The value of narratives in human understanding of the world is widely recognized. The importance of narrative is apparent in varieties of everyday storytelling as well is in written fiction, drama, spectacle and ritual, visual art and film, architecture, legal proceedings, scientific reports, and political theory, to provide only a partial list indicative of the range. Yet the popular song—one of the most pervasive narrative forms that people encounter in their daily lives—has been almost entirely ignored in the vast literature on narrative.1 Whereas narratological methods have often featured in the interpretation of Western art music2 and film music,3 and literary approaches to lyrics have sometimes emphasized a poetics of storytelling,4 theories of narrative have rarely been foregrounded in the study of popular songs.5 In this article, I will focus on narrative to explore practices of interpretation in both scholarship and everyday discussion about popular songs. I will emphasize the intersubjective interpretation of song meanings and advocate an “intercontextual” approach to the understanding of song narratives, drawing from research that emphasizes how our knowledge of the world is cumulative and always in a process of becoming through time. Overall, I argue for a musicological hermeneutics of the intersubjective production of value, belief, and judgment. In developing this theme, the structure of this essay journeys from textuality through intertextuality toward intercontextuality. I shall illustrate how popular songs participate in the wider cultural dialogues through which historical understanding is narrated, and explore how songs connect with more personal expressions of self and individual identity.
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Kenneth Negus (2012) studied this question.