Lit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music

273 Pages·2022·3.077 MB·English

by  Ryan Hibbett (editor)

Lit-Rock

Lit-Rock
Literary Capital in Popular Music
Edited by
Ryan Hibbett
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2023
Copyright © Ryan Hibbett, 2023
Each chapter copyright © by the contributor, 2023
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 241 constitute an extension of
this copyright page.
Cover design: Louise Dugdale
Cover image © Jean-Marie Périer/Photo12.
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Hibbett, Ryan, editor.
Title: Lit-rock: literary capital in popular music / edited by Ryan Hibbett.
Description: [1st.] | New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Discusses the
relationship between popular music and literature in conjunction with
the connection between high and low art”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022009460 (print) | LCCN 2022009461 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501354694 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392856 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501354700 (epub) | ISBN 9781501354717 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501354724
Subjects: LCSH: Music and literature. | Music and language. |
Popular music–History and criticism. | Popular music–Philosophy and aesthetics.
Classification: LCC ML3849 .L586 2022 (print) | LCC ML3849 (ebook) |
DDC 780/.08–dc23/eng/20220322
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009460
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009461
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5469-4
ePDF: 978-1-5013-5471-7
eBook: 978-1-5013-5470-0
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
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To my brother David Brent Hibbett, through whose cassette-player and
bedroom wall came all sorts of beguiling new sounds. And to my children,
Jordan and Chase: You ignite and rejuvenate my interest in words and
music, books and songs more than you know!

Contents
Introduction: Conspicuous Listening: Literature, Rock, and
the Pop Omnivore 1
Part I Authorship and Authenticity
1 David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, the Cut-Up, and Rock’s Unfinished
Revolution Barry J. Faulk 35
2 Kurt, Kathleen ‘n’ Kathy: Cut-and-Paste and the Art of Being for
Real Patricia Malone 49
Part II Craft and Confession
3 Joni Mitchell and the Literature of Confession David R. Shumway 65
4 Pop Star vs. Harvard Professor: The “Amateur” Poetry of Taylor
Swift Weishun Lu 78
5 Personae Non Grata: Dramatic Monologue and Social Pathology in
Select Randy Newman Songs John Kimsey 91
Part III Aesthetics, Movements, Technology
6 New Wave, European Avant-Gardes, and the Unmaking of Rock
Music Chris Mustazza 109
7 Cycling on Acid: The Literariness of Altered Experiences in Psychedelic
Rock Tymon Adamczewski 120
Part IV Signs and Mediations
8 A Portrait of the Artist in a Pop Song: Images of James Joyce in Popular
Music Kevin Farrell 137
9 “Hand in Glove”: Punk, Post-punk, and Poetry Martin Malone 152
Part V Nation and Narrative
10 Under an American Spell: U2’s The Joshua Tree in the Shadow of
Flannery O’Connor Scott Calhoun 169
viii Contents
11 Rock, Hard-Boiled: The Mekons and American Crime Fiction
Peter Hesseldenz 182
12 When Poetry Meets Popular Music: The Case of Polish Rock Artists in
the Late Twentieth Century Marek Jeziński 196
Part VI Identity and Discourse
13 “It’s Our Version of Almost Famous”: Toward a Reimagined Canon of
Rock Criticism Kimberly Mack 213
14 Limits of the Literary: Rethinking Allusions in Pop Music Pat O’Grady 227
Acknowledgments 241
List of Contributors 242
Index 245
Introduction
Conspicuous Listening: Literature, Rock, and
the Pop Omnivore
Just when it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. When
one considers that both the bubblegum and art-rock traditions are epitomized by the
very same Beatles; that a great many rock bands, as Simon Frith and Howard Horn
have shown, were the products of formal art school educations;1 that MTV in its
heyday devoted massive chunks of programming to “alternative” music;2 and that the
2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to singer-songwriter legend Bob Dylan,
one can begin to see the story of rock as the mainstreaming of the high/low binary itself.
Far more relevant, in the rock era, than the split between classical and popular music is
the latter’s own, diversely manifested claims to seriousness, depth, and distinction. To
put it another way, rock music very quickly became a space in which the construct of
high and low, of the tasteful individual and the cultureless mass, was widely instituted
and made functional through the resources, purchases, conversations, and experiences
of everyday life; the trope of distinction was effectively loosened from simplistic class
divisions and put to work—effectively and ineffectively, naively and skillfully—within
communities who may have previously seen themselves as culturally homogenous.
And though the new social currency meant opportunity for some previously excluded
individuals, it was promptly invested in as well from above, and toward the emerging
stock of the omnivore. Today, nearly every artist and fan has, in some way, shape, or
form, a stake in the game, whose terminology, signs, and structures have been fully
extrapolated into the globalized culture industry.
Literature has long provided a key resource in popular music’s claim to prestige,
as well as its role—across an ever-widening range of genres—in mediating the
institutionalized, disproportionately accessible realm of high art. Some examples not
accounted for in the chapters that follow? Steppenwolf, the Doors, and Soft Machine
take their names, respectively, from books by Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, and
William Burroughs; Beyoncé recites the poetry of Warsan Shire on her visual album
Lemonade; progressive-rock gurus Rush, in addition to their tour de force “Tom
Sawyer,” engage works by Ayn Rand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ernest Hemingway,
Williams Faulkner, and David Foster Wallace; the teen-anthem-penning Beach Boys
reproduce, as a kind of choral round on their beleaguered Smile project, William
Wordsworth’s paradox “the child is father of the man”; hip-hop artist Loyle Carner takes
his album title “Not Waving, But Drowning” from poet Stevie Smith, whose recorded