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. It asks who the author of a popular song is. Musicology and music criticism still explain songs by their writers, while the sociology of Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu traces artworks and reputations to the work and rivalry of many people, and Roland Barthes moved a text’s meaning from its author to its reader. Negus takes a middle path. From the study of fiction he borrows terms that separate a song’s real author from its implied author and its narrator, from studies of stardom he adds the persona and star image of the writer or singer, and he calls telling them apart “unbundling” the author. His test cases are two songs by Ray Davies of The Kinks.

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

The essay 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. Performers may win critics’ praise, but the composing songwriter, Negus writes, “holds a privileged place in the economic and cultural valuing of creativity.”³

Sociology has its uses, “particularly to contest naïve notions of genius,” Negus writes, but he is “sceptical of the sociological approach due to the way it simply reverses the imbalanced account of the relationship between individual creativity and social context.”⁴ Barthes’s death of the author, in his reading, became in practice “a means of elevating the prominent interpretations of the professional critic and scholar.” What survives these arguments is an author “more obviously mediated, constructed and contested.”⁵

From Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) he takes the “real author,” the “implied author,” which is the sensibility a text conveys and need not match the beliefs of the person credited with it, and the narrator, the voice that tells the story. Songs “regularly address the listener in the second person,” and the “you” can be someone in particular. Mark Booth and Simon Frith doubted that any listener took Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” (1965) personally, yet Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, and Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out!, were among those who, in Negus’s words, “thought that it was directed at them personally.” The lyric names no one, but West 4th Street was where Dylan had lived and had first played at Gerde’s Folk City: “It is the title that contains the sting.”⁶

Like novels, Negus writes, “all songs contain characters,” 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,” a persona he takes from the musicologist Allan Moore and from studies of stardom.⁷ He applies these terms to two songs 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 his phrase a “sunny kitsch pastoral,” and “Lola” (1970) “a song of the nocturnal city,” narrated by “a man, confused about gender, sexuality and desire.” Davies is the real author of both, but Negus need not, he writes, “make any assumptions about the life, beliefs, experiences and values of the real author,” since the implied author “can be interpreted from the songs,” and the two songs’ implied authors hold “contrasting social and political views.”⁸

Lee Marshall wrote in a study of Dylan that “what we see is all there is,” and Frith 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.”⁹ Some songwriters work to dissolve these distinctions: the songs of Joni Mitchell and Lennon’s first songs after the Beatles can be heard, he suggests, as “a Romantic challenge” that seeks to “recover the fragmented self,” and much rap blurs them in its insistence on “being real.” 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,” through “irony, camp and artifice, satire.”¹⁰

The epilogue takes the bundle from philosophy’s accounts of the self, from David Hume to John Perry, and from the music business, whose contracts treat a recording artist as a “bundle of rights.” If musicians can unbundle their personas and their albums, Negus suggests in closing, “we (critics, musicologists, scholars) can also unbundle the idea of the author.”¹¹ Shuwen Qu and Jian Xiao drew on the idea in 2020 to question “the myth of singer-songwriters’ heightened investment of authorship” in contemporary Chinese folk music.¹² Ross Cole, arguing in 2021 that songwriting can be autobiographical, went further than Negus, proposing to “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.¹³

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