Negus — “Authorship and the Popular Song”

Author: Keith Negus
Title: “Authorship and the Popular Song”
Year: 2011
Publisher: Oxford University Press (in Music & Letters 92, no. 4)
Type: Essay

“Authorship and the Popular Song” is an essay by the musicologist Keith Negus, of Goldsmiths, University of London, published in Music & Letters in 2011. Negus begins from musicology and music criticism, which still explain songs by their individual authors. The sociology of Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu, by contrast, traces artworks and reputations to the cooperation and competition of many people. Roland Barthes proposed moving a text’s meaning from its author to its reader. Negus mediates between musicology and sociology. From the study of fiction he takes terms that separate a song’s real author from its implied author and its narrator, and from studies of performance and stardom he adds the persona and star image of the songwriter or singer. He calls telling these apart “unbundling” the author. He applies the terms to two songs by Ray Davies of The Kinks. The essay’s other examples include copyright disputes, a Bob Dylan song that some people in Greenwich Village took to be aimed at them, and what songwriters say in interviews. Later, Shuwen Qu and Jian Xiao used the essay’s idea of unbundling to study Chinese folk singer-songwriters, and Ross Cole, taking up its objection to locating a song’s meaning in the performer’s persona, argued that songwriting can be autobiographical.

In January 2010 Negus held two posts at Goldsmiths: professor of musicology and co-director of its Centre for Contemporary Music Cultures.¹ Music & Letters published the essay in its November 2011 issue, volume 92, number 4, at pages 607 to 629.²

In the essay’s own summary, “within the broad field of musicology and music criticism the author as creative originator and authority remains a central figure.” Negus advocates “an intermediate or mediating approach, attuned to the insights from both musicology and sociology,” and suggests “ways that concepts drawn from the study of fictional narrative can be used to ‘unbundle’ the author.”³

The essay’s first section, “From author to auteur to absence,” opens on two copyright cases. George Harrison was found to have copied “He’s So Fine” “subconsciously” in “My Sweet Lord”, and John Lennon settled out of court over his use of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” in “Come Together”. Because the court judged Harrison’s copying unintended, and the settlement did not oblige Lennon to credit Berry, each kept, in Negus’s account, his “integrity” as a writer. Negus counts these among “many other cases” in which a songwriter paid but kept the writing credit: “Deals that allow songwriters to retain their authorial integrity as originators.” Performers may win critics’ praise, but the composing songwriter, Negus writes, “holds a privileged place in the economic and cultural valuing of creativity.”⁴

Negus writes that Becker treated art as “collective action,” and that Bourdieu described a “field of cultural production” whose “struggles over position, power and prestige” are part of how both artworks and reputations are made.⁵ Negus finds value in this sociology, “particularly to contest naïve notions of genius,” but remains “sceptical of the sociological approach due to the way it simply reverses the imbalanced account of the relationship between individual creativity and social context.”⁵ A note in the essay connects their work to Jason Toynbee’s term “social authorship.”⁵

Barthes’s essay on the death of the author, in Negus’s summary, argued for “a shift in processes of interpretation” that included a move “from author’s intentions to reader’s insights.” In practice, Negus argues, the idea became “a means of elevating the prominent interpretations of the professional critic and scholar,” despite the “apparently democratising and pluralistic sentiments that have often accompanied the application of this new orthodoxy.” Negus, following Seán Burke, writes that denying the author “merely emphasizes the author’s presence.”⁶ To describe the author who emerges from these arguments, “more obviously mediated, constructed and contested” and “a far more tentative author,” Negus turns to the study of narrative and to studies of songs and stardom.⁶

From Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Negus takes the distinctions between a text’s “real author,” its “implied author” and its narrator. In Booth’s terms, as Negus uses them, the implied author is the sensibility a text conveys, which need not match the beliefs of the person or people credited as its author, and the narrator is the voice that tells the story.⁷

Songs, Negus writes, “regularly address the listener in the second person,” and listeners often take the “you” of a love song to mean themselves. The “you” can also be someone else, as in Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” (1965). Mark Booth wrote in 1981 that the song had “surely found no guilty listener who identifies with the addressee,” and Simon Frith agreed in 1996. Negus answers that “biographies and memoirs suggest” otherwise: Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, and Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out!, were among those who “thought that it was directed at them personally.” The lyric names no one, but the title names 4th Street, and West 4th Street was where Dylan had lived and had first played at Gerde’s Folk City. In Negus’s words, “It is the title that contains the sting.”⁷

Like novels, Negus writes, “all songs contain characters.”⁸ But in a song the implied author, the narrator and the characters “cannot be isolated from the public persona or star image of the songwriter or singer.”⁸ For the persona Negus draws on the musicologist Allan Moore’s idea of the “musical persona” and on studies of stardom, and cites Philip Auslander’s studies of performance as allowing that persona “to be extended to encompass all aspects of performance.”⁸

Negus applies these terms to two songs that Davies wrote for the Kinks. “The Village Green Preservation Society”, the opening song of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968), is in Negus’s phrase a “sunny kitsch pastoral,” and “Lola” (1970) is “a song of the nocturnal city,” narrated by “a man, confused about gender, sexuality and desire.” Davies is the real author of both. Negus does not need, he writes, “to make any assumptions about the life, beliefs, experiences and values of the real author,” since the implied author “can be interpreted from the songs.” The two songs’ implied authors hold “contrasting social and political views,” and their narrators are “equally contrasting characters.”⁹

Negus answers Lee Marshall, who wrote in a study of Dylan that “what we see is all there is,” and Frith, who took what Negus calls “a similar, but more nuanced position.” That position, Negus writes, “ignores the way that knowledge of the real author informs interpretations of the personae.”¹⁰

Negus writes that some songwriters work to dissolve the distinctions between real author, implied author, narrator and star image. He suggests that the songs of Joni Mitchell and Lennon’s first songs after the Beatles can be interpreted as “a Romantic challenge” that seeks to “recover the fragmented self,” and that much rap blurs the same distinctions in its insistence on “being real.”¹¹ Others, among them Kate Bush, Steely Dan, Tom Waits and Randy Newman, “quite consciously craft a critical distance and open up spaces between these categories.” Among the means Negus names are “irony, camp and artifice, satire.”¹¹

In interviews, liner notes or remarks to a concert audience, songwriters aware of these gaps “may attempt to use contextual or ‘paratextual’ information to influence the way their songs are interpreted in these terms,” Negus writes. They may also use the interview “to obfuscate.” Negus’s example is Waits, for whom the tactic is routine and who once said, “I usually try to bury anything autobiographical.” PJ Harvey, told by an interviewer that many of her songs had been “written specifically from your point of view,” answered that she adopts “the techniques a writer would adopt.”¹²

In the epilogue, “unbundling the author,” Negus takes the idea of the bundle from philosophy, from David Hume’s view of the mind as a bundle of perceptions to John Perry’s self as a “bundle of cognitive complexes.” The essay finds the bundle in the music business too, in the contract that treats a recording artist as a “bundle of rights” and in albums sold as separate tracks after digital downloading. If musicians can unbundle their public personas and their albums, Negus suggests in closing, “we (critics, musicologists, scholars) can also unbundle the idea of the author.”¹³

Later scholars have applied and extended the essay. Shuwen Qu and Jian Xiao, writing in the Journal of Popular Music Studies in 2020 on singer-songwriters in contemporary Chinese folk music, drew on Negus’s idea of “unbundling” to question “the myth of singer-songwriters’ heightened investment of authorship.”¹⁴ Ross Cole, in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2021, argued that songwriting can be autobiographical. He wrote that Negus “has questioned the precept that somehow ‘truth and meaning resides in the performance persona or star image,’” and proposed to go further and “do away with the clumsy and distracting concept of personification” where it serves “either to disenchant or needlessly to obfuscate” an author’s relation to a song.¹⁵

Key contributions

• An account of the songwriter as an author “mediated, constructed and contested,” studied through both musicology’s attention to the real author and sociology’s attention to struggles for recognition.
• The argument that the death of the author, in practice, moved authority over a text’s meaning from its author to professional critics and scholars.
• Terms for unbundling the songwriter into real author, implied author, narrator, characters, and the persona and star image of the writer or singer.
• The argument, against Lee Marshall and Simon Frith, that what listeners know of a songwriter’s life can inform the persona they hear, and a distinction between songwriters who blur real author, implied author, narrator and persona and those who keep a critical distance between them.
• The bundle as a model of authorship, taken from philosophy’s bundle theories of the self and from the music business’s bundles of rights.

See also

• Performing Rites — Simon Frith’s 1996 study of musical value, whose account of sincerity in performance the essay answers
• Making Popular Music — Jason Toynbee’s 2000 study of creativity in popular music, whose term “social authorship” the essay, in a note, traces to Bourdieu and Becker
• The songwriter-performer divide — the debate over who is the author of a record