Lyrics, Voices and the Stories They Tell, K.Iveland, 2024, Dissertation (2025)

2024, Lyrics, Voices and the Stories They Tell

Situated within the field of Popular Musicology, this thesis takes a discursiveapproach to the relationship between lyrics and representations of the voice.Drawing on personal experience with lyrics and voices as a singer, performing songwriter, and researcher, it takes on several discourses of academic thinking, such as musicology, literary studies, and voice and performance studies. Interdisciplinary lines are drawn between these related fields to explore their discursive interactions. The thesis advances an approach suggesting that people's lifelong relationship with voice contributes to the development of a Voice Recognition, Use, and Listening Competence. This competence is argued to be intertwined with individuals' lifelong relationship with voice and performance traditions within popular music genres, enabling them to identify coded meanings in the voice. Furthermore, this thesis investigates whether our knowledge and experience with voice and its everyday function as a means of expression and communication is transferred to how we write, perform and understand lyrics. It thus aims to highlight how somatic and semantic meaning contribute to different understandings of lyrical meaning. To address these and related issues, the thesis introduces an analytical framework labelled “Four Approaches to Lyrics and Voices”. This framework is designed to encompass experiences as a listener, reader, singer/performer and lyricist/songmaker, offering a broad perspective on how lyrical meaning is constructed and understood. These four approaches are applied to explore how the relationship between lyrics and the performativity and coded meanings of the voice contribute to our understandings of lyrical meaning. The thesis studies a selection of songs, lyrics, songmakers and performers, avoiding focus on specific genres or artists to provide a broader perspective. The examples also underscore the universal nature of coded meanings in the voice and the versatility of “Four Approaches to Lyrics and Voices” as an analytical framework applicable to lyrics across various genres and artists.In this way, the thesis makes a case for how lyrical meaning emerges and lives on in its interactions with performers and listeners, implying that our understanding of lyrics is never fixed. Moreover, it addresses how experiences of external and internal listening and auto-listening inform experiences and understandings of lyrical meaning. Additionally, the thesis highlights the relationship between lived experiences, personal narratives and song narratives and how they are interwoven in the tapestry of our lives. The primary objective of this PhD project is to start a new conversation within Popular Musicology about lyrics, voices and the stories they tell.

The poetry of rock: song lyrics are not poems but the words still matter; another look at Richard Goldstein's collection of rock lyrics

Popular Music, 2010

Reading Song Lyrics

Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and of a 2000 song by ‘jungle punk’ collective Asian Dub Foundation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity. full text: http://www.scribd.com/doc/75704917/Eckstein-Reading-Song-Lyrics

‘Hot Dog, Jumping Frog’: the community of experience and meaning in songs

Academia Letters, 2021

Embodied Subjectivities in the Lyrical and Musical Expression of PJ Harvey and Björk

Theories of Lyric

Journal of Literary Theory, 2017

Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of archi- tecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in which words and music are com- bined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regard- less of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song.

Book review: Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song, Allen Moore

Form and Content, Again. Four Remarks on Lyric Theory

Journal of Literary Theory, 2017

The following statement suggests reconsidering recent debates on a theory of lyric in terms of form and content. Four aspects and issues of the ongoing debate are discussed. In a first step, it is necessary to establish the relation between authorial poetics and lyric theory, since it is often characterised by fuzzy boundaries. Secondly, in order to specify the problem of form in lyric theory, it is suggested to have a closer look at the performative in lyric practice. Another important aspect of form is the semantics of lyrical genres. Lyrical genres mark an area in which form and content are intertwined and in which aspects of the form itself become semantic. Finally, the author argues that we should discuss – if possible assisted by a didactics sensitive to literary texts – whether and how theoretical proposals could be transformed into a practice of teaching poetry.

An Analysis of Bts’s Selected Song Lyrics: A Study of Denotative, Connotative and Myth Meaning

2022

Temporality, Affect, Lyrics

MA Thesis, 2021

Lyric poetry has long been considered as lacking a prominent “movement” in contrast with the narratives, which contain developments either in plot or character or both. Henceforth, the critics of lyrics have to make a choice between two ways of reading: either regarding lyrics as an imitation of the speech act by a fictional speaker or as an artful assemblage of symbols and forms. The former approach reconstructs a persona from the poem’s social-political background and considers the lyric expression as a fictional moment, in which the constructed persona speaks to a defined audience under a specific circumstance. The other type of reading focuses on the literary forms, since the stylistic inventiveness in the lyric poem is the point of attention that compensates for the static characters and actions. Critics taking this approach first rearrange the bits and pieces of the lyric language into a spatial structure resembling a painting or an architecture, and then identify the places of incongruities that capture attention. Due to the momentary snapshot in the mimetic reading and the spatial orientation in the formalist approach, both types deny the “movements” in lyric poetry. However, if we examine affect in lyrics in addition to the form and content, there exists a movement in the affect of lyrics—the sparkle of forces carried by individual words, like the little particles in Brownian motion, are gathered throughout the sequence of words into a much stronger, pervasive and cohesive momentum that unifies the lyric utterance. In this affective flow, temporality plays an important role, since only over time can the different affects conveyed by individual words, phrases, stanzas coalesce and consolidate into a coherent force. In this thesis, I examine the temporal features like order, pace, and frequency and how these devices render affect in both Graeco-Roman and Classical Chinese lyrics. I argue that the different temporal arrangements, both in prosody and content, drive the flow of affective expression, which then recreates the aesthetic experience for the audience. Instead of reading lyrics either as a scene in a larger plot or as a painting that symbolizes meaning beyond, we can find a third way by focusing on the “movement” of the lyric text and the development of affect—to read lyric poetry as a shared affective experience with the poet. Just like listening to a song, we do not necessarily need to have continuous actions or character developments to keep our attention: the ups and downs of the feelings from music and words themselves can take us through this affective journey.