In recent years sociologists have become suspicious of song lyrics (wary of using them to illustrate social changes and beliefs, dubious of their aesthetic merits), while musicologists have continued to subordinate lyrics, treating them as secondary to melodies, rhythms, timbres, vocal performance and other musical qualities. The room has been vacated, available for literary critics and scholars of poetry to unpack their bags and set the agenda – as they have been doing for some time. Back in the 1960s, as popular music studies was being shaped, it was literary critics who began treating lyrics as a poetic form (while musicologists investigated aeolian cadences, and sociologists went subcultural with the rebels on the street). The musicological and sociological escape clause – that lyrics are performed voices, that they are embedded within music and rhythms, that meaning is contextual, that social actions and flattened sevenths speak louder than words – will only hold up as an alibi for so long. Take a peek at the notebooks of contemporary songwriters (musicians working in the genres of rap, country or rock, to name the most obvious). Listen to folk and vernacular songs from around the world. Weigh the box files of lyricists. Eavesdrop at public places and in classrooms where songs are analysed. Poke your nose into Internet fora where arguments about song lyrics animate the dialogues. You will see that for many people songs are also words on a page. Not ‘reducible’ to words on a page. But still words on a page. And, looking at lyrics, while listening to them, can provide insights, and a variety of methods among the many, for getting an understanding of the powers, pleasures and the pretensions of the popular song.
Charlotte Pence clearly recognises this, and many of the contributions in her edited collection are incisive and illuminating, notably the in-depth studies of songs and songwriters which illustrate the overlap and interplay of poetry, song and speech: Peter Guralnick's carefully contextualised explication of Sam Cooke's songwriting; Stephen Deusner's interrogation of Will Sheff as the ‘unreliable narrator’ in Okkervil River; and Jesse Graves's essay on the creative collision of contemporary poetry and post-indie rock songs, via a study of Jason Molina and the Magnolia Electric Co. These three short chapters inspired me to idle away my time seeking out tracks on YouTube and elsewhere – my personal highlights in a collection that brings together contributions from 12 poets, eight literary professors and three music scholars (as they are counted in and identified in the book's introduction).
Like all edited collections, it is inconsistent. It is partly inconsistent by design: different voices and viewpoints are encouraged. This can be stimulating, moving through varied approaches to a similar set of issues. But it is also frustrating when contradictions and divergences between authors are left without comment or internal dialogue. For example, Jeffrey Roessner's insightful chapter on REM and the ‘post-confessional’ lyric locates the songs and their singer within the context of both pop song and contemporary poetry, showing how the band challenge the confessional ‘I’ and disrupt semantic and syntactical expectations. This is followed by Eric Reimer's equally engaging attempt to yoke Michael Stipe's lyrics to Keats' Odes, implying a more sensual Romantic position. However, there is no sense of dialogue between these stances. I can make up my own mind, for sure, but I'd like to get a sense of how these authors might debate their approaches.
The mention of Keats inevitably recalls past efforts to elevate Bob Dylan's song lyrics through this comparison, and it seems that the same trick is now being inflicted on Stipe. Here we have, for me, one of the recurrent problems when high literary critics and theorists meet lowly song lyrics – the popular is legitimated as worthy of our attention through comparisons and associations with canonical high culture, rather than approached and valued on its own terms (which is why I favour the articles by Guralnick, Deusner and Graves). Hence, Charlotte Pence extrapolates the Shakespearean sonnet structures that she discerns within country music lyrics; John Paul Hampstead positions gangsta rap within ‘the traditional canon of Western literature’, specifically making comparisons with Homer and Virgil, while asserting that ‘Ancient Greek society was perhaps even more repressive than what we think of as contemporary gangsta culture’ (p. 83) – not a ‘comparison’ I find reassuring or useful for understanding the poetics and politics of rap. Incorporating the popular into the canon of high culture is not only conservative – leaving dominant aesthetic criteria unchallenged – but it devalues the historical traditions and downplays the material conflicts from which rap (and country lyrics) have emerged. More pertinent is Keith Flynn's take on the ‘intersection of poetry and the blues’, evoking the profoundly important impact of blues on poetry. But here again, there is no sense of debate between these contrasting positions – one appropriating for the Western tradition a contemporary form indebted to and embedded within African American history and everyday life, the other stressing a vibrant poetic blues tradition as a ‘black vernacular’ within (and without) a lived literary modernism.
The blues and literary modernism (and their intersections) had a big impact on Bob Dylan's lyrics. As anyone familiar with the discussion of song lyrics might imagine, Dylan features prominently throughout this book. Gordon Ball's rerun of the argument that Dylan should have been and should be given the Nobel Prize in Literature is, yet again, another attempt to extract Dylan from pop, R&B, blues and country, and line him up alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Ezra Pound, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Homer, William Faulkner, and so on. Meanwhile, Claudia Emerson and Ben Yagoda provide brief impressionistic contributions that mention Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Anton Chekhov, but not Michael Gray and Christopher Ricks. These brief chapters on Dylan ignore other scholarly writings, favouring personal impressions and literary allusions. Fair enough, we are in the world of poetics. But the absence of major writings about Dylan means that, here again, there is no attention to critical engagement, dialogue and debate.
The book, in general, is premised on the tendentious claim, asserted by Pence in her introduction, that there have been ‘an astonishing lack of articles that analyzed the content and techniques of song lyrics’ (p. xii). True, there may be very few writings, but that should make those that are available all the more significant. I find it quite staggering that no writer in this collection engages with Simon Frith's influential and insightful arguments about song lyrics in Performing Rites (and the previous essays about song words that fed into that book). Equally absent is the acknowledgment of significant interventions into debates about the poetics of song lyrics from Robert Christgau, Will Friedwald, Dai Griffiths, Richard Goldstein, Mark Booth, Barbra Bradby and Philip Furia – names that spring to mind from teaching rather than any sustained searches. Interdisciplinarity is surely vital here. It is a shame that a book which contains many insightful contributions provides no substantive engagement with the broader ongoing arguments about pop song poetics.
