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Original Articles

Where is Here? An Issue of Deictic Projection in Recorded Song

Pages 145-182 | Published online: 21 Apr 2010
 

Abstract

This article develops a theoretic base for the hermeneutics of spatialization in recorded popular song, drawing from work in ecological perception, cognitive linguistics, proxemics and some music semiotics. It uses this base in order specifically to observe a range of uses of the deictic expression ‘here’ in the lyrics of popular songs, and from this observation to construct a typology. It draws from a very wide range of Anglophone genres, stretching across most of the previous century and beyond, exploring the varying extents to which the music that encompasses such lyrics helps to fix a type of location indexed by ‘here’. Such an exercise forms part of a larger programme to establish a grounding that permits a reasoned response to Ricoeur's call to interpret the text by means of disclosing a ‘possible way of looking at things'.

Notes

1Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX, 1976), 92.

2I am exceedingly grateful to my co-workers on that project, Patty Schmidt and Ruth Dockwray, for their penetrating critiques of earlier versions of this essay, and to members of the project workshop for further insightful comments and ideas; and I have also learnt much (and incorporated perhaps a few of the ideas) from this article's referees, Ian Biddle and Robert Fink.

3Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT, 2002), 82.

4Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (New York, 2007), 28.

5Jody Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Mediations’, The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 129–50 (p. 130).

6 Jody Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Mediations’, The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 133.

7Jody Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Mediations’, The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 130.

8Allan F. Moore, Patricia Schmidt and Ruth Dockwray, ‘The Hermeneutics of Spatialization in Recorded Song’ (forthcoming).

9Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text (2nd edn, Aldershot, 2002), 120–6.

10Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT, 2005).

11See Ruth Dockwray and Allan F. Moore, ‘Configuring the Sound-Box 1965–72’, forthcoming in Popular Music, 29 (2010), on the diagonal mix; and David Gibson, The Art of Mixing (2nd edn, Boston, MA, 2005), for the cross-genre norm.

12Schemas are ‘mental representations of the properties that concepts usually have’. Mike Rinck, ‘Spatial Situation Models’, Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking, ed. Priti Shah and Akira Miyake (New York, 2005), 334–82 (p. 337).

13David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 103.

14Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 104. Azimuth, in this context, refers to what I am calling laterality.

15Elena Rusconi et al., ‘Spatial Representation of Pitch Height: The SMARC Effect’, Cognition, 99 (2006), 113–29 (p. 113). The experiments reported in this article dealt with the apparent misdirection of decades of earlier studies, where respondents had generally been asked to estimate the spatial height of pitches, thereby prejudging the conclusion. I am very grateful to Nicola Dibben for bringing this area of research to my attention. Peter Doyle is typical of writers who state that ‘to call shorter wavelength, higher frequency sounds “high” is mostly convention’ (Echo and Reverb, 27). It appears that simple convention may play less of a part than we hitherto supposed.

16This concept forms part of Philip Tagg's interpretative apparatus: Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Music, <http://www.tagg.org/xpdfs/semiotug.pdf> (accessed 17 April 2008).

17For example, James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, MA, 1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (London, 1979).

18Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (New York, 2005).

19As argued in Allan F. Moore, ‘Interpretation: So What?’, Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Aldershot, 2009), 411–25.

20Eric F. Clarke, ‘Subject-Position and the Specification of Invariants in Music by Frank Zappa and P. J. Harvey’, Music Analysis, 18 (1999), 347–74.

21Allan F. Moore, ‘The Persona/Environment Relation in Recorded Song’, Music Theory Online, 11 (October 2005), <http:www.music-theory.org/mto/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.moore_frames.html>.

22I refer for instance to issues of cadence, of modulation, of melodic contour, of speed and direction of harmonic motion, and of how they are read in the light of the specifics of a song's narrative.

31Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 29 (emphasis original).

23Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension: Man's Use of Space in Public and Private (London, 1969), 110–19. The term ‘interpersonal distance’ is currently more common than proxemics in the psychology literature, referring to the conceptual area which Hall initiated, and which continues its useful life almost in its original formulation.

24Doyle, Echo and Reverb, 57, incorporating his quotation from Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tinfoil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph (2nd edn, Indianapolis, IN, 1976).

25Contra George Lakoff (Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago, 1987), 215–16), we do not see that ecological perception and cognitive sciences are at odds: see Moore, Schmidt and Dockwray, ‘The Hermeneutics of Spatialization in Recorded Song’. See also Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge, 2005), who has recourse to both ‘affordance’ and ‘image schemata’ (pp. 19–20).

26Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Constructions in Natural Language (Cambridge, MA, 1985).

27Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thoughts and Language (Cambridge, 1997).

28This model has been employed for musicological discussion in Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford, 2002).

29Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, IL, 1987) and The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, IL, 2007); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, IL, 1989), 90ff.

30Leonard Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

32By convention, in the literature, individual schemas are capitalized.

33Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 87. His discussion of BALANCE can be found on pp. 73–98.

34George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL, 1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, 1999).

35For instance, Janna Saslaw, ‘Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 40 (1996), 217–43, and Mark Johnson and Steve Larson, ‘“Something in the Way She Moves” – Metaphors of Musical Motion’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18 (2003), 63–84.

36Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, 2001), esp. pp. 132ff.

37‘Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)’, Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007).

38In the sense given by Clarke, Ways of Listening.

39Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 93.

40Operative distinctions between these characteristics are explored in Allan F. Moore, ‘Categorical Conventions in Music-Discourse: Style and Genre’, Music and Letters, 82 (2001), 432–42, and in Franco Fabbri, ‘Browsing Music Spaces: Categories and the Musical Mind’, Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, ed. Allan F. Moore (Aldershot, 2007), 49–62. I do not accept the common assumption that style is an aspect of genre, but consider that each operates relatively autonomously.

41For example, I have in mind the extended demonstration of such genre characteristics offered in Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music (Middletown, CT, 2006).

42Originally 1956. The Best of the Sun Sessions (Music Club, 1994).

43Doyle, Echo and Reverb, 199.

44From Doyle's subtitle; see note 10 above.

45Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH, 1997).

46Steve Jones, Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication (London, 1992).

47Albin J. Zak III, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

48For example, William Moylan, The Art of Recording: Understanding and Crafting the Mix (Woburn, MA, 2002).

49For example, Maureen Droney, Mix Masters: Platinum Engineers Reveal their Secrets for Success (Boston, MA, 2003).

50I am grateful to Ian Biddle for pointing out the importance of this direction of thought.

51See Marina Yaguello, Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics (Oxford, 1998).

52 Blood on the Tracks (Columbia, 1975). A similar comment could be applied to the remainder of the tracks on the album, although ‘Jack of Hearts’ is particularly extreme.

53David Boucher, Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (New York, 2004), 93.

54Originally 1956. The Magic of Alma Cogan (EMI, 1997).

55Of course, at the time, it would have been a tape recording of a train, but it functions in the same way as the samples with which we are nowadays familiar.

56Well, I hear it left to right, which I suspect is a factor of the localization of brain functions with respect to left and right hemispheres.

57 Roxy Music (Virgin, 1972).

58Howard Horne and Simon Frith, Art into Pop (London, 1987), 118.

59Examples of such stereotypical oboe description in relation to ‘Laugh! Faithless one!’ from Act 2 of Handel's Ariodante may be found at <http://www.eno.org/src/baylis_ariodante.pdf>; to Saariaho's La passion de Simone at <http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article2061246.ece>; and to Barber's Violin Concerto at <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E2DA133AF935A25751C0A96F958260> (all accessed 22 April 2008). Many others could be cited. I make these references as a telescoped form of Philip Tagg's interobjective comparison technique.

60PENDULUM is not a widely referenced image schema (as far as I am aware, it does not appear in the work of Mark Johnson, Mark Turner or George Lakoff), but it is discussed in Christopher Schmidt, ‘Metaphor and Cognition: A Cross-Cultural Study of Indigenous and Universal Constructs in Stock Exchange Reports’, Intercultural Communication, 5 (2002), <http://www.immi.se/intercultural> (accessed 22 April 2008), and elsewhere. I return to this schema below.

61 Skylarking (Virgin, 1986).

62‘The clock at Waterloo station is well known as a meeting place for people going on blind dates’, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A11682317>; ‘the landmark meeting point, like the famous clock at Waterloo station […]’, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2030682,00.html> (both accessed 22 April 2008).

63 Vehicles and Animals (EMI, 2003).

64 Bells, Boots and Shambles (Castle, 1973).

65Phasing is a production technique that was widely used in the 1960s to connote psychedelia.

66Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 207.

67Susan Henking, review of Johnson, The Body in the Mind, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 58 (1990), 503–6 (pp. 505–6). My thanks to Patty Schmidt for this reference.

68David Sless, In Search of Semiotics (London, 1986), 158.

69David Sless, In Search of Semiotics (London, 1986), 99.

70Clarke, Ways of Listening, 51.

71Clarke, Ways of Listening, 40.

72Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes (New York, 2003). Unfortunately, in their experiments, they did not note differences of response according to gender (p. 117), since they were interested simply in the degree of similarity of response within a shared culture.

73Diane F. Halpern and Marcia L Collaer, ‘Sex Differences in Visuospatial Abilities’, Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking, ed. Shah and Miyake, 170–212 (pp. 176–7). Note that this is no more than a (statistical) tendency; though male, I use landmarks almost exclusively.

74Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Cambridge, 2003).

75Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Cambridge, 2003), 20.

76See, for instance, Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (London, 1984), 203–4.

77Gillian Brown, Speakers, Listeners and Communication: Explorations in Discourse Analysis (Cambridge, 1995), 108.

78Sally McConnell-Ginet, ‘Language and Gender’, Language: The Socio-Cultural Context, ed. Frederick J. Newmeyer (Cambridge, 1995), 75–99 (p. 82).

79Allan F. Moore, ‘The Act You've Known for All These Years: A Re-Encounter With Sgt. Pepper’, Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles, ed. Olivier Julien (Aldershot, 2008), 139–46.

80Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition, 294.

81Brown, Speakers, Listeners and Communication, 110.

82Explored in Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN, 1994).

83Originally 1969. Best of T. Rex (A&M, 1998).

84An inert personic environment does not intervene between the listener and a conventionalized, matter-of-fact reading of the persona; see Allan F. Moore, ‘The Persona/Environment Relation in Recorded Song’.

85Originally 1968. She Flies Like a Bird (Castle, 2002).

86 Revolver (Parlophone, 1966).

87Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (London, 1995), 168.

88Originally 1963. Gold (Universal, 2003).

89Andrew Moore, Pragmatics, 2001, <http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/pragmatics.htm>, (accessed 14 December 2009).

90 A Song for Me (Mystic, 1970).

91Perhaps surprisingly, bearing in mind its historical location, there seems to be no slang reference here to a mule as smuggler of drugs.

92Comparison with ‘Summer's Cauldron’ (above) demonstrates that atmospheric heat can be specified both by too much precision (the artificial vibrato of the string pad) and too little, depending on the listener's perspective: the first specifies, for example, the way sweaty clothing seems to constrict one's movements in excessive heat, while the second specifies, for example, the loosening of that clothing one undertakes in order to try to escape the effect of such heat.

93Originally 1980. The Godfather (Universal, 2002).

94Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City (London, 1983), 235.

95Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 21–3.

96 John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1968).

97As is my invariable practice, music examples, all of which are analytical transcriptions from the relevant recording, cite performer only. This is simply intended as a means of identification, for I argue throughout that the text instantiates the identity of the persona only, not that of any writer or producer. The identification of a popular-music track as that of an individual writer, producer or performer is a means of distributing money, not a reliable indicator of any labour involved.

98 Electric Ladyland (MCA, 1968).

99Albin J. Zak III (‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation “All Along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2005), 599–644 (p. 631)) hears the downbeat a quaver later than I do. His analysis allows the maintenance of a regular 4/4, but I would maintain that the unsettling nature of Hendrix's recording is amplified in my hearing, whereby the regular metre is interrupted as early as bar 4, with an additional half-beat.

103Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop (London, 1989), 150 (emphasis original).

100Albin J. Zak III (‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation “All Along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2005), 599–644 (p. 631)) hears the downbeat a quaver later than I do. His analysis allows the maintenance of a regular 4/4, but I would maintain that the unsettling nature of Hendrix's recording is amplified in my hearing, whereby the regular metre is interrupted as early as bar 4, with an additional half-beat., 631.

101Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 85 and 21–3.

102William Echard, ‘An Analysis of Neil Young's “Powderfinger” Based on Mark Johnson's Image Schemata’, Popular Music, 18 (1999), 133–44 (p. 141).

104 Grace of the Sun (Stormy Forest, 2004).

105 Rattle and Hum (Island, 1988).

106This is true, I think, of every cover I have noticed, with the exception of a recent one by the Fratellis, which uses both articulations at different points in the track. Radio 1: Established 1967 (UMTV, 2007).

107 It's a Wonderful Life (Capitol, 2001).

108 Abbey Road (Parlophone, 1969).

109Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 113–17.

110 How Long is Forever (Castle, 1974).

111Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create their Classic Albums (Houston, TX, 2006), 522.

112 Peter Gabriel I (Virgin, 1977).

113For instance, at <http://rec.horus.at/music/gabriel/Songs/here-comes-the-flood> (accessed 22 April 2008).

114‘The Monkees' (1966), Greatest Hits (Rhino, 1995).

115Gillett, The Sound of the City, 331.

116This concept also forms part of Philip Tagg's interpretative apparatus; see note 16.

117I refer specifically to the film.

118 Disco Mania (Crimson, 1976).

119I assume these two, normal lead singers for Tavares, were indeed singers on this track, but have been unable to corroborate this.

120 Space Oddity (EMI, 1972).

121See Allan F. Moore, ‘In a Big Country: The Portrayal of Wide Open Spaces in the Music of Big Country’, Contemporary Music Review, 13 (Musica Significans: Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Musical Signification, ed. Raymond Monelle, 1998), 1–6. Doyle locates the origin of this signifier in mid-century cowboy films, where a shout may echo from distant mountains. Echo and Reverb, 106ff.

122Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York, 1995), 10.

123Elmore James, ‘Dust my Broom’ (originally 1951). Dust my Broom (Charly, 2006).

124Originally 1931. The Voice of the Mississippi (Prism, 1996).

125Originally 1954. Queen of Gospel (Music Club, 1993).

126For example, Ebony Three, Buster Bailey and Sam Price Trio, Gospel Truth (Castle, 2000). They make the most of the injunction to the chariot to ‘swing’.

127Originally 1947. Queen of Gospel (Music Club, 1993).

128Originally 1933. Down Hearted Blues (Golden Options, n.d.).

129Originally 1927. Match Box Blues (Indigo, 1998).

130Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues (Urbana, IL, 1977), 63.

131Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge, 1984), 266–71.

132Originally 1929. Atlanta Strut (Snapper, 2004).

133Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (London, 1972), 126.

134Originally 1958. Good 'Uns: The Classic Cobra Recordings (Demon, 2000).

135Originally 1954. Father of Chicago Blues (Primo, 2006).

136 Spirit of the Century (Real World, 2001).

137 Kimono my House (Island, 1974).

138 The News (Castle, 1979).

139My own literary reference point is Anna Kavan's terrifying Ice (London, 1973), but this reference may well be purely personal.

140Originally 1939. Goodnight Sweetheart (Disky, n.d.).

141David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (2nd edn, Berkeley, CA, 2000), 54–5.

142 Yellow Moon (A&M, 1989).

143The refusal of Rosa Parks (a co-worker of Martin Luther King) to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, highly influential in the US civil rights movement, the ‘mother’ of which she was later dubbed by the US Congress.

144Forman, The 'Hood Comes First, 170.

145 Return of the Boom Bap (Jive, 1993).

146Taken from 4' 20" of their cover of The Animals' ‘Inside – Looking Out’. Grand Funk (Columbia, 1969).

147 Home Invasion (Rhyme Syndicate, 1993).

148 Rock Island (Chrysalis, 1989).

149Michele Kort, ‘Judee Sill's Holiest Dreams’, sleeve-note to Abracadabra, collected recordings (Rhino, 2006).

150 Judee Sill (Asylum, 1971).

151Halpern and Collaer, ‘Sex Differences in Visuospatial Abilities’, 185.

152Of course, a great deal of listening would be necessary to substantiate this assumption, and it is outside the purview of this particular article.

153 Sheer Heart Attack (EMI, 1974).

154Serge Lacasse, ‘Listen to my Voice’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 2000), 139, note 216.

155Allan F. Moore and Ruth Dockwray, ‘The Establishment of the Virtual Performance Space in Rock’, Twentieth-Century Music, 5 (2009), 63–85.

156Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 119–21.

157 Paranoid and Sunburnt (One Little Indian, 1995).

158Originally 1941. Greatest Hits (RCA, 1999).

159Single release (Parlophone, 1968). It was used as the theme tune to the first four of her Saturday night television series.

160 Loveless (Creation, 1991).

161On <http://www.mybloodyvalentine.net> (accessed 25 April 2008), a piece of journalism originally published in Hype in 1992.

162 The Woman in Me (PolyGram, 1995).

163 Spirit (Sony, 2007).

164Originally 1970. At the Close of a Century (Motown, 1999).

165As demonstrated in Allan F. Moore, ‘What Story Should a History of Popular Music Tell?’, Popular Music History, 1 (2006), 329–38.

166Originally 1967. Four Tops at their Very Best (Universal, 2002).

167Originally 1967. Motown Gold (Universal, 2001).

168Originally 1976. Endless Summer (Mercury, 1994).

169Originally 1938. The Best of Vera Lynn (Delta, 2003).

170Originally 1945. Sentimental Journey (Carlton, 1996).

171Originally 1942. Sentimental Journey (Carlton, 1996).

172 Peace in Our Time (Track, 1988).

173 Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966).

174Johnson, The Body in the Mind, xiv.

175 Greatest Hits (RCA, 1984).

176 You've Come a Long Way, Baby (Skint, 1998). Fat Boy Slim is the stage name of Norman Cook.

177According to the (anonymous) Wikipedia article on the track, the lyric ‘Right Here, Right Now’ is taken from the sci-fi film Strange Days, spoken by actor Angela Bassett at 1:39:08; see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Here_Right_Now_(song)> (accessed 6 November 2008). Identification of the source will impact on the track's import, but does not affect this persona's spatial placement.

178 James Gang Rides Again (ABC, 1970).

179 Doubt (Food, 1990).

180According to the band's own publicity: <http://www.jesusjonesarchive.info/1990.php> (accessed 25 April 2008).

183Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79.

181The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967).

182Unstudied, that is, except through content analysis, which so often seems to forget that lyrics are only one aspect of song.

184 Hopes and Fears (Island, 2004).

185 Sentimental Journey (Carlton, 1996).

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