ABSTRACT

This chapter extrapolates the irony in Paul Anka's performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit, with an eye toward musical genre. It briefly outline's how popular songs are able to mean or signify through musical gestures and lyrics via their connections to larger categories of musical genre and social identity. The ontology of musical genre is particularly complex, lying paradoxically between the illusory and the pragmatic. A musical genre is a network of sounds, words, styles, groups, and individuals around which social and other extra musical values and significances cohere and reify. The juxtaposition in generational difference and dramatically opposed stances regarding the entertainment industry is the root of the first level of irony in Anka's Smells Like Teen Spiritone expressive world appears to be articulating the values of a contradictory other. Framing Anka's performance in terms of dramatic irony adds to the irony engendered by this generic incongruity or juxtaposition.