I Atkin, G Bradley | "'She’s
Gone' Men and the Remembrance of the Unattainable Women." |
On first impression, it appears that society, has played the trick of
convincing those in love, or who wish to be in love, that what they indulge in
is outside the public domain. This trickery might be understood as an
autonomous, spontaneous, complex and, at tunes deeply confusing, set of
individualistic, physiological or psychological experiences. While these
experiences of a unique encounter with another person cannot be ignored, it is
just as important to recognize that these events are difficult to separate from
the historical and social contexts which help individuals make sense of falling
in, heterosexual, love.
It is one of these social contexts, the relationship between the private
experience of romantic love and its public representation in rock and popular
music which is considered here. In particular, the romantic male’s
appropriation and representations, in songs, of the remembrance of a now
unattainable women. Within this context, it is possible, to suggest two common
themes. One is the man’s unrequited love for a women, this is exemplified by
the following lyrics from Billy Bragg’s 'The Saturday Boy’:
And she never came to the phone
She was always in the bath
In the end it took me a dictionary to
find out the meaning of unrequited
While she was giving her-self for free at
a party to which I was never invited
I never understood failings then and
I hide my humble hopes now
Looking back she made us want her
A girl not old enough to shave her legs
Bragg’s lyric, can be connected to the other common theme of representing
the unattainable women. Bragg is "looking back" to his days at school
when he and the unnamed girl sat together "in double history twice a
week". While lyrics which narrate a present requited love cannot be
disregarded, greater consideration is given here to this male retro yearning or
remembrance for the now unattainable women. Remembrance, in this form, involves
the man’s rescue from the present. It is more than nostalgia, for remembrance
also evokes a melancholic attempt, which fails, to re-capture a more youthful
and innocent time which was less cluttered with the cynicism of later life.
Remembrance involves the man’s escape from the present through the pleasure of
suffering for the past. This escape attempt might be a pre-death acceptance of
masculine failings, defects and imperfections. Consider Billy Bragg’s version
of 'Walk Away Renee‘ which is appropriated by Bragg as a context for his own
lyric. The opening and final verses are as follows:
She said it was just a figment of speech
I said you mean figure
She said no, I mean figment, because she
Could never see it happening
But it did.
I confronted her about it
I said, I'm the most illegible bachelor in town
And she said, yeah, that's why I can
never understand any of those silly letters you send
And then one day it happened
she cut her hair and I stopped loving her.
Bragg confesses to the listener his, or at least the narrator's,
acceptance of imperfection as a man when at the outset of this relationship he
reveals: "my nose began to bleed". In terms of the narrative the
listener is being asked to situate themselves in the past and to look back from
later life to the pain of adolescent love. A pain that is venerated as a site of
innocence but also mocked as a location of inarticulacy - witness the use of
inappropriate words like "figment", the repetition of conjunctions and
phrases such as "I said", She said". That this is remembrance of
a more innocent past is evident by the deliberately self-conscious use of these
inexactitudes and the "Walk Away Renee" refrain which would only be
appropriate to a narrator whose adolescence was at the time of this song's first
release. While the lyrics cannot be ignored, for they create the narrative, it
is the tune which locates the song as a remembrance of a now unattainable woman.
The public articulation through sound, and words of an unattainable love is read
by men to encapsulate their own sense of loss. In this context artistic
production is therapeutic because it either makes a personal sense of loss
understandable or keeps the memory of unattainability alive. Pop and rock
recordings provide a mass aide-memoir through which men's private
feelings and experiences become public in the form of artistic expression. In
turn such public expressions are re-appropriated by the listener as a text that
connects with some aspect of their self-identity. Yet, the 'real' self-identity
of the unattainable woman remains beyond the man. As an external, the woman is
outside the ultimate control to the man. From this, it is possible to suggest
that the unattainable women while a (loved) object of remembrance is also a
source of male anxieties of insecurity and jealousy. To resolve this anxiety the
romantic desire for the unattainable woman becomes a means of codifying a man's
potentially disruptive, irrational self. This demands an object of desire on
which to project and reflect the characteristics of the private self. This
romantic 'other" usually manifests itself in the form of an 'us' but from
somewhere else. In short, the object of desire - in this case, the unattainable
woman - is an active male creation.
The desired, but unattainable, women while 'real' is appropriated and recreated,
by the male, in the form of images of femaleness.
Anxieties, can be resolved through the individual's ability to work themselves
into narratives of romantic love. This is reflected in Brunt's observation
within popular art that it is like "getting to star in your own
movie." Similarly, through pop and rock recordings attempts are made to
liquidize the boundary between the public narrative of the song and the private
listeners: it is not always decidable if the universal emotion and feelings of
romantic loss or the producer of the "text" gives the lead in its
production.
The listener actively enters and appropriates the song. A recording as a
document is constructed as evidence of the listeners real past, no matter what
the truth of this personal history may have been. In short, the recorded song as
a document is proof of a past; yet such documents can be constructed and
manipulated. It is this willingness to search for self-identity and a personal
history that creates the unattainable women. However, the listener can only
re-enter the narrative of the song by acknowledging the overwhelming power of
the present.
The consumption of narratives on the remembrance of an unattainable women can be
understood as a sanctioned emotional disruption. A sanctioned disruption
unsettles the accepted social and cultural protocols, in the form of increased
masculine self-indulgence and irrational behaviour, that is allowable and, to
some extent expected. This is evident when we look at the lyric of 'Can t Stand
Losing You' by The Police. A reading of the final verse reveals the immersion of
the male ego in rejection:
I guess this is our last goodbye
And you don't care so I won't cry
But you'll be sorry when I'm dead
And all this guilt will be on your head
I guess you'd call it suicide
But I'm too full to swallow my pride.
There is here, the male's desire to witness his own death and
the reaction to it. It is an interesting trait that in this kind of narrative
construction the male protagonist's character is cast as in some way lacking.
The character failing or even 'defect' is echoed in the above verse as the
narrator wants witness recognition of his worth from reaction to his, hoped for,
sorely missed absence. Whilst it is a case of 'I'm a good guy and a wrongs been
done to me' as far as the songs protagonist's is concerned, the audience, is
invited to share a different perspective. A perspective that sees this character
as spiteful and petty: something given added emphasis when we consider this
character's obsessive, list making nature suggested by the line
I see you sent my letters back
And my LP records and there all scratched
An initial observation might indicate that it is unclear what
society gains from this indulgence. On closer inspections, it might be that love
or its remembrance functions in a similar manner as, according to Bakhtin the
medieval carnival did, as depicted by Rabelais: as a temporary suspension, even
inversion, of the normal protocols and hierarchy. This too was thought to be
autonomous and spontaneous but did in reality have a degree of official church
sanction in the expectation that the pull towards disruption could be kept
within confined limits and ultimately purged. Just as the potentially chaotic
carnival had an unofficial agreed set of parameters so too does the potentially
disruptive experience of past love.
While lyrics are not the sole factor to be considered, it is not too strong to
write that they are basic to the majority of pop and rock recordings. This point
can be support when it is recognized that instrumental hits remain relatively
rare and Smash Hits with its heavy emphasis on the words of songs, is the market
leader within the music press. To be more exact, the vehicle for the lyric is
because, as Simon Frith Acknowledges, songs are speech acts; "plays more
than poem". And as plays, what is obscured is as meaningful as what is made
clear. Just as a De Niro mumble can be as expressive as a perfectly articulated
Jeremy Irons phrase, so too can drowned out Robert Smith vocal where not much
more that the title "Sometimes I dream", are audible as on 'Charllotte
Sometimes', are all that is necessary for the gothically inspired narrative
fantasies of the romantically suffering male. It seems clear that there is a
close relationship at work whereby, to paraphrase Frith music gives lyrics their
vitality and lyrics give music its social use. But social use which appears to
be borne of such banality! Indeed, once divided up into discrete elements banal
it is, but, as an integrated whole, it a medium that is capable of carrying a
great deal of emotional baggage: and the reason for this, and a possible area
for further study, is rock and pop's ability to defamiliarise the cliché and
thereby, through being at once familiar yet strange, a suitable narrative medium
for us to keep reconstructing ourselves in. This, as Shklovsky has stated, is
the technique of all art; but it is one that seems particularly relevant to a
major art form of an age when individuals no longer trust their own senses and
emotions unless they are in some way mediated.
I Atkin, Lectures part-time
G Bradley Teaches at a college in Sussex.
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