Abstract
This chapter explores narrativity in recorded popular song, employing a cognitive position that considers narrative to be an interpreter’s formation of a sequence of events, characters, and so on. In doing so, this chapter adapts and expands the concept of narrativization, drawn from literary theory, to describe the process in which an interpreter constructs a story in response to a text. The adaptation of narrativization for recorded popular song is synthesised with three models of musical narrativity: the enactment of a story in real-time, the telling of a story, and depicting the mental interior of an experiencing consciousness. These forms of narrativization are illustrated with examples that explore the contributions of lyrical information relayed by a persona, notated details, and the art of record production.
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Notes
- 1.
This approach follows a wider poststructuralist turn throughout musicology that models musical meaning in a broad sense as a subjective construction. In this chapter, my approach is informed particularly by Moore’s (2012) hermeneutical method, which explores ways in which aspects of tracks afford meaning to a listener by analogy to a dialogue.
- 2.
- 3.
In Moore’s application, the persona remains distinct from the central character of a song, which he labels the protagonist. It should be noted that Moore develops his understanding of the persona in the context of his hermeneutical popular music analytical strategy and, as such, his use of the term differs from other authors’ uses elsewhere.
- 4.
In his later work, Andean (2016) proposes that recorded musical works may illicit a range of different “narrative modes,” including “textual narrative,” “spatial narrative,” and “mimetic narrative.”
- 5.
The Kit-Kat invokes two pertinent references, firstly a popular confectionary consisting of bars (a nod to being “behind bars,” i.e. sent to prison) and, secondly, the Kit Kat club in New York where Jay-Z himself attacked a record producer in 1999 (BBC 2001).
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Discography
Jay Z. 2003. 99 Problems. Digital Download. The Black Album. Roc-A-Fella Records.
No Doubt. 1995. Don’t Speak. CD. Tragic Kingdom. Santa Monica: Interscope.
The Pogues. 2005. Fairytale of New York. Digital Download. The Ultimate Collection. London: Warner Music UK.
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Harden, A.C. (2019). Narrativizing Recorded Popular Song. In: Braae, N., Hansen, K. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_3
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