Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers

Mathijs Peters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030431006
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

This book explores the ways in which popular music can criticise political, social and economic structures, through the lens of alternate rock band Manic Street Preachers.Unlike most recent work on popular music, Peters concentrates largely on lyrical content to defend the provocative claim that the Welsh band pushes the critical message shaped in their lyrics to the forefront. Their music, this suggests, along with sleeve art, body-art, video-clips, clothes, interviews and performances, serves to emphasise this critical message and the primary role played by the band's lyrics.

Blending the disciplines of popular music studies, culture studies and philosophy, Peters confronts the ideas of German philosopher and social critic Theodor W. Adorno with the entire catalogue of Manic Street Preachers, from their 1988 single 'Suicide Alley' to their 2018 album Resistance is Futile. Although Adorno argues that popular music is unable to resist the standardising machinery of consumption culture, Peters paradoxically uses his ideas to show that Manic Street Preachers releases shape 'critical models' with which to formulate social and political critique.

This notion of the 'critical model' enables Peters to argue that the catalogue of Manic Street Preachers critically addresses a wide range of themes, from totalitarianism to Holocaust representation, postmodern temporality to Europeanism, and from Nietzsche's ideas about self-overcoming to reflections on digimodernism and post-truth politics. The book therefore persuasively shows that Manic Street Preacher lyrics constitute an intertextual network of links between diverse cultural and political phenomena, encouraging listeners to critically reflect on the structures that shape our lives.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. PetersPopular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43100-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Making Music Redundant

Mathijs Peters¹

(1)

Philosophy Department, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Mathijs Peters

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

‘Personally I just want to make music redundant… All we wanted when we were young was a band who spoke about political issues and we’ve never had one in our lifetime. It was all just entertainment, love songs, which never changed anything. I want to sing about a culture that says nothing, where you feel like a nobody…’ (qtd. in NME Originals: Manic Street Preachers 2002: 22). So observes Manic Street Preachers’ lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 after the release of the band’s third album, The Holy Bible, never to be seen or found again.

Edwards made this statement in the beginning of the group’s existence, during a 1991 conversation with British music journalist Steve Lamacq. Everything that Manic Street Preachers are about, Edwards suggests in this interview, is the message they aim to get across with help of their lyrics; the ‘political issues’ about which they are manically preaching; a message that should result in change. The band’s music, he suggests furthermore, is a vehicle to slip this message into the mainstream; to make the band’s critical lyrics part of the public’s consciousness and to resist a music industry and a popular culture that, in his view, mainly revolve around uncritical entertainment and superficial sentimentality, propagating naive notions of happiness in a society permeated with dehumanising political and economic structures.

Edwards’ statements conflict with many ideas about the importance of lyrics in popular music, especially as formulated in the discipline of popular music studies. Whereas non-academic analyses of this music often tend to focus more on lyrics than on music—the meaning of words, after all, is easier to write about than the meaning of sound, rhythm, melody, tonality or musical structure—many contemporary academic analyses frequently criticise this approach for ignoring that which makes popular music into music. In this introductory chapter, I want to focus on these ideas and discuss several aspects of popular music in general. I will conclude with an overview of the content of the following chapters. By doing this, I will sketch the contours of the main arguments that I will eventually develop in this book, in which I confront the releases of Manic Street Preachers with several observations developed by the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. This will enable me to use these releases as a lens to explore the ability of popular music to formulate social, political and cultural critique, mainly through lyrics.

Music and Lyrics

Most of the ideas about the relationship between lyrics and music, as formulated within the discipline of popular music studies, revolve around the claim that one cannot and should not separate words from music, since song lyrics are entwined with—and most of the time secondary to—the musical aspects of the artwork that is the song as a whole. Simon Frith, for example, one of the founders of this discipline, emphasises the performative elements of song lyrics, criticising the ideas that lyrics would ‘communicate’ a specific message to listeners or that we can read them as poetry (Frith 2007). Their meaning, Frith observes, does not so much revolve around what these lyrics mean when written down, but with the ways in which they sound and work with the music when they are performed and sung: ‘A song is always a performance and song words are always spoken out – vehicles for the voice. The voice can also use nonverbal devices to make its points – accents, sighs, emphases, hesitations, changes of tone. Song words, in short, work as speech, as structures of sound that are direct signs of emotion and marks of character; songs are more like plays than poems’ (qtd. in Christgau 2014: xiii–xiv; see also Shuker 1994: 100–107).¹ In his analysis of political forms of protest music, John Street makes similar observations about the meaning of political songs, arguing that ‘it would be a mistake … to see the words, at least as they appear on the sleeve, as conveying the (political) meaning of the song. Not only are they heard in the context of the other aspects of the song (the beat, the production, etc.), they are also heard through the tone of voice and inflections of the singer. A song is more than its words’ (2014: 743; see also Street 1986: 2). Reflecting specifically on the genre of rock, Theodore Gracyk famously took these observations one step further and concluded that in this type of music ‘most lyrics don’t matter very much’ (1996: 63).²

In Alison Stone’s impressive The Value of Popular Music: An Approach from Post-Kantian Aesthetics, to which I will return frequently in this book, we find a recent and comprehensive defence of this approach to song lyrics. Stone takes over Julia Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic elements of language. Within Kristeva’s post-Freudian analysis of the psychosexual development of the self, the ‘semiotic’ refers to the linguistic rhythms and sounds that constitute embodied forms of meaning for the young child (Kristeva 1994: 25–30; Stone 2016: xxi). It refers, for example, to the feelings of connectedness and love that accompany the soothing experience of listening to the sound of one’s mother’s voice as a baby. The symbolic elements of words, on the other hand, concern the ideas that these words communicate; they concern their content. According to Kristeva, these elements become important when the child learns the conceptual meaning of a language. She then begins to distinguish herself as a self from other selves, Kristeva argues: she starts giving a specific meaning to herself and the objects around her, shaped and structured in and through the language and the words she is learning. Kristeva concludes that the meaning of language is constituted both by the semiotic and symbolic elements of words: by their sound—how they are pronounced, work together rhythmically, and resonate with our bodies as affective entities—and by their content—that which they conceptually communicate (Kristeva 1994: 26–7).

Using Kristeva’s distinction, Alison Stone argues that the meaning of popular music is primarily constituted by the semiotic elements of music and lyrics: popular music, she observes, generates meaning through its specific organisation of pitch, rhythm, melody, bass, sound, dynamics and more. These aspects of a song address what Stone calls ‘the intelligence of our bodies’ (2016: xx – I return to this idea in Chap. 3) and resonate with the experiences we had when we grew up as young children and responded with our bodies to sounds (2016: xxi). She follows Kristeva herself, who argues that music is a ‘nonverbal signifying system’ that is ‘constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic’ (Kristeva 1994: 24).

Analysing the role played by song lyrics in the meaning of popular music, Stone therefore criticises Gracyk’s above-mentioned claim that in rock music lyrics do not matter very much. She does agree, however, that song lyrics do not primarily communicate a message to listeners on a symbolic level. Instead, she argues that Gracyk overlooks the fact that lyrics matter on a semiotic level as they are sung (Stone 2016: 231). This does not mean, however, that she completely dismisses the symbolic meaning of popular music lyrics, which follow the conventions of everyday language, in her view, and should therefore—following Frith’s above-mentioned ideas—be approached as speech (Stone 2016: 233–5; see also Middleton 1990: 226). Still Stone argues that it is not the symbolic dimension of lyrics that plays a primary role in the song’s meaning as a whole.

Stone puts this into words as follows, reflecting on the ways in which lyrics are generally approached within popular music studies:

Usually the content of lyrics is either treated as unimportant compared to the sounds of the words and music or, when lyrical content is given importance, this is because it is used to articulate meanings already embodied in the music and in the words qua sounds. Either way, explicit meaning is treated as secondary to semiotic meaning… (Stone 2016: xxi)

What is mainly important about the meaning of lyrics, Stone concludes in other words, is how they rhyme, how they sound when they are sung, and how they work together with the rhythm, melody and other musical aspects of the song (Stone 2016: xxii).

A clear illustration of this observation is formed by lyrics that border on symbolic meaninglessness. Astor and Negus, for example, discuss Kurt Cobain’s often indecipherable lyrics in this context and link them to avant-garde poetry (2014: 203–5), an artform that Kristeva praises for foregrounding semiotic elements of language like sound and rhythm.³ In many Nirvana songs, we indeed hear Cobain screaming and singing words that mainly seem to be put together because they sound good, because they rhyme and work with the rhythm and melody of the music as they are sung in his typical raw, raspy and sneering voice. The message these lyrics communicate on a symbolic level is rather indecipherable or even non-existent. Cobain himself collaborated with William S. Burroughs (on The “Priest” They Called Him) and it could be argued that the latter’s cut-up technique influenced the writing of Nirvana lyrics, making the semiotic break through the structure of the symbolic and through the hold that the symbolic order might have on our lives and selves.⁴

Affectivity and Performativity

In the following, I want to explore these arguments more systematically. It is again important to notice, first of all, that even though it might be possible to approach Cobain’s lyrics as avant-garde poetry, these arguments do not imply that we can sever these lyrics from the specific way in which Cobain sings them; that we can grasp their meaning as we read them from a page, like we often do with poetry. Most of the arguments regarding the unimportant or, put less drastically, secondary role played by the symbolic and conceptual elements of lyrics in popular music, therefore not only target the idea that we should or that we even can read and interpret lyrics of popular songs as primarily communicating a conceptual message to the listener, but also the idea that we can or should approach them as poems that we can read from a page, disconnected from the music of which they form part and from the particular way in which they are sung by a particular singer (Astor and Negus 2014: 195).

This is a strong argument: the observation that lyrics are always part of a song implies that the semiotic meaning of popular music lyrics is inherently entwined with the particular song as a whole. It means, as described above, that the meaning of lyric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Making Music Redundant
• 2. An Exclusive Language
• 3. The Windowless Monad
• 4. Détournement, Subjectivity and Popular Modernism: Generation Terrorists, Gold Against the Soul and The Holy Bible
• 5. Embodiment and Self-Overcoming: Everything Must Go, ‘Judge Yr’self’ and Journal for Plague Lovers
• 6. Marxist Specters and Alternative Futures: Everything Must Go, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Know Your Enemy and Lifeblood
• 7. Locality and Internationality: Rewind the Film and Futurology
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter