Songs as Texts

Abstract

Abstract Most contemporary popular music takes the form of song (even acid house), and most people if asked what a song “means” refer to the words. In examining what the words do mean we can follow two obvious strategies, treating songs either as poems, literary objects which can be analyzed entirely separately from music, or as speech acts, words to be analyzed in performance. But in listening to the lyrics of pop songs we actually hear three things at once: words, which appear to give songs an independent source of semantic meaning; rhetoric, words being used in a special, musical way, a way which draws attention to features and problems of speech; and voices, words being spoken or sung in human tones which are themselves “meaningful,” signs of persons and personality. In this chapter I will focus on words and rhetoric; in the following chapter I will consider the voice.

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