Introduction: The challenges of the song lyric

At the end of his recent article in Language and Literature on Kate Bush’s song ‘Running Up That Hill’, Massimiliano Morini warns that, unless ‘the multimodal stylistician’ finds ways of keeping all the elements that make up a song together (including sung words, melody, harmony and rhythm), ‘the words of songwriting will remain a dead language for contemporary stylistics’ (Morini, 2013: 295). It is indeed most strange that contemporary stylisticians, and particularly those of a multimodal persuasion, should be so silent on song lyrics. The toolkit of stylistics has been unpacked and applied to many other domains outside literature, but there has been very little on song lyrics. In the almost 100 issues of this journal published since 1992, there have been five articles dealing with the song lyric – as well as Morini’s on Kate Bush, two articles by Greg Watson on the notion of love in the lyrics of early female blues artists (Watson, 2006; 2012), an article by Marcus Bridle on ‘Male blues lyrics 1920 to 1965’ (Bridle, 2018) and an article by Rod Hermeston on ‘The Blaydon Races’ (Hermeston, 2011). The same is true outside this journal. With one or two exceptions, stylisticians have simply not engaged with the song lyric. Where they have, they have tended to focus exclusively on the lyrics and to ignore the sonic and visual context in which the lyrics are situated (see Gavins, 2007: 61–64; Steen, 2002). As a consequence, the sound of silence amongst stylisticians when it comes to song lyrics is deafening.

Song lyrics have been largely ignored in literary studies, too, with Christopher Ricks’ (2003) work on Bob Dylan (Dylan’s Visions of Sin) being more or less the only exception. Indeed, the extremely muted response among literary scholars to the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Dylan in 2016 was symptomatic. Whether we consider the award justified or not, it does represent a highly significant moment in the discipline of literary studies, challenging as it does the very category of literature and raising the dauntingly difficult question of value. That this moment largely passed literary scholars by is depressingly unsurprising. What we have instead is quite a large body of work on popular music that takes a sociological or anthropological approach (the key text here is Bennett et al., 2006). While certainly interesting and worthwhile in itself, this approach has little to say about how song lyrics work as pieces of text, and about how they represent an integral part of the whole multimodal experience. In a similar vein is Way and McKerrell’s (2017) recent edited collection, Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest, which, combining critical discourse analysis with Halliday’s functional grammar, assumes that ‘linguistic and visual choices reveal broader discourses articulated in texts’ (McKerrell and Way, 2017: 7). Although perhaps a step in the right direction, the nine chapters in the book do not deal in any great depth with the textuality of song lyrics, their focus being much more on (social and political) context (see West, 2018).

This Special Issue is therefore intended to revive the words of songwriting for contemporary stylistics. This is important for two reasons. First, because song lyrics are an integral part of popular music, which itself is a domain of human experience that has enormous significance. Since its emergence through revolutionary media at the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly since its explosion in popularity and availability in the late 1950s, popular music as we now know it has probably been the most significant cultural form created and experienced by the human being – to such an extent, indeed, that it is now more or less omnipresent. I think that it is important that we, as stylisticians, have something to say about it. Second, because song lyrics have value. It is not for nothing that popular music has such a wide and profound appeal; and song lyrics, as the most salient element, quite clearly have a crucial role to play in how people experience popular music. I do not want to plead the case here that song lyrics are valuable because they are a kind of ‘poetry’. They might share a number of common features, but song lyrics also have their own specificity, derived precisely from the fact that they are an integral component of a multimodal experience: they are sung and accompanied by music, and, when performed live, they are connected to a real physical human being whom we can see. What I want to argue instead is that song lyrics have their own value as lyrics, and that we should judge them by their own criteria – not as ‘poetry’, but as ‘song lyrics’ written to be sung and to be accompanied by music. At its best, popular music can provide the listener with an experience that is truly transcendental, and song lyrics are clearly integral to such an experience. To discover how that power works should be a priority for stylisticians.

In Tom Shippey’s (2017) introduction to Craig Williamson’s recent translation of The Complete Old English Poems, there is an account of ‘Grave 32’ in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Snape in Suffolk, England. Here, about 1400 years ago, a man was buried with a hearpe (lyre or harp) ‘cradled in the crook of the left arm, almost as though in preparation for performance’. This ‘warrior-poet’ was almost certainly a scop, someone who, sitting at his lord’s feet, ‘Plucks with his harp-nail, sweeps over strings, / Shapes song: hall-thanes long for his melody’ (Shippey, 2017: xv). This should remind us that the modern popular song actually revives a very old tradition of poetry, a multimodal tradition that saw the poet performing the song in accompaniment to music. What we now know as poetry is therefore a relatively recent and relatively simple monomodal form, something that emerged with Gutenberg’s printing press; in comparison, the song lyric is a much older, and, being multimodal, a much more complex form.

The articles in this Special Issue are intended, then, to continue the process begun by Morini (2013) of exploring what a stylistic approach to the song lyric might look like. In the first article, Matthew Voice and Sara Whiteley draw on different cognitive theories (particularly those dealing with attention), as well as on work in music psychology, to account for the fact that different listeners can have such diverse experiences of the same song. The song that they deal with is ‘Hey Ya!’ by the US hip-hop band OutKast, which, released in 2003, is characterised by a radical dissonance between its musical element on the one hand, and its lyrics on the other. It is precisely this dissonance, Voice and Whiteley argue, that allows for such a wide range of listener experiences with regard to the song. In the second article, Lisa Nahajec draws on theories of negation, as well as on pragmatics and text world theory, to explore the complex inferencing processes that the listener undergoes when listening to the 1975 hit song ‘I’m Not in Love’ by the UK band 10CC. How is it, Nahajec asks, that the listener knows that the musical persona in the song is, in fact, in love, even though he repeatedly asserts that he is not? For Nahajec, it is the song’s complex multimodality that interferes with the listener’s normal pragmatic processing of the lyrics, and thereby leads the listener to an interpretation of the song that runs counter to what the song actually says.

The third article is by Clara Neary, who adopts Lawrence Zbikowski’s theory of musical grammar to analyse the 1997 song ‘Paranoid Android’ by the UK band Radiohead. Zbikowski’s approach to music draws heavily on cognitive linguistics (in particular, conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory), and provides a way of understanding music as inherently meaningful, based as it is on ‘sonic analogs’, which themselves derive from image schemas. By using Zbikowski’s theory, Neary can provide a painstaking analysis of the music and lyrics of Radiohead’s song, and of how the two interact, and thereby account for the feelings of frustration and alienation that listeners experience when listening to the song. In the fourth article, Hazel Price and Jack Wilson argue for the benefits of using an approach based on relevance theory (as opposed to, for example, conceptual metaphor theory) to account for the extended metaphor that the US singer Tom Waits uses in his song ‘Emotional Weather Report’ (1975). Analysing each verse in turn, Price and Wilson show how the listener builds up an understanding of the extended metaphor ‘the weather is Waits’ emotions’ through various elements of schematic/encyclopaedic knowledge.

These first four articles deal with a single song and use instruments from the stylistics toolkit to provide an account of the song’s lyrics within their multimodal context. In the fifth and final article, Paul Flanagan takes a different – though related – approach. Adapting Paul Simpson’s (1999) USA-5 model for studying accent in vocal performance, Flanagan carries out a diachronic study of how the lead singer of UK band the Arctic Monkeys, Alex Turner, performs the band’s songs over a 13-year period (2006–2018). What Flanagan discovers is that Turner’s vocal performance changes markedly during this period, particularly with regard to his use of non-standard speech variants that are iconic of northern (and working-class) British identity, which he then relates to the notion of ‘authenticity’.

Clearly, there is much more to be done in this field, and the articles in this Special Issue suggest ways that stylisticians might approach the complex and exciting world of the song lyric. We hope, in other words, that the Special Issue is just a start.