Reading song lyrics

: an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach

Abstract

The arguments presented in this thesis draw upon a selection of my own published texts between the years 2017 and 2022 and extend the existing critical discourse of popular music studies by foregrounding song lyrics as the object of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary study. Since Goldstein’s 1969 text Poetry of Rock, identified by Mosher (1989: 144) as the first ‘respectable’ book on the subject of popular music studies, research has tended to focus on the separate components found within song, for example language (Ricks, 2004; Eckstein, 2010; Bradley & DuBois, 2010), sociology (Frith, 1996; Longhurst, 2007; Street, 2013), psychology (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001; Frisicks-Warren, 2006; Levitin, 2008), musicology (Bicknell, 2009; Powell, 2010) or media and cultural studies (Barthes, 1977; Devereux, Dillane and Power, 2011; Railton & Watson, 2011; Arnold et al, 2017), or, in the case of collected texts such as Popular Music Studies (Hesmondhalgh & Negus., eds, 2002) used a multidisciplinary approach to draw on knowledge from different disciplines. In my own work I demonstrate how we can draw upon existing methods of popular music analysis individually, but then also bring them together in an interdisciplinary approach to analysing popular song, synthesising links between different disciplines that I argue are essential to a coordinated and coherent reading. To do this, I suggest that lyrics can be ‘read’ by drawing on film, literary and dramatic critical theories to produce close internal readings, but instead of analysis beginning and ending with the text, I stress the importance of looking to the elements ‘outside’ the song. This thesis, therefore, is composed of the three main sections: critical context and methodological underpinnings; a focus on ‘inside’ the text; and a focus ‘outside’ the text. The notion of staying ‘inside’ the song involves using only the lyrics and music for analysis, and this includes explorations around listener interpretation, the use of rhetorical devices, and storytelling. Moving ‘outside’ the song involves discussions of cultural and political significance, the songwriter’s biography, and a multimodal approach to analysis where the importance of music video and album artwork are discussed.

Date of Award	19 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Stevie Simkin (Supervisor) & Jude Davies (Supervisor)