUSICAL APOCALYPSE’: TOM WAITS’ BONE MACHINE 119 - 163 ‘THE INNER OR DEEP PART’: BJORK’S MEDULA 164 - 209 CONCLUSION: NEW DIRECTIONS 210 - 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 215 - 228 INTERPRETING CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL IDEAS AND THEMES THROUGH POPULAR MUSIC When I first began work on this thesis, my original argument concerning popular music was based upon an as yet untested conviction that popular albums could be analysed and critiqued in much the same way as other kinds of cultural ‘texts’ – in terms of composition, thematic development, cultural context and so forth. While this conviction has certainly been subject to much revision and reworking over the course of my doctoral studies – not least because I have come to believe that popular music disrupts the very idea of the ‘text’, not to mention the ‘author’ – it has nonetheless continued to inform the approach which I have developed throughout this thesis: namely, to conduct a detailed analysis of a selection of albums in order to construct an understanding of how ideas and themes pertinent to other contemporary theoretical and artistic discourses might be interpreted through popular music. To that end, each chapter will consist of a close analysis of just one album by different artists as a means of exploring the ways in which popular music can be understood as enabling new and different perspectives on some well-established cultural themes. Thus, the first chapter of my thesis will look at the thematic concerns of love and communication explored throughout Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), in relation to ideas of the postmodern metropolis discussed by writers such as Edward Soja, Paul Virilio and Celeste Olalquiaga. This chapter aims to demonstrate the way in which Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can be understood as enabling different perspectives on the ideas of the postmodern cityscape. The second chapter will discuss Tom Waits’ Bone Machine (1992) as a musical registration of the Apocalyptic theme. By interpreting the album through the framework of the apocalyptic discourse provided by Frank Kermode and Jacques Derrida, I wish to argue that Bone Machine provides a unique vantage point from which to consider the changing ideas of Apocalypse within late-twentieth-century culture. My final chapter will use Bjork’s all-vocal album Medulla (2004), as a platform from which to address contemporary cultural debates concerning the idea of the ‘human voice’ as a sign of interiority, subjectivity and presence. Drawing on the conceptions of the voice put forward in work by 1 Steven Connor, Joseph Auner, and Simon Frith, I will argue that Medulla can be understood as calling attention to the voice as a site of intersection and exchange. While all of these cultural themes and ideas – ‘the city,’ ‘apocalypse’ and ‘voice’ – have already been extensively documented in relation to other discourses and art forms (whether literature, poetry, cinema or the visual arts), there has been very little written about the way in which such ideas might be registered or explored sonically – through music. This is, perhaps, not surprising, given that music, as so many theorists have testified, is a particularly slippery medium to analyse. As Roland Barthes famously commented in the introduction to his seminal essay on “The Grain of The Voice”: if language “is the only semiotic system capable of interpreting another semiotic system,” then when it comes to the task of interpreting music, it appears to fare “very badly” indeed.1 Moreover, where classical musicology at least has the advantage of musical notation (which is itself a kind of language, as I will come back to shortly) and an established lexicon of critical terminology used to interpret and classify its various stylistic devices and aesthetic practices, the study of popular music tends to exist, in the words of Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “in a methodological vacuum”.2 As yet, there have been few successful attempts to devise an aesthetic approach which is specific to popular music and sensitive to those aspects of the music which do not readily transfer to existing analytical models (whether those of literary theory, musicology, sociology and so forth), and even fewer attempts to apply such aesthetic approaches to any actual musical ‘texts.’ Having said this, since the early-1990s there have been an increasing number of academic publications by theorists working within the field of what has become known as ‘popular musicology’, which have explicitly addressed the need for more in-depth analysis of actual musical texts. Books such as Richard Middleton’s Studying Popular Music (1990)3 and Reading Pop: Approaches to the Textual Analysis in Popular Music (2003)4; Allan F. Moore’s Analyzing Popular Music 1 Barthes, R. “The Grain of the Voice” in S. Frith & A. Goodwin, (eds.) On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (London, New York, 1990) p. 293; italics deleted (this reference to language as “the only semiotic system capable of interpreting another semiotic system” is attributed to Beneviste). 2 McClary, S. & Walser, R. “Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock” in S. Frith & A. Goodwin (eds.) On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. (London, New York, 1990) p. 280 3 Middleton, R. Studying Popular Music. (Milton Keynes, Philadelphia, 1990) 4 Middleton, R. (ed.) Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. (Oxford, New York, 2000) 2 (2003)5; and David Brackett’s Interpreting Popular Music (1995)6 – amongst others – are all publications which, as their titles suggest, are not only concerned with studying popular music but also, more self-reflexively, with the study of popular music.