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Making Meaning in Popular Song
Philosophical Essays
Theodore Gracyk
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Making Meaning in Popular Song
Philosophical Essays
Theodore Gracyk
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Winner, ASA (American Society for Aesthetics) 2023 Outstanding Monograph Prize For Theodore Gracyk meaning in popular music depends as much on the context of reception and performer's intentions as on established musical and semantic practices. Songs are structures that serve as the scaffolding for meaning production, influenced by the performance decisions of the performer and their intentions. Arguing against prevailing theories of meaning that ignore the power of the performance, Gracyk champions the contextual relevance of the performer as well as novel messaging through creative repurposing of recordings. Extending the philosophical insight that meaning is a function of use, Gracyk explains how both the performance persona and the personal life of a song's performer can contribute to (or undercut) ethical and political aspects of a performance or recording. Using Carly Simon's "You're So Vain", Pink Floyd, the emergence of the musical genre of post-punk and the practice of "cover" versions, Gracyk explores the multiple, sometimes contradictory, notions of authenticity applied to popular music and the conditions for meaningful communication. He places popular music within larger cultural contexts and examines how assigning a performance or recording to one music genre rather than another has implications for what it communicates. Informed by a mix of philosophy of art and philosophy of language, Gracyk's entertaining study of popular music constructs a theoretical basis for a philosophy of meaning for songs.
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Part One
Songs
1
Meanings of Songs and Meanings of Song Performances
Distinct performances of the same song can mean very different things. This is because, in the pithy description of Jeanette Bicknell, “meaning is a product of three factors: the song’s text, its music, and the performance context.”1 Yet the meaning of the song may be fixed. If this sounds paradoxical, my immediate purpose is to show how the interplay of semantics and pragmatics generates different meanings in different performances.2 The basic idea is that context-dependent aspects of a song’s meaning are different from—and supplemented by—context-dependent aspects of a performance’s meaning. Popular song performances are rich in meaning because the semantic content of the lyrics is wedded to a very “thin” musical structure. This combination of semantic information, musical flexibility, and shifting performance contexts generates myriad possibilities for generating pragmatic contextual supplementation of the song during its performances.
Sentences and Songs, Utterances and Performances
Pragmatics examines how the meaning of an utterance—one particular communication at a particular moment—depends on the context of utterance. Utterance meaning often diverges from the standard or face-value meaning of a phrase or sentence or larger text. Applied to popular song, it implies that audience interpretation should distinguish meaning-making properties that belong to the song from those that are specific to a particular performance, recording, recontextualization, or some other use of that song.3
Consider the following case. Suppose someone utters a sentence and the referring expression of the sentence is a name or description that misdescribes the speaker’s intended referent. Is the resulting sentence true or false? In a well-known essay, Saul Kripke discusses cases such as “Her husband is kind to her,” erroneously said of a man who is not married to the woman in question.4 A narrow focus on the semantic content of the sentence tells us that the spoken sentence is false if the woman is unmarried. If the woman is married, the truth of the sentence depends on her husband’s behavior. If the actual husband is unkind to her, then (again) the utterance is false. Yet, married or single, the intended male referent is the man actually observed being kind to the woman in question. So long as the person to whom the speaker addresses the sentence understands the speaker’s intended reference, the utterance will successfully refer to that person, and it will succeed even when the intended audience for the sentence recognizes the failure of semantic reference. Thus, a successful understanding of a speaker often requires us to set aside a strict adherence to the semantic reference of the referring expression, and the speaker’s utterance can be true even if its proper semantic reference should render it false. Thus, utterance meaning diverges from semantic content.
For my purposes, the important point is one that Kripke mentions in passing, but which is central to pragmatics:
The notion of what words can mean, in the language, is semantical: it is given by the conventions of our language. What they mean, on a given occasion, is determined, on a given occasion, by these conventions, together with the intentions of the speaker and various contextual features … together with various general principles, applicable to all human languages regardless of their special conventions.5
In other words, our grasp of the context of utterance can prompt us to amend a sentence’s established semantic reference. We do so by distinguishing between the sentence type and its utterance on a particular occasion of use, which allows us to achieve a pragmatically correct understanding of the speaker’s reference for that use of that sentence. Correct understanding of “her husband” is not merely a grasp of how context fixes the referent of “her” in the normal way but also of how “husband” operates in an abnormal manner this case.6
This distinction between sentence reference and speaker’s reference can be extended to other cases where the meaning of a sentence type diverges from the meaning of a specific utterance. In short, the conventional meaning of a sentence type does not fully determine the meaning of each and every instance (token) of that type.7 Semantic content is a matter of general conventions, whereas speaker’s meaning (utterance meaning) demands sensitivity to context-sensitive pragmatic implicatures.
The implication for songs and song lyrics is straightforward. Because utterance meaning frequently diverges from sentence meaning, song performances frequently communicate context-sensitive meanings that diverge from the semantic content provided by the song’s words. The performance context sometimes involves a performer’s actual intentions on that occasion. As William Lycan puts it, pragmatics explores how changes in speaker contexts make it possible that “one and the same sentence with an already fixed propositional content can still be used to do interestingly different things in different contexts.”8 Substitute “song lyric” for “sentence” and one and the same song can be used to do interestingly different things in different performance contexts.
In summary, the meaning of a song’s words contributes to the meaning of each of its performances, but that is merely one factor among several in generating the meaning of any particular performance. Although our arguments are very different, I am expanding on Stan Godlovitch’s general position about the relationship between musical works and their performance: “The fixity of the work must typically be consistent with the opportunities for novelty expected in performance.”9
Songs as Structural Types
Quite apart from issues of meaning and interpretation, philosophy has long grappled with a fundamental distinction between two basic forms of art. Some arts—most notably painting, drawing, and some forms of sculpture—result in artistic products for which the artistic achievement is identified with a particular physical object. The Mona Lisa is painted on a particular wooden panel and Michelangelo’s Pietà carved into a particular block of marble, and a viewer has only seen the actual artwork if they have been in the physical presence of that wooden panel and that carved marble. Yet no one seriously extends this “physical object hypothesis” to musical works.10 When Dolly Parton wrote “Jolene” (1973), she may have written it out on paper, but no one equates the piece of paper with the song. No one thinks that access to the song depends on access to that one piece of paper. It depends, instead, on access to performances and recordings that follow the music-with-words structure that Parton created. Consequently, most philosophers of art endorse the thesis that the products of some art forms are singular (there is only one “original”), but others involve works that are multiple in their instantiation, where none of the instances are more genuine than any others.
I will adopt the standard assumption that songs are structural types and I will concentrate on musical performances and recordings that are instances or tokens of those structures.11 The present chapter focuses on works for musical performance, namely songs that are meant to be instantiated through the action of performing them, most often for an audience. The audience may be small, as when “Happy Birthday to You” is sung by everyone in the room except grandmother, to whom it is sung because it is her birthday. Or it may be quite large, as when the American national anthem is sung to a crowd of tens of thousands of fans during the opening ceremonies of a university football game.12 Audience size aside, the cases are alike in that the songs are structures that guide performances. Conversely, their performances are instances or tokens of the structural types.
My analysis of song performance draws on four elaborations of this distinction between types and instances.
First, types place constraints on instances. The act of composing a song includes the songwriter’s determination of which features are normative, that is, which ought to be present in performances and other tokens of that type. This point is sometimes made by saying that the musical type is a norm-kind. In the tradition of classical music, the type is usually indicated through the creation and publication of a musical score. In this tradition, scores specify all instrumentation and provide notation and other instructions in order to indicate how the composer’s intentions supplement the standard performance conventions of the musico-historical context.13 However, in the field of popular music, the basic type can be initiated and passed down through oral tradition (as with many “traditional” and folk songs), or generated in the act of recording it, with a minimal score extracted later and published (e.g., much of what we find in Alicia Keys—Note-for-Note Keyboard Transcriptions). Because the identity of a popular song is ultimately score-independent, many variants, and many wildly different arrangements of it, will count as instances of the same basic song.
Most scored, classical works are highly prescriptive and constraining, excluding “some sonic possibilities” from their correct performances.14 The same cannot be said about popular songs. If you add a vibraphone to a string quartet by W.A. Mozart, it’s not a performance of Mozart’s work. Not so with Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” (1928). With lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, the song was written as a musical number for the show The Threepenny Opera, a production which Weill and Brecht intentionally undertook as an exercise in popular music theater.15 While the published score does not indicate use of a vibraphone, no one who has any familiarity with the conventions of popular music would say that a performance cannot be a performance of “Mack the Knife” because it includes vibraphone. And singers often supplement the words of popular songs, as in Ella Fitzgerald’s famous 1960 live recording of “Mack the Knife” with extemporaneous lyrics. The Last Town Chorus’s mournful interpretation of “Modern Love” (2007) features a crawling tempo and a slide guitar. Sonically, it sounds almost nothing like David Bowie’s original, uptempo R&B version (1983). To the casual listener, there is little agreement beyond the lyrics. In this respect, we find that popular song, rather than classical music, exhibits a strong license for meaning alteration by allowing considerable flexibility in the music. With art music, the performance norm is for performers to act in service to the composer and the score.16
Second, every type underdetermines the properties of its instances. This relationship generates the one-over-many principle: there are many instances of one and the same type, and each instance will be distinctive in some way. Each instance will have properties associated with the type and consequently shared with other instances; yet, every instance will have more properties than can be specified in the type.17 If the latter were not so, a performance’s meaning would almost always align with the type’s meaning as established by its original context. Another way of expressing this point is to say that types are ontologically thinner than their instances, and because types vary in how many performance features are set as invariant in its performances, some types are ontologically thinner (specifying few) or thicker (specifying many) relative to their determinative properties.18 Popular songs are generally very thin, allowing considerable variation from performance to performance and thus permitting considerable tailoring to the performance context. Whereas it is legitimate to complain that one is not hearing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major (Op. 61) if the first movement cadenza is played on a kazoo, there is no parallel complaint if a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” is accompanied by kazoos.
Third, the basic properties of a song are determined by the musico-historical context in which it is composed.19 Every song has meaning established by the time and place of its composition. That meaning is its work-meaning and it is a property of that song. By virtue of the first point, that work-meaning ought to be attributed to all instances of that work. However, any such meaning can be nullified by power of pragmatic implicature. Semantic properties are fixed by a work’s musico-historical context. They may inform and contribute to the meaning of subsequent performances, but they do not fully determine the meaning of its performances. The semantic content of the sung words may be exploited in many ways, generating distinct pragmatic supplementation in different performance contexts. In the same way that sentences containing the phrase “her husband” permit use of that phrase to refer to someone who is not married, it is unsurprising when a popular song’s semantic content is exploited to communicate meanings that the songwriter would not sanction or endorse for it. Hence, the supposition that all performances will share meanings established by the initial context is not an obstacle to allowing for divergent meanings of different performances. (I discuss this at greater length in Chapter 2.)
Fourth, song instances can count as recognizable instance even when they fail to embody some properties specified by the type. If we do not make this concession, then it would be impossible to have instances/tokens with even a single flubbed note.20 As I said earlier, the musical type is a norm-kind. It is a pattern that can have better and worse realizations, and so an error-ridden or minimally recognizable performances can be counted as instances. A sloppy, ramshackle, out-of-tune performance of “Happy Birthday to You,” or The Replacements performing “Like a Rolling Stone” as “Like a Rolling Pin” (1990), along with other choice word alterations, are nonetheless performances of those two songs.
Ironically, given the variants that arise from contextual supplementation, performance arrangement, and performance style, it is theoretically possible that every performance of a particular popular song might contain enough variation from the composer’s expectations and design that every performance of it will fail to convey the composer’s intended meanings for it. Unlikely in practice, but a theoretical possibility.21
Authorship, Semantic Content, Intentions
This technical overview of ontology has been a prelude to seeing how a single song can communicate many different meanings in its various performances.22 The key issue is whether, or to what degree, a song (as a type) has invariant meaning.
Normally, semantic properties are independent of any speaker’s intentions on any given occasion. Thus, a song’s basic semantic properties are determined by prevailing semantic conventions at the time of composition. If a blues fan thinks that Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” (1936) is about some kind of airplane, that interpretation is wrong. But we do not have to peer into Johnson’s private thoughts to know this. In the 1930s, “Terraplane” was the name of a brand of automobile, and this bit of public, historical information explains why his lyrics reference the hood, battery, and other car parts, and fails to reference propellors and wings.
Does it follow that a composer’s intentions play no role in determining the song’s meaning on the grounds that semantic conventions override those intentions? As I explained in the Introduction, the celebration of the “death of the author” and the common prohibition against committing the intentional fallacy have created an environment in which authorial intentions are dismissed as irrelevant to the interpretation of literature and other meaning-structures.23 However, there has been a counter-movement that explores ways that authorial intention contributes to the context that guides interpretation of composed texts.24
Consistent with recourse to pragmatics, I will offer a number of reasons to think that the counter-movement is correct and that performers’ intentions play a role in explaining how utterance meanings diverge from semantic meanings. In terms of the pragmatics of popular song performance, the crucial point is that we must distinguish authorial intentions of a song’s compose...