mediocre sleep-inducing homogenized pablum v. background music for the slavery of daily drudgery
alex long has written a fun working paper on uses and misuses of popular music lyrics in legal writing. as is my custom, i skipped immediately to the data.
i worked up a li'l spreadsheet with the most cited artists in both law journals and legal opinions.the list is a familiar but disappointing catalog of self-consciously respectable boomer-friendly aging or dead white males: dylan, beatles, springsteen, simon, et alia. professor long himself cites the stooges' raw power, but this stuff hasn't made it into legal scholarship. he even drops a li'l lester on us in the footnotes:
[I]t’s harder than hangnails to … even have a little moronic fun these days without
some codifying crypto-academic … swooping down to rape your stance and leave you shivering fish-naked in the cultural welfare line. So I wouldn’t blame you for hating me for this article at all.
i don't hate you, dude. in fact, i've gotta love a lawprof who can go deep on lester bangs. still, this leaves me with two questions:
first, would the sociology list look any edgier? i doubt it. nirvana, rage, james brown, or marvin gaye might pop up -- and i know i've seen gang of four in more than one context -- but i'd wager the soc list would pretty much replicate the lawlist. personally, i tried to cite social distortion in contexts once ("a broken nose, a broken heart, an empty bottle of gin" in a review of laub and sampson), but it was excised before it hit the newstands. so it goes.
second, i've always wanted to drop the pistols' pretty vacant into a title but never quite found the proper setting. which great song titles are just sitting there, crying out for a hunk-a hunk-a burnin' sociological research?
posted by christopher uggen @ 12:57 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
I've always thought that Clampdown by the Clash had some terrific soc quote potential.
Great paper. I love the methodology discussion:
There are plenty of flaws in my methodology. Frankly, I’m not too
worried about them since popular music, or at least rock ‘n’ roll, has historically been willing to sacrifice technical proficiency in the pursuit of authenticity and fidelity to the artistic vision.
Just guessing, I would think that the sociologists' list would lean even more heavily on 60s/70s boomer folk and pop. You can't throw an eight-dollar cocktail at an ASA reception without klunking some Professor who believes himself to be Bob Dylan's sprit brother.
Personally, I think that any of half a dozen Cake titles or lyrics seem to be just waiting for somebody to use.
alan's right: how can you afford your rock and roll lifestyle? seems a natural.
Ross Haenfler's book "Straight Edge" certainly made ample use of lyrics. Of course, it kinda has to.
I'd guess that the Soc list might be a little more diverse if only due to the Bielby effect: they've used Donna Summer ("She works hard for the money" -- Bielby and Beilby 1988); Marvin Gaye ("Can I get a witness" -- W. Bielby 2003); and Sister Act ("I will follow him" -- Bielby and Bielby 1986-ish).
And some sociologist, somewhere, *has* to have used R-E-S-P-E-C-T. No respectable (ha ha) status theorist should be able to pass it up.
i've got it! we've been going at this backwards. why aren't the musicians placing sociology titles in popular songs. how about a whole album devoted to the popular soctitles "bringing the [whatever] back in" and "stability and change in [whatever] over the life course"?
there will also be colons -- lots of colons -- and sub-songtitles. properly sociologized, van morrison's brown-eyed girl becomes bringing the Brown Eyed Girl back in: a life course analysis of stability and change in hearts a-thumpin'.
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