Marc. How Do We Listen to Popular Music in Europe

7/30/2019 Marc. How Do We Listen to Popular Music in Europe

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JEPC 4 (1) pp. 29–35 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of European Popular Culture

Volume 4 Number 1

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jepc.4.1.29_1

KeywordsEuropean popular

musicpopular music

receptionlistening

verbal text lyrics Anglophone musicNon Anglophone

music

Isabelle Marc

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

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mi i ep?

abstract In this reflective article, I endeavour to raise a number of questions concerning popu-lar music reception in contemporary Europe. First, popular music is described as a

form of human communication where, it is argued, the verbal message should not betoo easily overlooked. In this sense, I present two paradigms of listening to popular music: one, which is centred on the music and another, which is verbally focused.Drawing from several examples, the ways in which the verbal message in a song isappropriated by an individual or by a community are shown to be determined bycomplex factors, among which vernacular culture and language are crucial. For thisreason, in the multilingual and multicultural European context, the study of thereception of popular music needs to draw on modern language, cultural and transla-

tion studies.

I would like to start by commenting on the question that serves as title to thisarticle. In a contemporary context, in which a farmer in la Corrèze, a highschool student in Dublin and a trendy business woman in Prague may beexposed simultaneously to Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’, it is highly likely thatthese very different people in such different locations receive and consumethis global hit in very different ways. Within the disciplines of modernlanguage studies and cultural studies, it is thus worth asking this questionand trying to answer to it. To this end, I wish to analyse its syntactic/semantic

structure. First, there is a semantic and grammatical subject, which refers to a



Isabelle Marc

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1. Alan Moore’s (2012)recent book is anexcellent reflection andcompendium of theways and the means bywhich popular songsmean.

2. The importance oflyrics in popular musichas been the object ofmany academic works.

3. To give only twoexamples of thecommercial successof 21 , Adele’s mostfamous album, inEuropean countries,it reached fifth andtwelfth position inSpanish sales chartsin 2011 and 2012,respectively, according

to Promusicae(Productores de Músicade España: http://www.promusicae.org/espanol.html).In France, the albumwas number one in2011 and still held aprominent positionin 2012 according tothe Snep (Syndicatnational de l’éditionphonographique:http://www.snepmusique.com/fr/

index.xml).

4. In fact, ignoring musiccompletely is ratheran entelechy. As Fabbri(2008) shows, musicalways has an impacton audiences. Forambient music issues,see also GarcíaQuiñones (2008).

community, the ‘we’, as well as to the individuals who conform to it. Second,there is the verb carried out by this subject, which consists of a wilful action –the act of listening – and which implies awareness in perception of musicas opposed to ‘hearing’. Third, there is the transitive object, popular music,

which can be replaced by its metonymic expression ‘popular songs’. Finally,the location phrase ‘in Europe’ refers to a political, cultural, linguistic andgeographical context, one which is intrinsically heterogeneous, polysemic andthe contours of which are highly disputed. All these elements are framed by the question mark and the interrogative pronoun ‘how’. In this reflective piece,I focus not on the object (the song) nor on its contents and/or meanings,1 buton the subject and his/her actions within a specific setting; in other words,I concentrate on the act of listening to popular songs in the contemporary European context.

The various processes of creation and reception of popular music may be considered a form of human communication, primarily aesthetic, which,in spite of its complexity and specificity, is structured according to the clas-sical yet complex communication scheme: a composite emitter or sender

(composer, lyricist, performer, sound engineer, producer, etc.) sends a multi-semiotic message (music, lyrics and performance) through mediators (mediaand institutional discourses) to a receiver (individual and social). In that sense,songs are not only musical but also verbal messages performed in a specificlinguistic code and perceived by a receiver (both situated within a specificsocio-cultural context) (see e.g. Frith 1987, 1988; Griffiths 2003; Astor 2009;Marc 2011).2 As in any communication act, the receiver can either apprehendthis message, understanding it in various ways, or ignore it; he or she canlisten to it or just hear it. The success or failure of the communication actdepends on various and complex factors: internal and external, individualand social, cultural and aesthetic, economic and ideological. However, one

of the main conditions for success, as in any communication act, is that boththe artist and her or his public share at least the same linguistic and there-fore the same cultural code. Yet, in the global world, where Adele’s lyricsare presented to anglophone and non-anglophone audiences alike, this is amuch complicated matter.3

Sociology provides us with a number of tools to understand how suchaudiences are structured regarding their cultural capital, their educationlevel, their social class or their gender. But some questions remain to beanswered, especially those related to individual reception of music. As Frenchphilosopher Peter Szendy asks in his book Écoute. Une histoire de nos oreilles:‘Que puis-je faire de la musique? Que puis-je faire avec elle? Mais encore: que

puis-je lui faire, que puis-je faire à la musique?’/‘What do I do with music? What can I do with it? One might also ask, what can I do to it , what canI do to music? (2001: 25, original emphases). Szendy, albeit without distin-guishing between lyrics and music (the referential and the non-referential),presents several actions that we, as subjects, can do with or to music: we cancopy it (by plagiarizing, stealing it or remixing it), we can rewrite it (adapting it, arranging it, transcribing it) and we can, of course, listen to it (2001: 25).I would add that we can also ignore it.4 Listening, for Szendy, is a form of responsibility towards the music, a critical action, a form of reflexivity to whichthe subject commits knowingly, listening consciously as an individual. Allthese things that we can do to music or with music are forms of appropriationin which the subject engages with music, signing his listening, putting hisor her signature on it, attaching his or her individuality to it. Among these



How do we listen to popular music in Europe?

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5. For a syntheticview of sociologicalapproaches to lyricsin popular music, seeFrith (1987: 77–106).

actions, listening is probably the essential form of musical experience and thusconstitutes one key issue in popular music studies.

Focusing on the verbal message, the lyrics, similar questions can argu-ably be asked: what do I do with lyrics? What do I do to lyrics? What do I uselyrics for? Of course, the listener can simply ignore the lyrics, yet there arealso plenty of ways in which the listener can engage with them: he or she canappropriate them, copy them, sing them, adapt them, as normally occurs

within fan groups. And he or she can obviously listen to them, with varying degrees of attention. These ways in which the verbal message of a song canbe noticed, understood and used by the listener cannot be overlooked, as isoften the case in sociological approaches to musical consumption, which tendto assume that lyrics are unimportant.5

Indeed, our everyday experience tells us that we can do many thingsto lyrics or with lyrics. We can just hear them when we do not understandthem, because they are sung in a foreign language, or when we are shopping,

watching TV or doing the dishes. Nevertheless, we can also listen to them in various ways and with different levels of attention. We might be at a concert

of our favourite band and still be worried about our day at work and not listento a word sung. We might also discover a beautiful verse while waiting foran appointment at the dentist. Indeed, every musical experience depends onspecific individual circumstances. Because individual experience can some-times seem too disparate, too complex, I comment on two concrete examplesin cinema and literature to illustrate how lyrics can be appropriated by the actof individual listening. The first one is found in the film Casablanca (Curtiz1942). When Sam begins to play the song ‘As Time Goes By’ (Wilson 1942),Ilsa and Rick listen to the famous line ‘You Must Remember This’ and do asthe imperative verse says: they remember their story of lost love. Indeed, Ilsaneeds the lyrics to fully evoke her memories: when the first chords of the

song are played, she asks ‘Sing it, Sam’. Rick, the addressee of Ilsa’s message,appears on-screen, livid and angry, transformed by the listening. The song –both music and lyrics – works as an echo, a metonym of love and of the filmitself. Both for the characters and for audiences, ‘As Time Goes By’ becomesan instrument for remembrance.

The second example, from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2009)is even clearer in showing individual use of lyrics. In the text, Ammu, thefemale adult protagonist takes the step that will set in motion the novel’stragic denouement after listening to ‘Ruby Tuesday’:

Ammu switched on her tangerine transistor. She sat there in the dark.

A lonely, lambent woman looking out at her embittered aunt’s orna-mental garden, listening to a tangerine. To a voice far away. Wafting through the night. […] To her. […] The words of the song exploded inher head.

There’s no time to lose,/I heard her say Catch your dreams before they slipaway/Dying all the time /Lose your dreams and you / will lose your mind.

Ammu drew her knees and hugged them. She couldn’t believe it.The cheap coincidence of those words. […] She remained sitting fora while. Long after the song had ended. Then suddenly she rose fromher chair and walked out of her world like a witch. To a better, happierplace.

(Roy 2009: 331–32)



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How is Ammu receiving the song here? What is she doing with it, to it?She is a young intelligent divorced woman, in charge of her two young chil-dren, living in a highly patriarchal traditional community in India, and whois looking for something to free her from her social and existential solitudeand marginalization. From her very specific situation, from her individual self,she appropriates the verbal message and the information allegedly conveyedby it. Although she consciously despises the song’s value, she cannot helpbeing dragged along by its words and the meaning she perceives in them.She knows that she is listening, she sees her listening, and even though she isaware of the fictional, unrealistic and commodified nature of the message, shestill follows it. She feels that the lyrics are a verbal message addressed espe-cially to her to the point that she obeys their imperative: ‘follow your dreams’,and so she rises to do just that. She is signing her listening and acting accord-ing to her own image of her listening.

At this point, we have to take into account the fact that the message and itscommand are uttered in English, the language, which in that context symbolizesethnic, cultural and gender domination. Yet Ammu, who is used to the situation

of linguistic and psychic diglossia in which she lives, is able to do something with the song, to use The Rolling Stones to liberate her dominated psyche. Thisexample, though fictional and extreme, shows how the subject’s individuality isindeed the determining factor for his or her engagement with the song, especially

when it comes to lyrics. It proves, thus, that the potential verbal message withina song only acquires an actual status when it is appropriated by a subject.

In these examples and in musical experiences, it is possible to identify atleast two different paradigms of reception of the verbal message by the subject(and by extension the communities) to which he or she belongs. First, a musi-cally centred one, in which words are absorbed by the music and are some-how deprived of their semantic meaning; in such cases, routinely found in our

consumption of music, the verbal communication act fails because the subjectis just hearing and not listening to the lyrics. In this sense, as Keith Negusputs it, ‘songs are experienced in the very way that they unfold as music intime, connecting with our bodies in a manner far removed from intellectualcontemplation’ (2007: 72). The second mode is verbally centred, in whichlyrics are perceived as verbal messages, with referential meaning which canprovoke intellectual and/or emotional responses; the communication act heresucceeds because the subject listens knowingly to the lyrics. The correlativesocial forms of reception stretch from the musically centred one, in situations

where the body response to music is privileged (parties, waiting rooms, shop-ping centres, etc.), to the verbally centred one, when a community agrees on

the meaning of a song, by adopting it as an anthem or rejecting it by means of censorship. Of course, in between these two extremes of song appropriationby individuals or communities, there may be as many combinations of musicand verbal listenings as there are listeners.

It is important to note that, although the message/object, according to thesemantic strategies of the sender (composer, lyricist, record company) can draw the subject’s attention either to the music (‘easy’ pop music and dance musicin general) or to the lyrics (songwriters’ music, soul), ideally, any song, fromthe ‘poetic’ to the ‘trivial’, can be appropriated in any of these ways depend-ing on its different mediations and on the circumstances of the receiver. Thetext is there to be apprehended by its listeners, as members of a community oras individuals. In fact, listeners in their specific context determine the successor failure of the act of communication. The act of listening by a subject is




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thus the process that validates the song as a verbal message in addition to –and alongside – any attention paid to the music. A communication act is thenestablished, where the receivers decode the verbal text that will then fulfillspecific functions (didactic, emotional, ludic and so on).

Everybody can think of circumstances in which the same song can beperceived and used in very different ways depending on the subject whoreceives it and on his or her precise context. For example, during the 1984

American presidential elections, Republicans tried to hijack ‘Born in the USA’,subverting its ‘original’ meaning as a condemnation of American military policy (Frith 1996: 165–66). Such a ‘subversive’ reading would have had very little incommon with that of Vietnam veterans – even though many of them actually

voted Republican, thus ‘failing’ to understand the song lyrics. Nevertheless, inboth these cases US audiences listened to and interpreted it according to theirown existential circumstances and political agenda. But, what would happen if

we took this song to contemporary Europe, where very different sets of existen-tial circumstances and political agendas operate, and almost 30 years since thesong was released? If we think of a British popular music scholar listening to it

on the radio while driving her car, the chances are that she would not pay muchattention to it even if she liked it and knew the lyrics and their political avatars.If we took it across the Channel, say to Britanny, where my grandmother mighthave heard it on the radio or on TV, neither the song nor its lyrics would meananything to her partly because she is not a rock fan but mainly because shedoes not speak English. What would happen in Berlin, in a party with 1980’smusic: how would audiences listen to ‘Born in the USA’? Would a DJ dare toplay such a song given the city’s history? Probably, most of the people over30 would recognize the song, know the lyrics and be able to sing along (giventhe average German’s level of English). Yet, they would not likely feel any patriotic identification with it. At most, it would work as a form of anamne-

sis, bringing back memories of their childhood. Finally, what would happen inMadrid were the song played on the radio at the McDonalds in the Puerta delSol? The immigrant worker sweeping the tables may not even notice that BruceSpringsteen’s voice was urging him to think about pacifism and the role of theUnited States in the world order. If the volume were high enough, the song may well reach a 20-year-old indignado in the square itself, who dismisses it asan old-fashioned song conveying capitalist values …. In fact, ‘Born in the USA’has probably already travelled to all these places, to every corner of Europe,from Gibraltar to Istanbul, from Cardiff to Vienna, and everywhere listeners

will have appropriated the song and its verbal message differently according totheir linguistic, socio-cultural, ethnic, gender and vital circumstances. Some of

them will have listened to the lyrics carefully, some others will have heard themas distant echoes, and some others will not even have noticed them. Carrying out this endless case study is obviously impossible, but these examples show usthat the subject, the listener, is the key to construct the meanings of the song,and that its verbal message is often central to this.

I deliberately chose ‘As Time Goes By’, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Born in theUSA’ as examples of how reactions to the verbal text depend mainly on one’sindividual circumstances because English is the international language of rock and pop, and because the popular music industry is dominated by theEnglish language. In a European context, however, only a small percentageof potential listeners are English native speakers. Therefore, we should askhow these linguistic and cultural communities perceive this Anglo-Americanmusical predominance. Without meaning any value judgment by that, I think



Isabelle Marc

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there is a very important difference between listening to a song in your nativelanguage and in your second tongue or in one you do not speak at all. If, asI contend, the listener’s circumstances are crucial, then his or her commandof the language and the culture in which the lyrics are sung will be essential.

We should then ask how do German or Polish people listen to English music?How do Italians listen to French songs? How do the Spanish listen to songsin Brazilian Portuguese? Given that songs contain a verbal message waiting tobe actualized by potential listeners, when studying popular music we need toconsider the role of the listener and the way in which he or she appropriatesthe verbal message conveyed by it. For that reason, the cultural and linguisticfeatures of both the listener and the message should be taken into account.Too many things, whether important or ‘trivial’, are said and interpreted inpopular music to be ignored.

Therefore, I believe that cultural and linguistic factors are indeed crucialat every stage of the process of creating and recreating songs as forms of human communication. From this point of view, I wish to conclude by asking more questions that need further discussion: Is popular music, in essence,

Anglophone? Does the predominance of English in popular songs imply aform of cultural colonialism? Or is it in fact problematized (or even neutral-ized) by individual appropriation? What is the place for the vernacular innational and regional pop music scenes? Are certain musical genres moresuitable than others for the use of vernacular? What does the use of vernacu-lar language imply, not only in terms of cultural identity, but also in terms of musical and market rhetoric and politics? Are popular music scenes forms of cultural diglossia? Indeed, tensions between the local and the global, betweentradition and modernity (wherever these may reside), between the individualand the social, seem to be core issues for the study of popular music receptionin contemporary Europe. What my reflections endeavour to do is to propose

to go beyond these fictional and hypothetical/conjectural examples and toundertake a systematic analysis of local reception of non-vernacular popularmusic genres in European contexts. To this end, the combination of musicol-ogy, sociology and communication studies alongside cultural and translationstudies would seem much profitable. Hopefully, this will help us address someof the questions raised above and better understand the logics of the cultures

we experience in our shared geographical and political space.

acKnowledgeMents

I would like to thank Diana Holmes, David Looseley, Russell Goulbourne,Paul Cook and Simon Warner for their help and support during the creation

of the European Popular Musics Cluster in the context of which this work issituated. I am also extremely grateful to Stuart Green for his very constructivecriticisms in the elaboration of this article.

references

Astor, P. (2009), ‘The poetry of rock: Song lyrics are not poems but the wordsstill matter; another look at Richard Goldstein’s collection of rock lyrics’,

Popular Music , 29: 1, pp. 143–48.Curtiz, M. (1942), Casablanca , USA: Warner Bros.Fabbri, F. (2008), ‘La escucha tabú’, in Marta García Quiñones (ed.), La música

que no se escucha. Aproximaciones a la escucha ambiental , Barcelona: Orquestadel Caos, pp. 19–36.




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Frith, S. (1987), ‘Why do words have songs’, in Avron Levine White (ed.),Lost in Music: Culture. Style and the Musical Event , London and New York:Routledge, pp. 77–106.

—— (1988), Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop , New York:Routledge.

—— (1996), Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music , Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

García Quiñones, M. (ed.) (2008), La música que no se escucha. Aproximacionesa la escucha ambiental , Barcelona: Orquesta del Caos.

Griffiths, D. (2003), ‘From lyric to anti-lyric: Analyzing the words in pop song’,in Allan F. Moore (ed.), Analyzing Popular Music , Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, pp. 39–59.

Marc, I. (2011), ‘De la poésie avant toute chose: pour une approche textuelledes musiques amplifiées’, Synergies Espagne , 4, pp. 51–61.

Moore, A. F. (2012), Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song , Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.

Negus, K. (2007), ‘Living, breathing songs: Singing along with Bob Dylan’,

Oral Tradition , 22: 1, pp. 71–83.Roy, A. (2009), The God of Small Things , London: Fourth State.Springsteen, Bruce (1984), Born in the USA , CD BSC01, Columbia.Szendy, P. (2001), Écoute. Une histoire de nos oreilles , Paris: Éditions de minuit.The Rolling Stones (1967), ‘Ruby Tuesday’, Between the Bottoms , LP 258.028, Deca.

Wilson, Dooley (Uncredited) (1942), ‘As Time Goes By’, in Michael Curtiz,Casablanca , USA: Warner Bros.

suggested cItatIon

Marc, I. (2013), ‘How do we listen to popular music in Europe?’, Journal of European Popular Culture 4: 1, pp. 29–35, doi: 10.1386/jepc.4.1.29_1

contrIbutor detaIls

Isabelle Marc lectures at the Department of French in the UniversidadComplutense in Madrid, Spain. Her research looks at contemporary Frenchpopular culture and popular music, and at cultural transfers in the French-Spanish domain. She has published on the aesthetics, intertextuality andtranscultural processes of French hip hop and chanson in general. Among her latest publications is ‘Une France passéiste? La nostalgie comme leitmo-tiv thématique et esthétique chez Georges Brassens’, a study of nostalgia asan aesthetic and cultural ingredient in contemporary French culture, which

appeared in French Cultural Studies in 2012. She is currently working on tran-sculturality in popular music within the European context.

Contact: Departamento de Filología Francesa, Facultad de Filología,Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid,Spain.E-mail: [email protected]

Isabelle Marc has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that wassubmitted to Intellect Ltd.



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Marc. How Do We Listen to Popular Music in Europe