Lit-Rock Lit-Rock Literary Capital in Popular Music Edited by Ryan Hibbett BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Ryan Hibbett, 2023 Each chapter copyright © by the contributor, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 241 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Jean-Marie Périer/Photo12. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Hibbett, Ryan, editor. Title: Lit-rock: literary capital in popular music / edited by Ryan Hibbett. Description: [1st.] | New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Discusses the relationship between popular music and literature in conjunction with the connection between high and low art”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022009460 (print) | LCCN 2022009461 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501354694 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392856 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501354700 (epub) | ISBN 9781501354717 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501354724 Subjects: LCSH: Music and literature. | Music and language. | Popular music–History and criticism. | Popular music–Philosophy and aesthetics. Classification: LCC ML3849 .L586 2022 (print) | LCC ML3849 (ebook) | DDC 780/.08–dc23/eng/20220322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009460 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009461 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5469-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5471-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-5470-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www .bloomsbury .com and sign up for our newsletters. To my brother David Brent Hibbett, through whose cassette-player and bedroom wall came all sorts of beguiling new sounds. And to my children, Jordan and Chase: You ignite and rejuvenate my interest in words and music, books and songs more than you know! Contents Introduction: Conspicuous Listening: Literature, Rock, and the Pop Omnivore 1 Part I Authorship and Authenticity 1 David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, the Cut-Up, and Rock’s Unfinished Revolution Barry J. Faulk 35 2 Kurt, Kathleen ‘n’ Kathy: Cut-and-Paste and the Art of Being for Real Patricia Malone 49 Part II Craft and Confession 3 Joni Mitchell and the Literature of Confession David R. Shumway 65 4 Pop Star vs. Harvard Professor: The “Amateur” Poetry of Taylor Swift Weishun Lu 78 5 Personae Non Grata: Dramatic Monologue and Social Pathology in Select Randy Newman Songs John Kimsey 91 Part III Aesthetics, Movements, Technology 6 New Wave, European Avant-Gardes, and the Unmaking of Rock Music Chris Mustazza 109 7 Cycling on Acid: The Literariness of Altered Experiences in Psychedelic Rock Tymon Adamczewski 120 Part IV Signs and Mediations 8 A Portrait of the Artist in a Pop Song: Images of James Joyce in Popular Music Kevin Farrell 137 9 “Hand in Glove”: Punk, Post-punk, and Poetry Martin Malone 152 Part V Nation and Narrative 10 Under an American Spell: U2’s The Joshua Tree in the Shadow of Flannery O’Connor Scott Calhoun 169 viii Contents 11 Rock, Hard-Boiled: The Mekons and American Crime Fiction Peter Hesseldenz 182 12 When Poetry Meets Popular Music: The Case of Polish Rock Artists in the Late Twentieth Century Marek Jeziński 196 Part VI Identity and Discourse 13 “It’s Our Version of Almost Famous”: Toward a Reimagined Canon of Rock Criticism Kimberly Mack 213 14 Limits of the Literary: Rethinking Allusions in Pop Music Pat O’Grady 227 Acknowledgments 241 List of Contributors 242 Index 245 Introduction Conspicuous Listening: Literature, Rock, and the Pop Omnivore Just when it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. When one considers that both the bubblegum and art-rock traditions are epitomized by the very same Beatles; that a great many rock bands, as Simon Frith and Howard Horn have shown, were the products of formal art school educations;1 that MTV in its heyday devoted massive chunks of programming to “alternative” music;2 and that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to singer-songwriter legend Bob Dylan, one can begin to see the story of rock as the mainstreaming of the high/low binary itself. Far more relevant, in the rock era, than the split between classical and popular music is the latter’s own, diversely manifested claims to seriousness, depth, and distinction. To put it another way, rock music very quickly became a space in which the construct of high and low, of the tasteful individual and the cultureless mass, was widely instituted and made functional through the resources, purchases, conversations, and experiences of everyday life; the trope of distinction was effectively loosened from simplistic class divisions and put to work—effectively and ineffectively, naively and skillfully—within communities who may have previously seen themselves as culturally homogenous. And though the new social currency meant opportunity for some previously excluded individuals, it was promptly invested in as well from above, and toward the emerging stock of the omnivore. Today, nearly every artist and fan has, in some way, shape, or form, a stake in the game, whose terminology, signs, and structures have been fully extrapolated into the globalized culture industry. Literature has long provided a key resource in popular music’s claim to prestige, as well as its role—across an ever-widening range of genres—in mediating the institutionalized, disproportionately accessible realm of high art. Some examples not accounted for in the chapters that follow? Steppenwolf, the Doors, and Soft Machine take their names, respectively, from books by Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, and William Burroughs; Beyoncé recites the poetry of Warsan Shire on her visual album Lemonade; progressive-rock gurus Rush, in addition to their tour de force “Tom Sawyer,” engage works by Ayn Rand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ernest Hemingway, Williams Faulkner, and David Foster Wallace; the teen-anthem-penning Beach Boys reproduce, as a kind of choral round on their beleaguered Smile project, William Wordsworth’s paradox “the child is father of the man”; hip-hop artist Loyle Carner takes his album title “Not Waving, But Drowning” from poet Stevie Smith, whose recorded