I've got a few ideas rolling around in my head about this week's readings/recordings. I've had the rhetorical triangle on my mind (not only because Evelyn drew it on the board, but because I will draw it for my 111 students next week). I’m interested in where we apply the ethos angle of the triangle to the recordings.
We've talked a bit in class about how performance changes our reception of a song and how the singer's interpretation enhances (or maybe interferes with) its rhetorical value. For me, at least, I tend to put the performer in the rhetor position, rather than the songwriter (whose name, if known, is tucked somewhere among the liner notes).*
After reading about Leadbelly's life, from several different (conflicting) perspectives, I'm curious about how our knowledge of a singer's life interferes with how we interpret a song? Do we assume (like so many readers assume short stories consist of thinly disguised memoir) that we’re learning about the singer’s life when we hear them perform? How can we apply this to our ability to view these songs as rhetoric?
(This is similar to the “separating the artist from the art” question.)
Also, how is this complicated by our “romanticism” of the artist? (I’m thinking about Mullen’s article now.) Is it possible to listen to these songs without a dose of romanticism that might hinder our ability to look at them objectively? Is it even possible to look at them objectively?
*Except for those rare cases, when considering popular music, or "mainstream" (as opposed to indie?), that we have a song delivered to us by its lyricist/composer. Stevie Wonder pulls this off for us, but there aren't too many like him in that regard.
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A pentagon, perhaps, is our best bet for something resembling the true rhetorical relationship found within any song. While the Pathos and Logos remain fairly locked (they is what they is), Nora’s question of with-whom to place Ethos is the tricky one. Is it the performer, the writer or -- as we see this week -- the person(s) picking, packing and presenting the Art and Rhetoric to you. Interesting that Nora gives the nod to the singer, where I’d lean mostly toward the songwriter. When does the producer come in, I wonder? Or the Lomaxs deciding to hit the record button. [Sorry I’m not on hand to see Evelyn’s presentation. I’m assuming the “rhetor” position Nora speaks of is the same as Ethos???] Regardless, it is, indeed, a tangled web.
ReplyDeleteAny piece of art, the audience must – at some point – decide how much he/she/it wants to know and what it known will effect both the expectations and "reading" of that Art. I would argue that true objective criticism is (a) not even possible and (b) an almost complete waste of our time. Can “Go Down Old Hannah” be read objectively? Sure. But why? To study and understand WHAT, exactly? Out of any historical, social or personal context, the song has almost no value at all.
A new born baby might be able to listen to a sing objectively. Might. Beyond that, any Audience is coming with some previous notions of words, sound, experience, etc. that all go toward the impression and significance of Art. Question: How much does the Audience want to know to help shape interpretation? Depends on the audience, perhaps.
Level 1: Listen to a song. Process.
Level 2: Listen to a song. Study words. Process.
Level 3: Put the song in historical/social context. Listen to a song. Study words. Process.
Level 4: Study writer/performer. Put the song in historical/social context. Listen to a song. Study words. Process.
Level 5: Explore recording (backing musicians, producers, etc.) Study writer. Put the song in historical/social context. Listen to a song. Study words. Process.
Each of you could add, I’m sure, 10 more levels and a dozen in between (Hell, Guthrie got to hang with the guy to form his own subjective history)…and each would surely bring a deeper and DIFFERENT “reading” of the exact same song(s).
Is any "better"??? Or are they all just DIFFERENT? And, I wonder, at what point does the Artist’s intent get stomped over in the name of analysis. Smith noted that Ledbetter’s prison years were written about so often that “new listeners tend to overemphasize them.” I just did a bizarre Ionesco play with my high school freshman this very week (I teach) and from Day 1, I’ve made a big deal about getting to know more about these various authors and their times to help shape better understanding of the text. Whoops. THeir reading of the play became entirely focused on the fact that Ionesco’s parents divorced when he was young – which has NOTHING to do with the damn play. Yet, the play to my horror suddenly became some strange allegory for divorce and the loss of his father. I must half applaud them… but this Audience (young, perhaps) had TOO MUCH information and this, I allow, got in the way of both the author’s and text’s intentions. And yet…
Gallis Pole by Ledbetter has one meaning.
Gallis Pole (the EXACT SAME words) by William Blake has another.
Shouldn't, then, I know SOMETHING about the author?
Gallis Pole heard by Nora has one meaning.
Gallis Pole (the EXACT SAME song) heard by me has another.
Gallis Pole with 0.00 information on Ledbetter or American History has one meaning. A fine meaning.
Gallis Pole after studying bio and history has another. Better?
Which are closer to Ledbetter’s Intention?
ReplyDeleteFor even if he were sitting across the table saying, “Hey, Geoff, these were my intentions,” it would only help shape MY overall understanding/translation of the song. The New Critics hope to strip away most of my newly-proposed pentagon and too much of the triangle to support/justify the intentions of all Art.
CAN Art be understood and useful without all the baggage. Of course. Would that be a disservice to the Purpose of Art. Of course.
PS: With respect to Stevie, I’d argue that MOST popular artists do, in fact, write/deliver their own songs. For every Taylor Swift, there are a dozen mainstream artists who do their own stuff… The charts are still mostly singer/songwriters.
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ReplyDeleteWell said, Geoffrey. Your thinking is similar to my own, just expressed more clearly.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree fully with the mythologized notion of objectivity. Does that mean that it is an unworthy goal to try for? Of course not. I am sure most would agree. But I always come back to that basic, Burkean idea of the 'terministic screen'---the ideological constraints that we each individually bring to our interpretation of symbols---and the importance of attempting to acknowledge or identify our rhetorical position. This is all airy and lofty theorizing, and something that can't be done in solitude (collaborative work/peer editing becomes increasingly useful to help us individually recognize our subjectivities).
As for the question about our knowledge of the artist 'interfering' with our interpretation of a song/work of art---to me, this is something I have to take on a case-by-case basis. With blues/Delta blues, there is a discourse of suffering atttached (the blues, in essence). This might be "reading" the blues in far too conventional a manner, but the ethos of the performer is bound to the imagined authenticity of the performer's experiences. If, from a song, I can reasonably corroborate something in the life of the performer (sort of basic biographical criticism), then I tend to have a more fulfilling musical experience.
Personal case in point: Blind Willie Johnson. I don't think we listened to Blind Willie (I know he's on the Babylon Box set, but later discs). Before knowing anything of his life situation, through my terministic screen came hints of temporal/spiritual suffering. This begs another discussion of the rhetoric of voice timbre, but that gravely, bull-frog rumble unnerved me. After learning that he spent his last days in the bones of a burnt-out house, before succumbing to pneumonia from a rain-soaked bed, my listening changed. It is inevitable that there will be interference, but sometimes I welcome it.
I wonder what it would be like to listen to Lead Belly (Wikipedia says he preferred it split into two words and I always trust Wikipedia) without knowing his mythology. I knew nothing about most, if not all, of the folk songs and ballads we listened to earlier, but I can't say I listened to them objectively. They still came in the package of folk ballads/songs so they still came to me with all the preconceived notions that that label brings. Like with Geoff's students, am I reading too much into Lead Belly's past and looking at it through a filter of his biography? Would my take on Lead Belly's songs be different if I didn't know about his time in prison? Lomax probably thought so, which is probably why he sold Lead Belly as an ex-con musician.
ReplyDeleteHis background does bring different meaning to the songs. The Animals' version of "House of the Rising Sun" has a different ethos than Lead Belly's. Nirvana's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" has a different ethos as well. Kurt Cobain tried to borrow some of that ethos by telling the audience that it's a Lead Belly song.
The struggle in poetry classes is to remove the author from the writing (like Nora said about the disguised memoirs). It's hard in poetry and fiction, and almost impossible to remove the singer from the rhetor position because I am listening to/watching them perform it, instead of just reading it on a page. The performer is never completely removed, which is why covers of songs sometimes fail. Kurt Cobain had to change the lyrics from "black girl" to "my girl" because from his ethos that one word would have changed the song completely. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is: no, we can't look at something objectively from the person, but we should try to not let the persona overtake everything else.
To add a wrinkle to this question of the rhetor in terms of the rhetorical triangle, I wonder how the five canons of classical rhetoric—inventio (invention), dispositio (organization), elocutio (style), memoria (memory), and pronuntiatio (delivery), can shed some light on how we assign credibility to a rhetor or even determine who the rightful owner of a song may be. In these canons, I see a space for the songwriter, the performer, the producer, and, in modern terms, the record company to emerge as the creators, the rhetors, of a musical text. Ah. The rhetorical pentagon.
ReplyDeleteI'm imagining an instance where a songwriter, working for a particular record company, composes a song (invention) that fits a certain format (style/organization) in order to make a song marketable for a certain audience. Onstage, the song's performer changes the words here and there to play with the audience, as Ella did in her version of "So High the Moon," thus reinventing (revising?) aspects of the song based upon the rhetorical situation surrounding the performance and the audience's expectations. Of course, there are several possibilities here, but regardless, there seems to be a real composition process happening here, rhetorical theories in action, and it appears nearly impossible to pinpoint the rhetor.
It seems especially relevant that memory and delivery, two canons that were once thought indispensable to rhetorical practice, have largely fallen away as our focus has become more geared toward texts—but these canons thrive in song. No doubt I'm going way out on a limb here, but I wonder if the emphasis we place on performers—the fascination with Leadbelly's steel gut, the worship of Dylan's poetic edginess—isn't representative of the remnants in our cultural consciousness of a rhetor who memorizes and delivers. The performer shifts the focus from a text to a performance, that very space where memory and delivery remain. (Imagine the ethos that would be lost if a performer read from the lyrics as she performed a song.) These two canons, more so than the other three, shift the focus away from the message itself and place it upon a person's interpretation and/or embodiment of a message.
I wonder . . . how does this shaky question of ownership and the rhetor in music create a contested site where individuals (the public, PR people, record companies, etc.) construct ideal performance identities, artists and star types? What is the motive behind these constructions?
I approached this week’s assignment in the same manner I always have. I listened to the music selections—once as an overview, to accustom myself to the sound of the music and see what jumps out at me, then again, paying careful attention to each of the songs and its lyrics, reading what music is provided with its notes. Then I listened to the music as a background while I completed the reading assignments.
ReplyDeleteAnd therein lies my immense satisfaction with this week’s blog question, for I have never been so turned on my head in my perceptions of an artist as I was this week with Lead Belly. My initial impressions of his song style was considering him a deeply emotional, sensual singer, whose motivations came from a sense of nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood and the past mixed with a grief for the hardship and cruelty of slavery that was inherent (though perhaps unrealized in childhood) in that past. His singing seemed to imply a poignancy that was restrained in his life and able to be expressed only through his music.
Then I read the bio. And suddenly his restraint of expression to music became savage unrestraint in his life. Sensuality became intemperance and dissolution. The nostalgia expressed in “Ha-Ha This A-Way” and “Little Sally Walker” became rueful commentary on his own life. “Before people was free” [from “Let it Shine on me” and “Ha-Ha ThisA-Way” (Lead Belly Songbook 71)] became charged with double meaning. “Take This Hammer” and “Old Riley” were no longer about slaves escaping captivity, but prisoners fleeing incarceration. And all this complicated by a tension between disgust and anger with Lomax for my perceived exploitation of Lead Belly and a nervous curiosity with Lead Belly’s own impetus.
My feelings (pathos, I’ll admit, and I recognize the crux of this discussion was ethos) were somewhat soothed, though, when I returned to the song which originally caught my attention in my first round of listening to the music: “Moanin.’” I was deeply moved by it for its complexity of emotion, for the inability of the audience to know just what the origin of Lead Belly’s emotion was. Knowledge of impetus is certainly not necessary for the audience to connect to the rhetorician (or singer). Our lack of knowledge—as we still achieve an emotional bond with the artist—might make us a little nervous , but, to be f air, isn’t that what art is meant to do?
I like the distinction Jonny makes between song and other literature – its cohesion of the text with the perfomer-as-rhetor – and I like also appreciate that the topic of cover songs have been introduced. I’d say that, when I listen to a song, ethos plays a strong role in whether or not I enjoy the song. I like Lead Belly (and I liked him before reading his background story), for instance, because his voice sounds authentic, honest, tough and lends itself well to the thematic material of his songs (makes sense, since he wrote his own stuff). His ethos seems properly fused to his songs, I might say.
ReplyDeleteSo, cover songs are interesting because they employ what I’d call a hybrid ethos, an amalgam of the performer’s voice and style with whatever preconceptions about the song we carry. Jonny referred to Nirvana’s acoustic cover of “Black Girl.” I prefer Lead Belly’s original version, but Nirvana’s version works for me because I think Kurt Cobain appreciated the song for the right reasons – its simplicity, its unabashed pathos, its straightforwardness – and performed the song in a way that reflects these characteristics. That is, Cobain’s ethos doesn’t jibe with the Lead Belly’s residual ethos that remains infused in the song.
But then there are bad covers. For some good fun, check this list out: http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2007/badcovers/part3.html. Rod Stewart’s version of the Tom Waits song “Downtown Train” earns the #9 spot. It is, to me, a, excellent example of clashing ethoi (yup, that’s the plural of ethos). The Waits version is catchy, sure, but his ethos takes the song to a darker, edgier, more austere and interesting place. And Rod Stewart – well, to borrow Joe’s term from class last week – conveys the ethos of yacht rock. There is no reconciling the two; I love the song, but Stewart’s ethos ruins his version for me.
One final, unrelated note: Geoffrey, I don’t normally spend my time defending Taylor Swift. However! she actually does write her own songs. But maybe she should be stopped.
Alan Lomax was like many other American white men in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose attraction to blackness was grounded in a desire to be black; that desire was itself created out of imagining blackness and whiteness to be at opposite ends of a spectrum of pleasure and denial (Mullen 115)
ReplyDeleteWonder if this is at all applicable to Nora’s question of ethos, performance, and reception? Perhaps the taken-on personas of singers serve to appeal to an audience as an embodiment of an emotion or ideal or activity or whatever… not to say that the performer/artist isn’t related at all to the idea they manifest… whether they be Chris Carrabba or Marilyn Manson… but by establishing a certain ethos, the expectation is already there. Johnny Cash’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Hurt” function differently rhetorically, not just because of the musical stylistic choices that differ, but because he has a different rep than Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, or Trent Reznor. Whether or not Whitney Houston covered “I Will Always Love You” for Kevin Costner’s character or for Bobbie Brown is irrelevant; we project our knowledge of her personal life onto her performance, and it becomes that much more successful/poignant accordingly. Or look at the beautiful disaster that is Britney Spears: her most recent effort, “Circus,” probably wasn’t written by her, but the line, “All eyes on me in the center of the ring/ Just like a circus” seems like a commentary on recent personal events, esp. preceded by the “Paparazzi” song (album?) She then makes a slick pop rhet move: she turns the tables “When I crack that whip everybody gon’ trip” and seals the deal for her listeners: she returns to the rep as pop princess she established for herself in ’95 (? 8?) with “Baby One More Time.” Eminem does this. Green Day does this. Every performer has a persona that the audience wants delivered with the art (I guess I’m using these terms loosely.) These personas are like calling cards: pick a feeling, mood, opinion, or fantasy, and listen accordingly. This is sort of an answer to your question, Mandy—though yours is a much better question than this an answer. I suppose these constructs happen on all fronts, but the purpose seems clear: establish an audience, keep them, expand them. “Speak to people,” to whatever end. Seems dirty, but as you pointed out, the elements of memory and delivery are especially important, because if the audience doesn’t believe it, it falls flat. Imagine if Miley Cyrus covered… any NIN song. Or Aphex Twin, ha. There’d be an initial tabloid splash, a subsequent firing from the Disney channel, then upholders of family values across the USA would boycott Hannah Montana. She’s not a serious musician, but she has an audience based on her squeaky reputation—and no agent or PR rep or record company would be stupid enough to screw with that. I guess Lindsay Lohan is the counterargument here.
After this week’s readings/songs, I’m wondering how ethos relates to the folk genre in general. Does a folk singer/performer have to establish him/herself as “folk”? Is the performance of a folk song ever de-legitimized by an audience who doesn’t recognize the performer as “one of the folk?” Or can a performer not be folk enough in the eyes of certain audiences? Are there times when folk ethos is established by in-group politics? I saw some of these questions being worked out in the “Lomax and the Romantic Politics of Race” essay. For example, the author spends a lot of time discussing the Popular Front Movement and how it “became a radical historical bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists [and] community activists…around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching,” and used folksongs as tools for social change. I guess then for this particular audience of folksong listeners, the folk singer would be legit if he/she were working class, pro-labor rights, liberal etc. The CEO of Coca Cola could probably not sing a folk song to these people. This essay deals with in-group politics and its relationship to folk again on page 97 when the author is discussing how Lomax didn’t consider African Americans who had become part of the Middle/Upper class to be folk. So, part of the folk singer’s ethos seems to be established in his/her identity as part of a certain socio-economic status. In other parts of the essay, additional elements are discussed in relation to folk ethos. On page 99 the author recounts Lomax’s experience on KP duty. After a grueling shift, Lomax is finally able to vocalize an “authentic” Delta holler. Here suffering seems to be a pre-requisite for authenticity/establishing ethos. One would also question how race plays into the authenticity of Lomax’s holler. Obviously race plays a big role in establishing ethos for a performance of African American folksongs. Could a white singer sing Lead Belly’s “Ha Ha This a Way” since it is (as described by Lead Belly) a traditional slave song (that was sung by children)? In sticking with Lead Belly, how does our knowledge of his prison past affect the way we receive his performance of “Take this Hammer”? Would the song have the same force if it were sung by someone who had not first sung it while imprisoned? And furthermore, would another singer without a prison past have added in the little “wah” sounds like Lead Belly does? For me, when listening to “Take this Hammer,” knowing Lead Belly was in prison does solidify his ethos – but it also establishes pathos. I found this song to be perhaps the most haunting. The song voices a desire to escape and knowing that Lead Belly did get out of prison but that the numerous men with whom he first sang this song – the men who are perhaps invoked in this “wah” sound, which would have been vocalized by hundreds of men as they brought their picks down– knowing that these men did not get out makes me really sad.
ReplyDeleteI'm in agreement with Johnny. I'm quite aware that even before I read Leadbelly's biographies, I associated the lyrics/performances with him at the rhetor. Romanticizing the performer seems the best, or most natural, means to enjoy the music. As I was thinking about this question I couldn't help but imagine performers such as Tina Turner and Whitney Houston. I think, although I knew it was unlikely a pop artist like Whitney Houston would write her own lyrics, I suspended that bit of knowledge. When listening to her song titled "It's Not Right But It's Okay" I was imagining her singing it to Bobby Brown. She was with her trademarked curly cropped hair and sweaty upper lip, telling him how she was leaving him (for the millionth time) singing, "Was it really worth you going out like that?/ See I'm moving on and I refuse to turn back/ See all this time/ I thought I had somebody down for me/ It turns out/ You were making a fool out of me." Is it the that I can analyze or, more correctly, interpret these lyrics as autobiographical? I mean, of course I can, but I'm choosing to. I'm naturalizing her in the performance in order to root for her, support her (albeit skeptically) for leaving her cheating lover. Allowing the knowledge of a performer's life experiences to bleed into my interpretation of the performance/lyrics is a major reason why I'm listening in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I can separate the lyrics from the knowledge I have about performer as a person. I would say here that I wish I could for sake of preserving the song as a work of art without the performer, but I'd be lying. I didn't want to know the song was written by someone else, because it took some of the joy out of being a listener, meaning, I was more connected to the performance/performer when I thought I knew what she (Whitney) was singing about.
As it applies to Leadbelly, I assumed all these songs were not autobiographical. Hmmm, the reason for this? Although they seemed organic, I assumed them to be adapted songs from his upbringing/travels/incarcerations. I trusted they were a part of his culture, but not necessarily that he wrote them himself.
Answering the question, or I guess just to be clear...I don't know that the audience is able to separate the performer from the lyrics. We cannot separate the two.
The performer's experience/celebrity lends to the ethos of the song/lyrics. Not simply in the fact that they are famous, actually the opposite, in that we, as an audience, might have access to that performer. We can connect with the subject matter, whether it be unrequited love, betrayal, isolation, etc.
ReplyDeleteLomax attempted to enter the black world by identifying with their oppression (95). Might we be identifying with the depression/joy/alienation of song lyrics and/or the performer who sings them? I think so. And although this is not necessary for us to seek pleasure from a song. It most certainly can contribute to our involvement or commitment to the performer and the piece (lyrics/song).