ABSTRACT

The first systematic analyst of pop song words, J. G. Peatman, was influenced by Adorno's strictures on 'radio music' and so stressed pop's lyrical standardisation: all successful pop songs were about romantic love; all could be classified under one of three headings the 'happy in love' song, the 'frustrated in love' song, and the 'novelty song with sex interest'. For Peatman, this narrow range reflected the culture industry's success in keeping people buying the same thing, but most subsequent content analysts, writing with a Cold War concern to defend American commercial culture, have taken pop market choices seriously. Most mass cultural critiques of pop songs words derive from 1930s Leavisite arguments. In songs, words are the sign of a voice. At its simplest, the theory of lyrical realism means asserting a direct relationship between a lyric and the social or emotional condition it describes and represents.