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Narrative Time and the Popular Song

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03007766.2011.567918

1740-1712

Keith Negus,

Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity

Abstract Drawing from Paul Ricoeur's work on how the uncertainties of temporality are given coherence through narrative, this essay explores how popular songs mediate the human experience of time. It develops this idea via a brief illustrative study of how "Waterloo Sunset" refashions ordinary time through a narrative that celebrates the cyclical repetition of a moment, and suggests a more general tendency for pop songs to humanize the paradoxes of the "triple present" and to harmonize the tensions between phenomenological "lived time," "cosmic time," and "clock time" (categories drawn from Ricoeur). The essay outlines ways that a cyclical popular song aesthetic resonates with a broader series of temporal experiences understood in relation to concepts of ritual, accelerating social time, and plotless biography. In arguing for the importance of time and temporality in the study of popular music and self-identity, the essay is deliberately exploratory, seeking to open up a series of issues with the intention of complementing existing approaches to the relationships between music, identity, and social life. Acknowledgments Lyrics from "Waterloo Sunset" reproduced by kind permission. Words and Music by Ray Davies - © 1967 Davray Music Ltd & Carlin Music Corp, London NW1 8BD. All Rights Reserved. Notes [1] See discussions in Barry Barry, Barbara. 1990. Musical Time: The Sense of Order, New York: Pendragon. Print [Google Scholar]; Kramer Kramer, Jonathan. 1988. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies, New York: Schirmer. Print [Google Scholar]; Frith (ch. 7). [2] For a discussion of scientific attempts to grapple with the tensions between lived time, cosmic time, and measured time, see Gefter Gefter, Amanda. 19 Jan. 2008. Is Time an Illusion?. New Scientist, : 26–29. Print [Google Scholar]. [3] A dramatic contrast from the present tense of love can be heard in the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" with its insistent riff and refrain—stuck in a cycle of frustration, going nowhere, with little pitch range in voice. [4] At the time of writing this can be found at KindaKinks.net: Dave Emlen's Unofficial Web Site. 7 Feb. 2011. [5] For discussions of Davies's portrayal of English life and characters, a sense of place, and the adoption of particular voices and viewpoints, see Kitts; Gelbart Gelbart, Matthew. 2003. Persona and Voice in the Kinks' Songs of the Late 1960s. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128: 200–241. Print[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Baxter-Moore Baxter-Moore, Nick. 2006. 'This is Where I Belong'—Identity, Social Class, and the Nostalgic Englishness of Ray Davies and the Kinks. Popular Music and Society, 29(2): 145–165. Print[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. [6] I am thinking here of Graham Greene's Greene, Graham. 2005. Preface. The Third Man and Fallen Idol. 1950, London: Vintage. [Google Scholar] comments in his "Preface" to The Third Man: "To me it's almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script. One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form. One must have the sense of more material than one needs to draw on" (3). [7] Although it is outside the scope of this article, this distinction has become something of a commonplace in some musicology and criticism of Western art music whereby compositions from the classical and most frequently the romantic period have been characterized as goal-directed, teleological, and unfolding horizontally, and often contrasted with "postmodern" and/or minimalist and post-minimalist music which has often been characterized in terms of moment time, cyclical time, repetition without development, non-goal directed and more concerned with the "vertical" texture of sound. See Barry; Kramer. [8] Conrad's narrator evokes the Thames: "The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.…The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea.…What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!" (28–29). [9] Davies clearly chose the words for the song's lyrics very carefully, as his comments about "polishing" them attests. It is likely that he was familiar with the Christian notion of Paradise and Milton's Paradise Lost and the idea of a quest for solitary "inner" paradise while living in the human world. [10] Strictly speaking, a strophe is usually considered a verse unit or a stanza, and clearly many pop songs are based on much smaller loops. Recurring strophic patterns or loops, and repetition, are very important in popular songs. Any new listener will soon become familiar with a song's basic structures and melodic shape. A musician or songwriter can use this to draw the listener in by introducing subtle changes of tempo or texture or by playing with the dynamics of the song. [11] When I began the research for this essay I was anticipating that I would be able to identify clearly songs that narrate time as linear or teleological. However, while it is certainly possible to find lyrics that present a carefully crafted developing tale (notably in folk and country), the lyrical narrative is cut across by cyclical, repeating structures, strophes, melodies, and refrains that overwhelm and render highly ambiguous a "linear" teleology. While folk ballads and country songs frequently present fairly coherent stories that often identify cause and effect, the "plot" is often grasped via the cyclical, repeating experience of returning to the songs and listening to them, as recordings or performances, time and time again. As I have stated, this article is intended as exploratory. This is an issue that has been conspicuously absent from studies of narrative and it clearly requires further research and theoretical development. I am certainly not seeking to absorb all songs and genres into my argument here or to downplay the significant way that ballads narrate stories in a linear manner (even if not necessarily presented in chronological sequence). It is also possible to identify music that might suggest a sense of purpose, or a goal-directed structure. A songwriter may have deliberately employed musical devices to convey change and development, such as modulation to a different pitch, or the introduction of new sections with a different tempo or pulse, or incorporating dramatic edits and shifts of timbre, rhythm, or harmony. There are certainly examples of such tendencies—in progressive rock, at the arty end of the popular music spectrum, and even in some mainstream pop songs. But even those songs that might present themselves as viable "linear" candidates at some point will (it seems almost inevitably) give way to repetition and circularity. [12] For a useful concise schematic survey of some of the issues and debates see Couldry and Rothenbuhler's Couldry, Nick and Rothenbuhler, Eric. 2007. Simon Cottle on 'Mediatized Rituals': A Response. Media, Culture & Society, 29(4): 691–695. Print[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] critique of Cottle's approach to media rituals. For a more general survey of various approaches to ritual, see (Ritual, Ritual Theory). [13] A point that is also made by Nick Couldry Couldry, Nick. 2002. Media Rituals, London: Routledge. Print [Google Scholar] and discussed in his book on Media Rituals. [14] Although many songs do attempt to convey a plot (again, particularly in country and folk), the cyclical character of music tends to mean that such plots are presented as arguments or accusations rather than unfolding sequences of connected events. [15] In a discussion of expression in jazz, Robert Walser Walser, Robert. 1997. "Deep Jazz: Notes on Interiority, Race and Criticism". In Inventing the Psychological, Edited by: Pfister, Joel and Schnog, Nancy. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Print [Google Scholar] has argued that the notion of an interior private self is a modern idea, given momentum by Enlightenment and Romantic thought, and linked with the emergence of concepts of the individual subject during the 18th century and the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis in the late 19th century. Walser cautions that notions of interiority can be used as an "asocial way of understanding music," as a way of ignoring commercial imperatives and social structures and in a manner that "depends on naturalizing the values and desires of some people as 'deeper' and thus more prestigious than others" (26). Walser is concerned with the way such ideas have been used ideologically and restrictively to characterize the musical "expressions" of certain elevated black jazz musicians. Yet, notions of interiority need not be deployed to imply romantic, unmediated, essentialist qualities of artistic expression, unfiltered or unshaped by social relationships and structures. Walser himself refers to how, with the rise of modern industry, capitalism and urbanization "audiences came to understand art as a refuge from a dynamic, volatile social world, with its unstable processes of identity formation" (26). Whether or not there was no comparable notion of interiority prior to this epoch, such arguments about seeking refuge are intrinsically social, integral to how varying notions of self-understanding are linked to societal changes. Since the end of the 19th century creative artists have often been pre-occupied with an inner self—painters, photographers, stage and film set designers, composers of Western art music, novelists, and film directors have often attempted to convey a sense of internal or interior states of consciousness. If a turn to interiority is a retreat, it is acutely social in its refusal of the "public" self at any given moment.