A Dialogical Approach to the Work of Jackson Browne A

(l ' CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE THE CONTEMPORARY RHAPSODE: A DIALOGICAL APPROACH TO THE WORK OF JACKSON BROWNE A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Speech Communication by Jeff Parker Knight August 1987 The Thesis of Jeff Parker Knight is approved: William G. Freeman Christie A. Logan California State University, Northridge ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The members of my committee have been enthusiastic, patient, and insightful from the earliest inceptions of this thesis.· In the courses I have taken from these three individuals, and in our conversations about and not about scholarly matters, Bill Freeman, Christie Logan, and particularly my committee's chair, Don Salper, have taught me more and in more ways than I may know for some time, and I am very grateful. My good friend, Diggs Wimberley, has, in a conversa tion that has now lasted seven years, shared with me his perceptive ideas about art: its quality, its creation, and its role in our world. His insights have been valu able and appreciated. J.C. Nadel, as a fellow Jackson Browne enthusiast, has often, through her own excitement about this thesis, refueled my brain when it was running on empty, and she has my thanks! I would like to thank my mother, Alice Knight, for, among other things, helping me learn to appreciate both poetry and music. It is my hope that that appreciation has borne fruit herein. My brother, Guy Knight, bought Jackson Browne's album, The Pretender, in 1976, and made me listen to it. For this and countless other blessings, I thank him. One feels the critical impulse when one's world is changed by art in some way. The critic seeks to explain, to congeal into language, the appreciation he or she feels. I thank Jackson Browne for sharing so much of himself with us in creating a body of work which has been so important to so many. I offer my greatest thanks and my love to my best critic, my best friend, and my partner in all endeavors, Pamela Parker Knight. It is my hope that this thesis will, in some small way, contribute to an understanding of the role of the rhapsode in our world, and perhaps even encourage its readers to consider some of the questions an artist like Jackson Browne poses in his work. They are wojth con sidering. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT •.•.•••..•.••••••••••.••.•.•••••••.• ·•.••...• vi CHAPTER ONE- INTRODUCTION .......................... 1 The Text and its Significance ................ 1 Approach to the Text: Dialogical Criticsm ... 6 Foundations.. • . 7 Goals .................................. 10 Preview of Chapters ......................•... 12 Notes ......................... ~ ............... 14 CHAPTER TWO- THE RHAPSODES ...•..................... 15 The Ancient Tradition ........................ 16 The Role of the Rhapsode ............... 17 The Decline of the Tradition ................. 21 The Contemporary Rhapsode .................... 25 Words and Music in the Twentieth Century ..... 27 Early Trends ............•.............. 27 Bob Dylan as Nexus ....................• 29 Browne as Existential Hero ........•.......... 32 Conclusions .. ~ . 33 Notes ........................................ 35 CHAPTER THREE- THE WORLD IN THE WORK ............... 36 Browne's Work as Dialogical ..........•....... 38 Humor in Browne's Work ................. 39 iv PAGE A Sense of the Other ...........•.•..... 43 The Chronotope ...•.......••..•..........•.... 46 The Castle ...•.........•........· ....... 47 The Parlo-r ............................. 48 Chronotope in Browne's Work ...•.............. 48 The Road.. • . 49 The Provincial Town .................... 51 The Threshold and the Changing Light ... 52 The Chronotopic Cycle ........................ 55 The Everyman Cycle ..................... 56 Conclusions. 60 Notes ........................................ 62 CHAPTER FOUR- THE WORK IN THE WORLD ............•..• 63 Sincerity As A Critical Standard .......••.... 67 Accounting for Perceptions of Sincerity ...... 69 Ready Or Not ............•...•.......... 70 The Ethical Speaker ....•...............•..... 75 Say it Isn't True ...................... 77 Lives in the Balance ................... 79 Conclusions .................................. 80 Notes ........................................ 81 CHAPTER FIVE- CONCLUSION •..... ~···· ................ 82 WORKS CITED.. • • . • • • . • . • . 84 v ABSTRACT THE CONTEMPORARY RHAPSODE: A DIALOGICAL APPROACH TO THE WORK OF JACKSON BROWNE by Jeff Parker Knight Master of Arts in Speech Communication This thesis is a dialogical approach to the work of Jackson Browne, who is a popular and politically active singer and songwriter. The purpose of the study is to reach a better understanding of the text, its relationship to the world around it, and its place in a continuing oral tradition of song poets. Browne can be thought of as a contemporary rhapsode, a twentieth-century version of the musically performing poets represented by Hesiod and Homer in preliterate Greece. Browne's work, like that of the early rhapsodes, is not strictly entertainment, but rather is a populist poetry which addresses central concerns of its audience. vi The work shows an ongoing persona, growing and chang ing from album to album, embodying an "everyman" ideal. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope as a unit of analysis shows Browne as an existential hero whose journey is one towards a threshold of understanding. The sincerity which marks Browne's confession~l work has helped him to establish a credibility with his audience. This sincerity seems responsible for any rhetorical effectiveness Browne may have in causing an audience to consider the questions he poses in his work. vii Chapter One Introduction The Text and its Significance In this thesis I discuss the work of Jackson Browne, a popular singer and songwriter. Browne's work is signi- ficant in several ways, one of which is simply that his is a voice that has been heard. He has sold over eight 1 million record albums in this country alone, and he has 2 also had several hit singles. His 1978 album, Running on Empty, sold more than three million copies, and his 1980 effort, Hold Out, was the number one album in the country the week it was released (Pareles and Romanowski 70). In three days of concerts at the Forum in Los Angeles in 1980, Browne played to over 50,000 fans (Wise- man 157). These songs that have been heard by so many often deal with friendship, family, and romantic relationships, the search for meaningfulness in life, and lost innocence. There are also political songs, songs which have attacked the United States' involvement in Central America, a large military budget in a world of hunger, and the de- velopment of power sources that contaminate the environ- ment. Browne's songs have been acclaimed by critics as among the finest written in Dur ti~e, and his peers have· 1 2 honored the songs by recording them. The Byrds, Mary Travers, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, and the Eagles are just some of the well-known artists who have recorded Jackson Browne songs (Wiseman 172-174). Rock critic Dave Marsh wrote: "Jackson Browne is the most accomplished lyricist of the seventies" (64), and Jack McDonough, in a critical review of Browne's first two albums, stated that Browne was "perhaps the most ·important American song writer since Bob Dylan, and as true a voice of the seven ties as we are going to hear" (242). Further, Contem porary Literary Criticism referred to Browne's "moral imagination, graceful style, and precision" (34). Yet Browne's significance is not due only to his popularity and the artistry of his song lyrics, but also to his role as a rhetorical force in the world in which he lives. Browne was one of the founding members of Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) and was central to that organization's successes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Daisann McLane, in Rolling Stone, noted: "Browne is the guiding force behind MUSE - its spiritual center" (11). Jan Wenner, in an editorial praising MUSE's "Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future," said of Browne: "He brought in many of the performers through his own preeminence, dedication, and sincerity" (14). In The Politics of Rock Music, John Orman described Browne as a central figure in activist rock music, and 3 asserted that "Jackson Browne" symbolized the [anti-nuclear] consciousness of some young rock fans with his 'Before the Deluge'" (109). Browne was also a singer on Sun City, 1985's anti-apartheid album, and he partici- pated in Amnesty International's 1986 "Conspiracy of Hope" tour (Harrington B2). The songs on his most recent album, Lives in the Balance, contain highly political lyrics which question the morality of American interven- tionism in Central America. Browne's less political songs also serve a rhetorical function in that they invite identification. Many of the songs are confessional, that is, they publicly express private, often painful concerns, and often directly ad- dress the audience, without the protective presence of a poetic persona, or mask. Browne's work presents a person in the process of becoming, of making sense out of a changing, sometimes confusing world. In so doing, that work has spoken to and for a generation, a generation faced with disillusionment that playwright Arthur Miller foresaw in a 1973 essay. Speaking on the relationship of political activism and art, Miller predicted that the 1970s would be a decade of casualties all around us,~ people with drug-injured heads, too-young girls

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