29

JEPC 4 (1) pp. 2935 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
Keywords
European popular
music
popular music
reception
listening
verbal text lyrics
Anglophone music
Non Anglophone
music
Isabelle Marc
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
How do we listen to popular
music in europe?
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 be
too 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 is
appropriated by an individual or by a community are shown to be determined by
complex factors, among which vernacular culture and language are crucial. For this
reason, in the multilingual and multicultural European context, the study of the
reception 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 this
article. In a contemporary context, in which a farmer in la Corrze, a high
school student in Dublin and a trendy business woman in Prague may be
exposed simultaneously to Adeles Rolling in the Deep, it is highly likely that
these very different people in such different locations receive and consume
this global hit in very different ways. Within the disciplines of modern
language studies and cultural studies, it is thus worth asking this question
and 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
JEPC_4.1_Marc_29-35.indd 29 4/3/13 6:27:05 PM
Isabelle Marc
30
1. Alan Moores (2012)
recent book is an
excellent reflection and
compendium of the
ways and the means by
which popular songs
mean.
2. The importance of
lyrics in popular music
has been the object of
many academic works.
3. To give only two
examples of the
commercial success
of 21, Adeles most
famous album, in
European countries,
it reached fifth and
twelfth position in
Spanish sales charts
in 2011 and 2012,
respectively, according
to Promusicae
(Productores de Msica
de Espaa: http://
www.promusicae.
org/espanol.html).
In France, the album
was number one in
2011 and still held a
prominent position
in 2012 according to
the Snep (Syndicat
national de ldition
phonographique:
http://www.
snepmusique.com/fr/
index.xml).
4. In fact, ignoring music
completely is rather
an entelechy. As Fabbri
(2008) shows, music
always has an impact
on audiences. For
ambient music issues,
see also Garca
Quiones (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 music
as 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 and
geographical context, one which is intrinsically heterogeneous, polysemic and
the 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
but
on 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 (media
and institutional discourses) to a receiver (individual and social). In that sense,
songs are not only musical but also verbal messages performed in a specific
linguistic code and perceived by a receiver (both situated within a specific
socio-cultural context) (see e.g. Frith 1987, 1988; Griffiths 2003; Astor 2009;
Marc 2011).
2
As in any communication act, the receiver can either apprehend
this message, understanding it in various ways, or ignore it; he or she can
listen to it or just hear it. The success or failure of the communication act
depends on various and complex factors: internal and external, individual
and social, cultural and aesthetic, economic and ideological. However, one
of the main conditions for success, as in any communication act, is that both
the 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 Adeles lyrics
are presented to anglophone and non-anglophone audiences alike, this is a
much complicated matter.
3
Sociology provides us with a number of tools to understand how such
audiences are structured regarding their cultural capital, their education
level, their social class or their gender. But some questions remain to be
answered, especially those related to individual reception of music. As French
philosopher Peter Szendy asks in his book coute. 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 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 can
I 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 can
copy 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 which
the subject commits knowingly, listening consciously as an individual. All
these things that we can do to music or with music are forms of appropriation
in which the subject engages with music, signing his listening, putting his
or her signature on it, attaching his or her individuality to it. Among these
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How do we listen to popular music in Europe?
31
5. For a synthetic
view of sociological
approaches to lyrics
in popular music, see
Frith (1987: 77106).
actions, listening is probably the essential form of musical experience and thus
constitutes 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 use
lyrics for? Of course, the listener can simply ignore the lyrics, yet there are
also plenty of ways in which the listener can engage with them: he or she can
appropriate 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 can
be noticed, understood and used by the listener cannot be overlooked, as is
often the case in sociological approaches to musical consumption, which tend
to assume that lyrics are unimportant.
5
Indeed, our everyday experience tells us that we can do many things
to lyrics or with lyrics. We can just hear them when we do not understand
them, 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 listen
to a word sung. We might also discover a beautiful verse while waiting for
an appointment at the dentist. Indeed, every musical experience depends on
specific individual circumstances. Because individual experience can some-
times seem too disparate, too complex, I comment on two concrete examples
in cinema and literature to illustrate how lyrics can be appropriated by the act
of individual listening. The first one is found in the film Casablanca (Curtiz
1942). 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 as
the imperative verse says: they remember their story of lost love. Indeed, Ilsa
needs 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 Ilsas 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 film
itself. Both for the characters and for audiences, As Time Goes By becomes
an instrument for remembrance.
The second example, from Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things (2009)
is even clearer in showing individual use of lyrics. In the text, Ammu, the
female adult protagonist takes the step that will set in motion the novels
tragic 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 aunts orna-
mental garden, listening to a tangerine. To a voice far away. Wafting
through the night. [] To her. [] The words of the song exploded in
her head.
Theres no time to lose,/I heard her say Catch your dreams before they slip
away/Dying all the time /Lose your dreams and you / will lose your mind.
Ammu drew her knees and hugged them. She couldnt believe it.
The cheap coincidence of those words. [] She remained sitting for
a while. Long after the song had ended. Then suddenly she rose from
her chair and walked out of her world like a witch. To a better, happier
place.
(Roy 2009: 33132)
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Isabelle Marc
32
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 who
is looking for something to free her from her social and existential solitude
and marginalization. From her very specific situation, from her individual self,
she appropriates the verbal message and the information allegedly conveyed
by it. Although she consciously despises the songs value, she cannot help
being 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 is
aware of the fictional, unrealistic and commodified nature of the message, she
still 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 its
command are uttered in English, the language, which in that context symbolizes
ethnic, 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. This
example, though fictional and extreme, shows how the subjects individuality is
indeed 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 within
a 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 at
least 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 subject
is just hearing and not listening to the lyrics. In this sense, as Keith Negus
puts it, songs are experienced in the very way that they unfold as music in
time, connecting with our bodies in a manner far removed from intellectual
contemplation (2007: 72). The second mode is verbally centred, in which
lyrics are perceived as verbal messages, with referential meaning which can
provoke intellectual and/or emotional responses; the communication act here
succeeds because the subject listens knowingly to the lyrics. The correlative
social 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 appropriation
by individuals or communities, there may be as many combinations of music
and verbal listenings as there are listeners.
It is important to note that, although the message/object, according to the
semantic strategies of the sender (composer, lyricist, record company) can draw
the subjects attention either to the music (easy pop music and dance music
in general) or to the lyrics (songwriters music, soul), ideally, any song, from
the 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. The
text is there to be apprehended by its listeners, as members of a community or
as individuals. In fact, listeners in their specific context determine the success
or failure of the act of communication. The act of listening by a subject is
JEPC_4.1_Marc_29-35.indd 32 4/3/13 6:27:06 PM
How do we listen to popular music in Europe?
33
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 then
established, where the receivers decode the verbal text that will then fulfill
specific functions (didactic, emotional, ludic and so on).
Everybody can think of circumstances in which the same song can be
perceived and used in very different ways depending on the subject who
receives 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: 16566). Such a subversive reading would have had very little in
common with that of Vietnam veterans even though many of them actually
voted Republican, thus failing to understand the song lyrics. Nevertheless, in
both these cases US audiences listened to and interpreted it according to their
own 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 the
song 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 much
attention 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 might
have heard it on the radio or on TV, neither the song nor its lyrics would mean
anything to her partly because she is not a rock fan but mainly because she
does not speak English. What would happen in Berlin, in a party with 1980s
music: how would audiences listen to Born in the USA? Would a DJ dare to
play such a song given the citys history? Probably, most of the people over
30 would recognize the song, know the lyrics and be able to sing along (given
the average Germans 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 in
Madrid were the song played on the radio at the McDonalds in the Puerta del
Sol? The immigrant worker sweeping the tables may not even notice that Bruce
Springsteens voice was urging him to think about pacifism and the role of the
United 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 as
an 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 to
their linguistic, socio-cultural, ethnic, gender and vital circumstances. Some of
them will have listened to the lyrics carefully, some others will have heard them
as distant echoes, and some others will not even have noticed them. Carrying
out this endless case study is obviously impossible, but these examples show us
that 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 the
USA as examples of how reactions to the verbal text depend mainly on ones
individual circumstances because English is the international language of
rock and pop, and because the popular music industry is dominated by the
English language. In a European context, however, only a small percentage
of potential listeners are English native speakers. Therefore, we should ask
how these linguistic and cultural communities perceive this Anglo-American
musical predominance. Without meaning any value judgment by that, I think
JEPC_4.1_Marc_29-35.indd 33 4/3/13 6:27:06 PM
Isabelle Marc
34
there is a very important difference between listening to a song in your native
language and in your second tongue or in one you do not speak at all. If, as
I contend, the listeners circumstances are crucial, then his or her command
of 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 songs
in Brazilian Portuguese? Given that songs contain a verbal message waiting to
be actualized by potential listeners, when studying popular music we need to
consider the role of the listener and the way in which he or she appropriates
the verbal message conveyed by it. For that reason, the cultural and linguistic
features of both the listener and the message should be taken into account.
Too many things, whether important or trivial, are said and interpreted in
popular music to be ignored.
Therefore, I believe that cultural and linguistic factors are indeed crucial
at 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 a
form of cultural colonialism? Or is it in fact problematized (or even neutral-
ized) by individual appropriation? What is the place for the vernacular in
national and regional pop music scenes? Are certain musical genres more
suitable 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, between
tradition and modernity (wherever these may reside), between the individual
and the social, seem to be core issues for the study of popular music reception
in contemporary Europe. What my reflections endeavour to do is to propose
to go beyond these fictional and hypothetical/conjectural examples and to
undertake a systematic analysis of local reception of non-vernacular popular
music genres in European contexts. To this end, the combination of musicol-
ogy, sociology and communication studies alongside cultural and translation
studies would seem much profitable. Hopefully, this will help us address some
of 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 is
situated. I am also extremely grateful to Stuart Green for his very constructive
criticisms in the elaboration of this article.
references
Astor, P. (2009), The poetry of rock: Song lyrics are not poems but the words
still matter; another look at Richard Goldsteins collection of rock lyrics,
Popular Music, 29: 1, pp. 14348.
Curtiz, M. (1942), Casablanca, USA: Warner Bros.
Fabbri, F. (2008), La escucha tab, in Marta Garca Quiones (ed.), La msica
que no se escucha. Aproximaciones a la escucha ambiental, Barcelona: Orquesta
del Caos, pp. 1936.
JEPC_4.1_Marc_29-35.indd 34 4/3/13 6:27:06 PM
How do we listen to popular music in Europe?
35
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. 77106.
(1988), Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop, New York:
Routledge.
(1996), Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Garca Quiones, M. (ed.) (2008), La msica que no se escucha. Aproximaciones
a 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: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 3959.
Marc, I. (2011), De la posie avant toute chose: pour une approche textuelle
des musiques amplifies, Synergies Espagne, 4, pp. 5161.
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. 7183.
Roy, A. (2009), The God of Small Things, London: Fourth State.
Springsteen, Bruce (1984), Born in the USA, CD BSC01, Columbia.
Szendy, P. (2001), coute. Une histoire de nos oreilles, Paris: ditions 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,
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suggested cItatIon
Marc, I. (2013), How do we listen to popular music in Europe?, Journal of
European Popular Culture 4: 1, pp. 2935, doi: 10.1386/jepc.4.1.29_1
contrIbutor detaIls
Isabelle Marc lectures at the Department of French in the Universidad
Complutense in Madrid, Spain. Her research looks at contemporary French
popular culture and popular music, and at cultural transfers in the French-
Spanish domain. She has published on the aesthetics, intertextuality and
transcultural processes of French hip hop and chanson in general. Among
her latest publications is Une France passiste? La nostalgie comme leitmo-
tiv thmatique et esthtique chez Georges Brassens, a study of nostalgia as
an 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 Filologa Francesa, Facultad de Filologa,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid,
Spain.
E-mail: isabelle.marc@filol.ucm.es
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 was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
JEPC_4.1_Marc_29-35.indd 35 4/3/13 6:27:06 PM
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