adaptation

Music: Ride: Waves (1992)

This afternoon I'm giving a "talk" for a speaker series in the department of psychology. It's a well-known department with a number of very highly regarded social scientists. I was invited to speak about my work with popular music, which for the last six years has been primarily from the perspective of teaching. I do plan on writing my next (as opposed to current) book on popular music, but that's a couple of years down the road. For this talk, however, I ended up taking my book notes and cobbling something together.

The difficultly of putting together this talk reminded me of one of the benefits of being housed in a Communication Studies department: I have been reared in a field that places as much (if not more) emphasis on empirical, social scientific research as it does rhetoric. Over a decade of hearing "talks" and giving them in this environment has trained me to speak across a wider background. At the same time, I could expect my social scientist colleagues to have some background in rhetoric. I realized when I was speaking with the scientist who invited me to speak that I had much more of a challenge: when discussing what I might present, he asked, "is it empirical?"

What I decided to do is set up, at the outset, a sort-of chummy discussion about argument expectations in our respective fields. I worry I'm being needlessly condescending (though I don’t need to be). So a quickie: is this condescending? To needlessly self-depreciating? Audience analysis in this situation is just a tad difficult. Here goes:

When Sam first approached me to hang out with y'all today, my first instinct was to share with you my current research on a book in progress about cultural morning and human speech. Much of that project is based in Lacanian psychoanalysis and, by extension, Freudian concepts of mourning and melancholy, the uncanny, and so forth. It then occurred to me I would be speaking to psychologists and you might not be in love with Freud and Lacan as much as I am. And because the best first impression is born of love, I decided to fast-forward a bit into something I think we might all love: music.

Popular music is the topic of the next book I plan to write, but I don't anticipate sitting down to draft it for another year or two. Having poked around the Goslab website a bit, I anticipate this project would nevertheless be of some interest to many of you, and perhaps even help to forge some connections for cross-disciplinary work.

The title of this book is tentatively, "Rhetoric and Popular Music," and it will be based on a course I have taught by the same name at three different universities for about a decade now. I know some of you are working on the relationship between musical preference, personality, and identity, and so what I thought I might do is share with you my approach to the study of popular music.

Before I begin, however, it behooves me to explain what I suspect are different expectations toward our research. As a student, I was trained in both analytical and intepretivist traditions. In more familiar terms, my background is in philosophy, and more specifically, in the continental philosophical tradition. My philosophical leaning is toward structuralism and phenomenology, and much of my work is informed by the German critical tradition. In less familiar terms, I was trained as a rhetorician, or as someone who is a philosophically informed cultural critic.

Rhetoricians study rhetoric, of course, but getting anyone to agree just what rhetoric is akin to herding cats. For our purposes lets just say rhetoric is language-based persuasion, anything representational that has influence on someone. Usually, you'll find me defining rhetoric as the study of how representations influence people to do what they ordinarily otherwise would not do.

Anyway, what this means is that the biggest difference between what most of you and I do for a living obits types of evidence. As a critic my job is to make persuasive arguments using whatever evidence I find useful. As a scientist, you are required to back up your claims with empirical data. You and I both persuade, it's just that there are different expectations about how we go about the process.

These different expectations and their corresponding scholarly reward systems, of course, influence the types of arguments us critics get to make. I think it's fair to say that we rhetoricians are much more likely to argue grandiose things, such as I have done recently in a publication on the iPod: basically, my coauthor and I argued that the iPod is a publically sanctioned dildo that actualizes the human sex drive. This is the reason why many cultural conservatives describe public iPod use as a form of masturbation.

Ah hah, I see some of you are already excited by my freedom from empirical evidentiary standards! I've even published on more racy topics, such as the fear of castration, the rhetoric of poop, and most recently the way in which Freemasonry is central to the American electoral process. But I promise not be so provocative as all of that today---unless, of course, you want me to. What I will do, is spend a majority of my time describing and defining what I am calling "A rhetorical theory of music," or perhaps "a rhetorical approach to music." I suspect you'll find this approach demands some degree of empirical investigation, and I look forward to hearing your ideas about how we might go about that.

To begin, however, I'd like to take some time to advance a sample demonstration of the kind of thing rhetoricians typically do with music. In other words, I want to begin with a sample rhetorical criticism of music. Then, I want to discuss why this traditional approach to understanding the appeal of music is limited, if not fatally flawed.

Rhetorical studies is, basically, an offshoot of literary studies that began to evolve as its own discipline the early twentieth century. If you want to know why Communication Studies is such a crazy field of social scientists and we rhetoricians, you have to go back to this formative history. I don't care about that, really, except to underscore the fact that rhetoricians distinguished themselves from literary critics by first disavowing the high culture/low culture divide. That is, popular texts were defended as a legitimate to study, just as important as, for example, Pride and Prejudice. Second, we rhetoricians tend to approach our texts not objectively, but subjectivity. And as most of us will readily admit, musical enjoyment is nothing if not subjective.

So, what the hell: let's go with one of my subjective favorites. The object I present to you is a song by Lauryn Hill titled "To Zion." I want to rhetorically analyze this song because it speaks to me deeply. In fact, the first thing I will tell you about this song is that it makes me cry. There is something about it that moves me to a deep emotional place, and I'm going to try to explain to you how this is the case . . . .