Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics demonstrates how lyrical content can be used to discuss ways of living throughout our society. The book takes the reader through decades of music to explore concepts of language and existence. The lyrics that are discussed vary but stay within what Wright defines as the Rock and Pop genres. By doing so, the author’s writing becomes more focused and the analysis more constrained. While this book uses archetypes of language and emotion to focus on the lyrical content of popular songs, it also succinctly goes through many eras of music.
This is a work that thinks about rock and pop from the listener’s standpoint and how we, as audience members, can view and interpret many different songs. “The underlying argument of the book,” Wright explains, “is that close reading of rock and pop music lyrics enable one to discern key issues in the population’s collective psyche.” 1 This kind of close reading is very effectively demonstrated throughout the book. Through organizing the songs into different sections of the “collective psyche,” the book gives the reader a journey through lyrical time.
Love, desire, and intimacy lost start the sections, and the book continues by exploring, in turn, nostalgia, leaving and returning home, being an outsider, alcohol and drug use, mental illness, social and political critique, utopia and dystopia, prophetic voice, and visions of heaven and hell. These chapters all take various songs from the rock and pop genres, as Wright defines them, and links the lyrics to the emotional response generated. Herein lie a couple of difficulties with the text: the definition of rock and pop as well as the sporadic choice of songs.
What defines and classifies rock and pop is always up for argument, but the more difficult challenge is what borders these classifications. Does punk qualify as rock? Do boy bands create pop music? This is an issue with the discussion in the book from the start. The classifications and the links through lyrical content are very well done, but the starting point in defining the genres is a problematic one for anyone attempting such a project. Wright handles this well but needs to address it a bit more thoroughly.
The first challenge leads to a second: the personal choice of songs is so varied that more explanation of why these songs were chosen would be welcomed. The book reads like the choice of songs was made to fit the concept, not the other way around. With limited use of the lyrics, I assume due to copyright and publishing issues, this omission becomes even more of an issue. The reasoning for the choices works, generally, but more on this would have helped to define and strengthen the arguments and the links that Wright intends to make.
Overall, Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics gives the reader a well-thought-out starting point for the analysis of lyrical content in rock and pop music that makes you want to listen to the songs again to see how your emotional reaction was and is. The writing is well organized throughout and defines the different layers of lyrical content related to the collective psyche. Wright does well to show that these songs “…speak to the lived human experience.” 2 In doing so, he offers us a way to view the lyrical content of his selected songs that cover the past seventy years.
Footnotes
Wright Jr., Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics, ix.
Wright Jr. Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics, 11.