“Staccato, Swivel and Glide: A Poetics of Early Rock and Roll Lyrics”1 Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (U L B) 2003 1. The Aesthetics of Semi-Articulation Rock lyrics remain a somewhat awkward object of study for academic researchers. Analyzing their lyrical value or their relation to the music is in itself no simple task. Yet the greatest challenge resides in a more fundamental question—the assessment of their very functionality in the process of rock and roll. What do lyrics actually contribute to experi- ence of music listening or to the ideology of rock culture? Uncertainties in this matter account for the fact that academic researchers and jour- nalists have adopted radically contrasted attitudes toward lyrics. One approach, modelled both on literary studies and on journalistic reviews, aims to assimilate rock lyrics within the canon of contemporary poetry. This methodology produces close readings of texts by individual performers (Dylan; Morrison; Patti Smith) who are likely to be granted the status of full-fledged writers and poets (see Day; Hertsgaard). Other researchers, working in the field of cultural studies, question the use- fulness of lyrically-intensive analysis. They argue, often compellingly, that lyrics–the literary component of rock songs–are secondary to other, more meaningful elements such as communitarian live performance (Frith, Performing 210), sonic excess (Grossberg, We Gotta 206) or star personalities (Goodwin Dancing, 115).Beneath this skepticism about the functionality of lyrics, one may also discern the fear that a literary-oriented methodology, while ostensibly opening up the literary canon to rock songwriters, perniciously reintroduces within popular culture the very logic of canonicity: if interpreted along these literary lines, rock loses its potential as an alternative or oppositional cultural practice. It becomes a would-be art form whose supposedly discrimi- 1 This paper was initially published in Sound as Sense: Contemporary US poetry &/in Music, eds. Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle, New Comparative Poetics 11 (Bruxelles-Bern-Berlin-New York. P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2003) 79-92. 2 Den Tandt “Staccato, Swivel, and Glide” nating fans accumulate what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital (Bourdieu, Raisons 40-41). There is, I believe, no need to commit oneself exclusively to either of these reading choices. Doing so would suggest that rock audiences have consistently adopted one single attitude toward lyrics. In fact, fans respond to words in songs as diversely as academics themselves: their attitudes range from eager interest to inattention, depending on the songwriter’s status (is he or she lyrics-oriented?) or on the practical conditions of reception (home listening, concert, club, casual occur- rence. film soundtrack). On the one hand, evidence of fans’ demand for songs as lyrical texts goes back to the early seventies, when lyrics were first printed on the inner sleeves of rock albums. Simultaneously, bootleg songbooks were offered for sale, sometimes containing approx- imate transcriptions directly from the records. Today, this practice lives on in the form of hundreds of websites publishing lyrics by one or several bands.1 On the other hand, it is indeed impossible to reduce the mode of reception of rock lyrics to this quasi-literary practice. Marshall McLu- han’s argument about the specificity of aural, print and electronic media is relevant here: the reading of lyrics in print form constitutes a separate experience from the apprehension of the same words during music playback (McLuhan, Understanding 86-87). In the latter situa- tion, words as vehicles of meaning are de-emphasized. Cultural studies researchers have repeatedly pointed out that rock audiences often have dim ideas of what words are actually being sung by their favorite singers: either the lyrics are drowned out in the musical arrangement or they are simply not decrypted as signifying chains (Frith, Performing 164). In the early career of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger expressed his predilection for arrangements in which lyrics are not distinctly audible (Dalton, Rolling Stones 21-23). This choice was endorsed by most subsequent rock bands and came to stand as one of the core elements of the rock sound, differentiating it from pop, folk or Europe- an variété. The present-day BBC2 quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks shows what kind of listening experience this rock esthetic generates. In one segment of the game, contestants are asked to recon- struct conspicuously undecipherable lyrics (the verses of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive,” for instance). Some of the talk show guests limit themselves to offer hilarious substitutes for the cryptic lines. In these pages, I mean to outline an approach that threads its way in between the fetishization of lyrics and their sheer dismissal. There is 3 a need, I think, for an analysis that takes into account the ambiguous status of words within songs–their ability to be overwhelmed by music, the listeners’ proclivity to filter out their meaning but also the rock fan’s prerogative to retrieve meaning, however imperfectly. In this perspective, rock song-writing appears wedded to what might be called an aesthetics of semi-articulation. As Simon Reynolds and Joy Press put it, “[t]roughout its history, rock has oscillated between intelligibility and incoherent excess, between meaning and musicality” (Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts 217). This means that, contrary to the cultural studies view, verbal meaning is never entirely dismissible in rock songs. Paradoxically, what the BBC’s lyrics recognition game indicates is precisely that listeners always assume that some meaning is being produced as the song unfolds. Yet, simultaneously, what the listening experience offers in actual terms is the apprehension of texts shifting in and out of meaningfulness or intelligibility. In this light, efficient song writing in rock and roll must implicitly or deliberately turn the song’s game with semi-articulated meaning to its own advantage. The ap- proach elaborated here leads therefore lead to new, more inclusive criteria not only of description, but also of evaluation. 2. The “Gibberish” of Early Rock and Roll The corpus selected for the present argument covers the early years of rock and roll, from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. Beyond a person- al predilection for these early songs, the choice is justified by the obvious fact that the 1950s mark the moment when the prosodic and musical apparatus of rock and roll was first elaborated. Also, there is some ironical benefit in using a corpus that has been described, even by fans themselves, as below the threshold of lyrical relevance. Indeed, In Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom (1969), one of the first book-length histories of rock and roll, Nik Cohn makes the sub-literate status of early rock lyrics a condition of the music’s authenticity: The lyrics were mostly non-existent, simple slogans one step away from gibberish. This wasn’t just stupidity, simple inability to write anything better. It was some kind of teen code, almost a sign language, that would make rock entirely incomprehensible to adults. In other word, if you weren’t sure about rock, you couldn’t cling to its lyrics. You either had to accept its noise at face val- ue or you had to drop out completely (24). 4 Den Tandt “Staccato, Swivel, and Glide” The obvious rejoinder to Cohn’s argument is that 1950s lyrics do have an identifiable thematics–teenage rebelliousness (Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues), the boredom of high-school education (Chuck Berry’s “School Days”), the ups and down of teenage romance (Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula”; Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”), dancing as a metaphor for sex (Cochran’s “Twenty-Flight Rock”; Richie Valens’s “Little Suzie”), the labyrinthine strategies of dating (Chuck Berry’s “Oh Carol”;). Also, a thematic analysis might investi- gate how rock and roll lyrics rework and possibly tone down the sexual sub-texts of the rhythm ‘n’ blues songs on which they are modelled. Above all, we might point out that at least one performer–Chuck Ber- ry—qualifies not only as a widely admired guitarist, but also as the first rock poet before Dylan. Yet an approach that embarks on a search for meaningful messages risks falling into the trap of literariness and canonicity. It would certainly favor a limited number of songs out of the larger 1950s corpus. Therefore, I believe that Cohn’s celebration of inarticulateness needs to be taken seriously: it describes a feature that most early rock songs share. Simply, I believe that what he presents as transgression can also be viewed as the basis of a song writing skill. Thus, Cohn is right to point out that the ostensible “gibberish” of rock lyrics should be read as a “sign language.” Beyond the vocal noise of 1950s rockers, there are structuring principles and regularities. Only, this poetic method does not operate exclusively within the field of articulated speech: it shutlles across the boundary that separates intelli- gible speech from that other, less determinate, semiotic system–music itself. 3. Geno-text and Pheno-text The theoretical framework I mean to use to investigate this semi- articulate corpus is Julia Kristeva’s analysis of semiotic and symbolic signifying processes. Kristeva’s approach was partially transposed to the field of music by Roland Barthes in “The Grain of the Voice”–an article often cited in academic literature on popular music (See Frith and Goodwin, Record 293-300). Kristeva distinguishes between fully articulated language, whose purpose is communication among consti- tuted subjects, and a more fundamental, less objectifiable “substratum” of signifying processes, out of which articulated language initially grows (Kristeva, Revolution 84). She calls the former the symbolic, following in this Lacan’s terminology, and the latter the semiotic. 5 Development of the semiotic takes place during the pre-oedipal phase when the child, still closely linked to the mother’s body, has no full sense of a separate self interacting with determinate objects (35).