Authorship and the Popular Song

Within the broad fields of musicology and music criticism the author as creative originator and authority remains a central figure. Yet sociologists have been sceptical of the emphasis placed on authorship in the arts and humanities, and argued that creativity, art works, and artistic reputations are produced through social processes and struggles. Meanwhile, a strand of cultural theory has followed Barthes’s pronouncement of ‘the death of the author’ and deemed authorship irrelevant to critical debate about meaning and value. In this article I advocate an intermediate or mediating approach, attuned to insights from both musicology and sociology, and suggest ways that concepts drawn from the study of fictional narrative can be used to ‘unbundle’ the author. Through this I open up a series of questions about how authorship is constructed, conveyed, communicated, and contested through the mediations of pop songs and identities of songwriters.