Reading Song Lyrics

Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and of a 2000 song by ‘jungle punk’ collective Asian Dub Foundation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity.

”Lars Eckstein’s Reading Song Lyrics deserves a place among the key works op popular music studies. […] the author securely combines scattered existing notions of words in songs to create a practical methodological framework for the analysis of song lyrics. […] To simply state that the book is a pleasure to read would be an understatement. It is rare to find an academic work written in such a clear and eloquent manner throughout. […] Reading Song Lyrics ranges among the best attempts yet at coming to grips with song lyrics. All the components necessary to facilitate a breakthrough in the way we analyse words in songs should now be at hand. This remarkable book has delivered its part, and in grand style.” - Yngvar B. Steinholt, Tromso University, Norway, in: The Journal of Popular Music 30.3, 2011