Staccato, Swivel and Glide: A Poetics of

Early Rock and Roll Lyrics1

Christophe Den Tandt
Universit Libre de Bruxelles (U L B)
2003
1. The Aesthetics of Semi-Articulation
Rock lyrics remain a somewhat awkward object of study for academic
researchers. Analyzing their lyrical value or their relation to the music
is in itself no simple task. Yet the greatest challenge resides in a more
fundamental questionthe assessment of their very functionality in the
process of rock and roll. What do lyrics actually contribute to experience of music listening or to the ideology of rock culture? Uncertainties
in this matter account for the fact that academic researchers and journalists have adopted radically contrasted attitudes toward lyrics. One
approach, modelled both on literary studies and on journalistic reviews,
aims to assimilate rock lyrics within the canon of contemporary poetry.
This methodology produces close readings of texts by individual
performers (Dylan; Morrison; Patti Smith) who are likely to be granted
the status of full-fledged writers and poets (see Day; Hertsgaard). Other
researchers, working in the field of cultural studies, question the usefulness of lyrically-intensive analysis. They argue, often compellingly,
that lyricsthe literary component of rock songsare secondary to other,
more meaningful elements such as communitarian live performance
(Frith, Performing 210), sonic excess (Grossberg, We Gotta 206) or
star personalities (Goodwin Dancing, 115).Beneath this skepticism
about the functionality of lyrics, one may also discern the fear that a
literary-oriented methodology, while ostensibly opening up the literary
canon to rock songwriters, perniciously reintroduces within popular
culture the very logic of canonicity: if interpreted along these literary
lines, rock loses its potential as an alternative or oppositional cultural
practice. It becomes a would-be art form whose supposedly discrimi-

This paper was initially published in Sound as Sense: Contemporary US poetry &/in
Music, eds. Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle, New Comparative Poetics 11
(Bruxelles-Bern-Berlin-New York. P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2003) 79-92.

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nating fans accumulate what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital

(Bourdieu, Raisons 40-41).
There is, I believe, no need to commit oneself exclusively to either
of these reading choices. Doing so would suggest that rock audiences
have consistently adopted one single attitude toward lyrics. In fact, fans
respond to words in songs as diversely as academics themselves: their
attitudes range from eager interest to inattention, depending on the
songwriters status (is he or she lyrics-oriented?) or on the practical
conditions of reception (home listening, concert, club, casual occurrence. film soundtrack). On the one hand, evidence of fans demand for
songs as lyrical texts goes back to the early seventies, when lyrics were
first printed on the inner sleeves of rock albums. Simultaneously,
bootleg songbooks were offered for sale, sometimes containing approximate transcriptions directly from the records. Today, this practice lives
on in the form of hundreds of websites publishing lyrics by one or
several bands.1
On the other hand, it is indeed impossible to reduce the mode of
reception of rock lyrics to this quasi-literary practice. Marshall McLuhans argument about the specificity of aural, print and electronic
media is relevant here: the reading of lyrics in print form constitutes a
separate experience from the apprehension of the same words during
music playback (McLuhan, Understanding 86-87). In the latter situation, words as vehicles of meaning are de-emphasized. Cultural studies
researchers have repeatedly pointed out that rock audiences often have
dim ideas of what words are actually being sung by their favorite
singers: either the lyrics are drowned out in the musical arrangement or
they are simply not decrypted as signifying chains (Frith, Performing
164). In the early career of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger expressed
his predilection for arrangements in which lyrics are not distinctly
audible (Dalton, Rolling Stones 21-23). This choice was endorsed by
most subsequent rock bands and came to stand as one of the core
elements of the rock sound, differentiating it from pop, folk or European varit. The present-day BBC2 quiz show Never Mind the
Buzzcocks shows what kind of listening experience this rock esthetic
generates. In one segment of the game, contestants are asked to reconstruct conspicuously undecipherable lyrics (the verses of the Bee Gees
Staying Alive, for instance). Some of the talk show guests limit
themselves to offer hilarious substitutes for the cryptic lines.
In these pages, I mean to outline an approach that threads its way
in between the fetishization of lyrics and their sheer dismissal. There is

a need, I think, for an analysis that takes into account the ambiguous
status of words within songstheir ability to be overwhelmed by music,
the listeners proclivity to filter out their meaning but also the rock
fans prerogative to retrieve meaning, however imperfectly. In this
perspective, rock song-writing appears wedded to what might be called
an aesthetics of semi-articulation. As Simon Reynolds and Joy Press
put it, [t]roughout its history, rock has oscillated between intelligibility
and incoherent excess, between meaning and musicality (Reynolds
and Press, Sex Revolts 217). This means that, contrary to the cultural
studies view, verbal meaning is never entirely dismissible in rock
songs. Paradoxically, what the BBCs lyrics recognition game indicates
is precisely that listeners always assume that some meaning is being
produced as the song unfolds. Yet, simultaneously, what the listening
experience offers in actual terms is the apprehension of texts shifting in
and out of meaningfulness or intelligibility. In this light, efficient song
writing in rock and roll must implicitly or deliberately turn the songs
game with semi-articulated meaning to its own advantage. The approach elaborated here leads therefore lead to new, more inclusive
criteria not only of description, but also of evaluation.
2. The Gibberish of Early Rock and Roll
The corpus selected for the present argument covers the early years of
rock and roll, from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. Beyond a personal predilection for these early songs, the choice is justified by the
obvious fact that the 1950s mark the moment when the prosodic and
musical apparatus of rock and roll was first elaborated. Also, there is
some ironical benefit in using a corpus that has been described, even by
fans themselves, as below the threshold of lyrical relevance. Indeed, In
Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom (1969), one of the first book-length
histories of rock and roll, Nik Cohn makes the sub-literate status of
early rock lyrics a condition of the musics authenticity:
The lyrics were mostly non-existent, simple slogans one step
away from gibberish. This wasnt just stupidity, simple inability
to write anything better. It was some kind of teen code, almost a
sign language, that would make rock entirely incomprehensible
to adults.
In other word, if you werent sure about rock, you couldnt
cling to its lyrics. You either had to accept its noise at face value or you had to drop out completely (24).

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The obvious rejoinder to Cohns argument is that 1950s lyrics do

have an identifiable thematicsteenage rebelliousness (Eddie Cochrans
Summertime Blues), the boredom of high-school education (Chuck
Berrys School Days), the ups and down of teenage romance (Gene
Vincents Be Bop a Lula; Elvis Presleys Heartbreak Hotel),
dancing as a metaphor for sex (Cochrans Twenty-Flight Rock;
Richie Valenss Little Suzie), the labyrinthine strategies of dating
(Chuck Berrys Oh Carol;). Also, a thematic analysis might investigate how rock and roll lyrics rework and possibly tone down the sexual
sub-texts of the rhythm n blues songs on which they are modelled.
Above all, we might point out that at least one performerChuck Berryqualifies not only as a widely admired guitarist, but also as the first
rock poet before Dylan. Yet an approach that embarks on a search for
meaningful messages risks falling into the trap of literariness and
canonicity. It would certainly favor a limited number of songs out of
the larger 1950s corpus. Therefore, I believe that Cohns celebration of
inarticulateness needs to be taken seriously: it describes a feature that
most early rock songs share. Simply, I believe that what he presents as
transgression can also be viewed as the basis of a song writing skill.
Thus, Cohn is right to point out that the ostensible gibberish of rock
lyrics should be read as a sign language. Beyond the vocal noise of
1950s rockers, there are structuring principles and regularities. Only,
this poetic method does not operate exclusively within the field of
articulated speech: it shutlles across the boundary that separates intelligible speech from that other, less determinate, semiotic systemmusic
itself.
3. Geno-text and Pheno-text
The theoretical framework I mean to use to investigate this semiarticulate corpus is Julia Kristevas analysis of semiotic and symbolic
signifying processes. Kristevas approach was partially transposed to
the field of music by Roland Barthes in The Grain of the Voicean
article often cited in academic literature on popular music (See Frith
and Goodwin, Record 293-300). Kristeva distinguishes between fully
articulated language, whose purpose is communication among constituted subjects, and a more fundamental, less objectifiable substratum
of signifying processes, out of which articulated language initially
grows (Kristeva, Revolution 84). She calls the former the symbolic,
following in this Lacans terminology, and the latter the semiotic.

Development of the semiotic takes place during the pre-oedipal phase

when the child, still closely linked to the mothers body, has no full
sense of a separate self interacting with determinate objects (35). In
Kristevas view, signifying processesthe semiotic chora (35)
emerge at this early stage as the childs pulsions map its body, and as
its body interacts with its social environment (40). Characterizing such
a signifying substratum is understandably tricky, since any analysis
must be carried out through theoretical, symbolic discourse. Kristeva
specifies, however, that the semiotic is articulated according to fluxes
and marks (40); it is characterized by principles of ordering such as
rhythm and transience (motility (71)); its various media are the
voice, gestures, colors, (28), as well as music and rhythm (29, 62).
Crucial to Kristevas dichotomy is the idea that the semiotic cannot
serve as a vehicle of representation or expression: it does not follow the
logic of the signifier and the signified; it is not meaningful in that sense.
Yet it anticipates the logic of meaningfulness, as it were: the fluxes and
marks of the semiotic are the raw material of which the symbolic
signifiers will be constituted.
In Kristevas La rvolution du langage potique, the discussion of
the semiotic and the symbolic serves as preamble for an analysis of
poetrya literary theoretical argument that deviates in interesting ways
from Jakobsonian poetics. In Kristevas view, poetic discourse is the
site where the pre-oedipal movement of the semiotic reasserts itself
over the symbolic in the form of a transgressive re-emergence. This
presupposes that the elaboration of symbolic language during the
constitution of the subject never entirely supersedes the semiotic. The
two layers of signifying processes are separated yet linked by a regimen
of conflictual exchange (46). In art and poetry, particularly, one
notices a re-emergence of the specific workings of the semiotic chora
within the apparatus of language (48). The poems signifying chain is
affected by deformations (47): its signifiers are subjected to the nonsymbolic ordering of meter and rhythm, and its syntax is either disrupted or structured beyond the need of symbolic expression. The signifying processes that outreach symbolic organization constitute what
Kristeva calls the poems geno-textits semiotic dimension, as
opposed to the pheno-text, that is the plane of articulate expression,
grammaticality and meaning (83). Thus, Kristeva implicitly disagrees
with Roman Jakobson, whose theory of the poetic function implies that
poetry is a sign system structured more tightly than everyday speech. In
Kristevas logic, poetry consists in the encounter of symbolic language

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with repressed, drives-based signifying processes that exert a destructuring impact on the language chain. It is a moment of disruption, albeit
eventually leading to a regeneration of the symbolic order (48).
4. Body and Voice
In this light, early rock and roll marks the appearance of songs with
radically disruptive geno-texts. Not that white popular music before
rock and rollthe crooning songs of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin or
Bing Crosbywas devoid of the capacity to weave desire into words
and melody. Yet, to judge by the cultural outrage stirred by rock and
roll, the new style boasted an unprecedented ability to let desire overwhelm articulated speech. Rock was experienced as a libidinal release
transgressing both sexual and ethnic boundaries. The process by which
this idiom was createdwhite teeenagers appropriating AfricanAmerican rhythm n blues (then commercially known as race
music) (Pielke, You Say 22)is familiar enough. Likewise, we do not
need to belabor the point that parental authorities resented this cultural
crossover because they feared it introduced into white pop vocal inflections drawn from a reputedly sexually-charged black culture (see Frith,
Sounds 19; see also Frith, Performing 127-134). What matters for the
present argument is that nineteen-fifties accounts concur in saying that
rock n rolls libidinal discharge was channelled not only through the
beat of electric guitars, but even more prominently through the singers
body and voice. This is indeed how the figure of Elvis Presley was
perceived in the fifties media and, in fact, in most subsequent writings
about his music: the rock and roll sound was the ungrammatical noise
issuing from the gyrating body of a singer appropriating nicknamed
Elvis the pelvis. Describing the geno-text of early- rock and roll consists therefore in recording this traffic between a drives-activated body
and a voice. Roland Barthess The Grain of the Voice, which draws
on Kristeva, suggests indeed that the value of singing resides in the
specific interface of these two planes. The French theorist argues that
certain musical voicestypically, the less polished ones (in his example, Panzera, as opposed to Dietrich Fischer Dieskau)have a grain
(295): they allow the body to be in the voice as it sings (299)and
therefore to display the moment when symbolic articulation surrenders
to physicality. Academic critics of popular culture value Barthess
argument, because they believe that rocks appeal resides to a considerable in the ability to make perceptible this bodily dimension of singing.

Ironically, the semiological and psychoanalytical arguments only

emphasize the difficulties in analyzing what both opponents and fans or
rock and roll describe as a blind, spontaneous, transgressive language
of the body, linked to the motility of unconscious drives. This paradoxical task, may, I think, be carried out by using inflection as a theoretical keyword. This term is particularly appropriate because it applies
indiscriminately to instrument-playing, singing, speech and gestures.
Also, I indicate below that cultural critics, drawing on Bakhtins terminology, use inflectionor rather accentingin order to describe how
popular culture may act subversively.2 Inflection, in the present context,
is the basic unit of rocks geno-text: it means the playful manipulation
of a normbe it musical or prosodic. At the level of music-making, the
syncopated swing beat the cornerstone of jazz, rhythm n blues and
later rock and rollrelies on such a game of transgressive inflection.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer offer a pointed yet, as is their
custom, sharply derogatory characterization of this practice: they
excoriate jazz musicians who, if asked to play one of Beethovens
simple minuets, [will] syncopa[te] it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal division of the beat (Adorno
and Horkheimer, Dialectic 128). What Adorno and Horkheimer resent
the playful loosening up of rhythmic regularityis the structural
principle of most forms of music inspired from African-American
traditions. It can be made visible in rock and roll by analyzing a very
common rhythmic pattern, which we might call the boogie beat. This
rhythmic unit, illustrated in Chuck Berrys No Particular Place to Go
[see annex I] is transcribed in music scores either as a binary (dotted
quaver and semiquaver) or tertiary pattern (crotchet and quaver as part
of a triplet or as one beat of a ternary time signature). Yet neither of
these descriptions match the rhythm as it is actually performed: if
binary, it would be too choppy, while, if ternary, it would be uncomfortably close to a waltz. Because of the game of accenting and inflections that takes place during actual playing, the boogie pattern becomes
in effect polyrhythmicoscillating between two norms. Such discreet
loosening of metronomic regularity illustrates, at the musical level, the
action of a geno-text (accents, delays, slurred beats) on a rhythmic
phenotext.
5. Vocal Inflections
In order to analyze similar phenomena within lyrics themselves, we
should focus on vocal inflectionsmanipulations of rhythm and pitch

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that constitute the signature of the early- rock and roll singing style.
Dave Laing, in an analysis of Buddy Holly vocals identifies contrast
in pitch as the most characteristic mannerism of the Texas singers
technique. He also suggests that Holly borrowed this technique from
Presley (see Frith and Goodwin, eds., On Record 332; see also Morrison, Go Cat Go 17). Such inflections are undoubtedly the result of the
singers attempt to emulate their black models. Comparisons of crossover versions (for instance, Arthur Big Boy Crudups original recording of Thats All Right Mama and Elvis Presleys cover) indicate in
fact that white singers tend to use these effects more generously than
African-American rhythm n blues singers. Other influences relevant
in this matter are the vocal styles of country singers (Hank Williams)
who served as model for rockabilly vocalists such as Presley or Charles
Perkins (see Morrison Go Cat Go 32).
I mean to map these vocal inflections by means of a three-term
model whose make-up is alluded to the present papers title: early-rock
nroll singing technique, I contend, is shaped by a system of vocal
staccato, swivels and glides. These words designate different steps on a
scale of vocal distortion, as it were. The first describes the choppy
diction of rockn roll singers as they match their words to the metronomic dimension of the songs beat. The second designates the smallrange inflections often occurring in between staccato syllables. The
third refers to the high-rising or deep-diving twists to which vowels or
syllables are submittedthe effect most likely to drag the lyrics into
unintelligibility. Admittedly, a more sophisticated analytical tool might
be envisaged. It would, for instance, be possible to emulate the sophistication of musical scores published in magazines for professional
guitarists (Guitar Player; Guitar). For their transcriptions of guitar
solos, these publications have developed an impressive gamut of signs
designating inflections and fingering techniques that cannot be represented by means of the conventional script of classical music scores.
Yet for the present purposes, the three-unit model will do.

Figure 1: Vocal inflections in "Summertime Blues" (Eddie Cochran / Jerry

Capehart)

My aim is indeed not to achieve full descriptive accuracy, but rather to

map a general tendency of early rock and roll singingits game with
(dis)articulation and inintelligibilty. Also, the staccato-swivel-glide
model proves adequate to describe the interaction of voice and music:
staccato accents indicate how vocals are aligned with rhythmic instruments (drums, bass, rhythm guitar), whereas swivels and glides show
how the singers voices mimic some of the signature sounds of early
rock and rollreverb-laced guitar tones or whammy-bar glides.
6. A Weave of Words and Music
On this basis, it is possible to show that the system of inflections of
mid-1950s songs is not random, but rather sets up a flexible dialogue
between words and music: partly autonomous yet acoustically similar
voices respond to one another, and assert themselves differently at
different moments. For instance, Eddie Cochrans Summertime
Blues plays off a mostly staccato instrumental arrangement against
more melodic, inflected sung lines. The singers vocals have to find
their way between staccato riffs on the acoustic guitar, itself reinforced
by sharp handclaps (see figures 1 and 2).

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Figure 2: Vocal inflections, riffs and hand claps in "Summertime Blues"

(Eddie Cochran / Jerry Capehart)

The overall impression in the beginning of the verses is that Cochrans

inflections (his geno-text) weave flexible melodic lines around a
rhythmic structure characterized by an implacable, stomping beat,
softened only by the quasi-swivelling bass line. By the end of the verse,
on the contrary, it is the inflected voice that takes over and occupies
nearly the whole of the sound space. First, the vocals switch to the deep
parental voice of the protagonists boss (My boss says, no dice, son...
in verse 1). The deeper voice (attributed to the protagonists father and
congressman in verses 2 and 3) has no determinate musical pitch, yet as
far as inflections go, it is all swivel and glides, verging on unintelligibility. Then, Cochran takes on his customary singing voice again to
deliver songs short chorus (But there aint no cure ...), which is
radically inflected and ends on a deep downward glide (...for the
summertime blues). After this plunge into deep vocal inflections, the
swivel/staccato rhythm of the verse resumes, thus re-establishing the
dialectic of metronomic regularity and vocal or instrumental twists.
Chuck Berrys fast-paced Let It Rock, on the other hand, establishes

11

a contrast between fast-paced, breathless verses, relying mostly on

swinging/swivelling vocal and musical patterns and, on the other hand,
quieter musical choruses featuring slow glides on the guitar (figure 3).

Figure 3: Vocal inflections in "Let It Rock" (Chuck Berry)

If we focus on the interaction of the inflected voice and its propositional text (between geno- and pheno-text), the obvious question that
arises is whether the inflectional system adds anything meaningful to
the articulated lyrics. This issue is the more pressing as a fair number of
early rock songsEddie Cochrans Cmon Everybody; Richie
Valenss That My Little Suzie (figure 4); Little Richards Tutti
Fruttiseem to function as pure webs of inflections or even as baby
talk: a semi-regular pattern of flows and pauses gliding over the words
and occasionally wrenching them away from phonic decipherability.

12

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Figure 4: Vocal inflections in "That's My Little Suzie" (Richie Valens /

Robert Kuhn)

If read as a pheno-text, Cmon Everybody does develop a schematic

narrative of teenage partying followed by a parental crackdown. Yet
what the listener perceives primarily is the ascending and descending
curve of the singers voice, punctuated by the distinct, yet concise,
slogan-like chorus Cmon everybody! Likewise, it matters relatively
little that both Littles Richards and Richie Valenss songs should
celebrate sex through the metaphor of dancing. More spectacular in
either case are indeed the sing-song structure of the inflected lyrics,
culminating in Valenss case, in the comically dramatic Im gonna
drown myself in the sea, and, even more tellingly in Little Richard, in
the non-propositional baby-like utterance Wopbobaloobopbalopbobob. In these cases, the propositional content (pheno-text) disappears under the geno-text, as if the singing voice aspired to become an
instrument itself.
7. The Choreography of Desire

13

Trying to infer meaning from these inflectional structure is a delicate

enterprise, possibly a betrayal, since the very function of transgressive
pheno-texts is inarticulatedness itself. Kristeva, in the definition of the
semiotic (the geno-text), points out that the geno-text does not generate
determinate meaningsthat is, representations based on signifiers and
signifieds (Kristeva, Rvolution 35, 39, 46). If we adopt a restrictive
reading of this principle, we may conclude that the intonation patterns
mentioned above have at best a value similar to that of metrical systems
and rhyme schemes in canonical poetry. This means that they do not
add anything specific to the propositional contents of the lyrics. Eddie
Cochrans vocal glides over such words as what Im a gonna do or
Sunday in Summertime blues carry as little determinate sense as
Shakespeares decision to have thou owst/ thou growst//proved and
loved rhyme in Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare, Sonnets 85)
Yet the absence of determinate representation does not imply
meaninglessness pure and simple. Basically, rocks staccato/swiveling/gliding inflections produce meaning performatively, that
is, through what they enact. A manipulation of prosodic norms is
staged throughout the songs by means of vocal gestures comparable to
dancing steps. It does not quite matter, in this logic, where the vocal
twists exactly fall. It is the overall unfolding of this dance of desire that
connotes the emotions of teenage rebelliousness. Characteristically, a
few famous rock and roll tracks use what we might call introductory
vocal hooks in order to advertise this transgressive game. Buddy Hollys Rave on, Gene Vincents Be Bop a Lula and Little Richards
Tutti Frutti begin with short, spectacularly inflected a cappella calls
(respectively Hollys swivelling Oh we-e-e-e-e-e-e, Vincents long
upwardly gliding Weeeeel and Richards famous staccato sequence
Wop Bop a Loo Bop Ba Lop Bop Bop). Such devices function in a
similar way as the de rigueur profanities that Roland Barthes identifies
in the writing of Hbert, a French anarchist writer (Barthes, Degr 7):
they manifest a transgressive or playful positioning toward power.
These examples indicate that whatever meanings are generated
through the performative game of rocks vocal inflections must be
produced by connotation. Admittedly, a connotative reading of semiotic processes as defined by Kristeva goes against the spirit of the theory,
which views the semiotic geno-text as a disruptive, undetermined
energy, not containable by such a schematic semiotica mechanism as
connotation. Yet the reception history of early rock and roll indicates
that many peoplebe they fans or guardians of moralitymanaged to

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Staccato, Swivel, and Glide

read specific messages in the up- and downswings of the performers

vocal styles. Those connotative signifieds are quite familiar, and quite a
few have already been discussed above. For fans, the rocknroll voice
connotes fun, energy, sexuality and blackness. For rocks opponents, it
connotes practically the same terms, though in a negative light, as well
as other concepts like degeneration and the breakdown of the social
bond. Again, those meanings are not derived from deciphering specific
segements of rocks geno-text, but from the very acknowledgement of
its presence through the whole song.
8. Conclusion: The Refusal of Adulthood
To conclude, I should like to concentrate on one type of connotations
produced by early-rock vocals: those that contribute to constructing the
male performers persona. Gender models for rock musicians changed
spectacularly from the 1950s to the 1960s. After the early decade of the
music, rock (in its Progressive form) increasingly developed into a
male homosocial culturea music of male musical craftsmen, addressed
primarily (though in practice, not exclusively) to other aspiring craftsmen of the same gender. By comparison, 1950s rock singers fit the
teeny-bopper type: like the early Beatles, a large part of their success
is due to their ability to serve as objects of desire for young women.3 In
this context, one may wonder to what extent the music s inflected
musical style contributed to making performers sex objects. The issue
is not self-evident: rocks geno-text produces high-pitched, often
androgynous teenage voices. Even Elvis Presley, regularly described as
an icon of Southern American sensuality, relies heavily on high inflections that feminize his otherwise mid-range crooners voice (see Morrison, Go, Cat Go 63). Two complementary interpretations of this apparent vocal androgyny come to mind. On the one hand, one may consider
that rocks vocals bring into play the pre-oedipal component of the
geno-textits status as baby-talk, as tool of interaction with the mother
(see Kristeva, Revolution 26-27).4 In this case, what early rock and roll
fans heard in the performers voice was a return to boyishness or even to
babyhood. Such a vocal regression is appealing, first, because it connotes transgressive teenage fun, the refusal of adulthood. Secondly, it
carries a romantic seduction because it evokes male performers who do
not adhere to a hard-edged masculine profile, and are ready to relinquish their standards of virility in order to embrace a softer code of
relationship. On the other hand, under the boyish inflections of rock
and roll singing reside less innocent undertonesthe very accents that

15

anti-rock advocates denounced. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously,

fans probably perceived in the swivelling and gliding voices what we
may euphemistically call the soundtrack of desire.
Notes
1. Sites consulted for the present paper include Kenos Rolling Stones
Web Site: Rolling Stones Lyrics : http://keno.org/ Summertimeblues.htm (for Eddie Cochrans Summertime Blues);
http://rukind.com/music/cbtunes/letirck.htm (For Chuck Berrys Let It
Rock); among the sites that make fun of the fans misreadings of rock
lyrics, see wysiwig://3/http://kissthisguy,com/archive/lyrics566.html
2. For a discussion of the Bakhtinian concept of inflection or accenting, see Hall, Representation 235, as well as Hall, Return 77-78. On
the basis of Bakhtin and Voloshinov, Hall argues that popular culture
works by a logic of inflections or accentings: social groups may
appropriate the discourses of other social groups and make them signify
for their own (possibly subversive) ends. A radical version of this
concept of popular subversion appears in John Fiskes cultural populism, which presupposes that cultural consumers have a nearly unlimited prerogative to inflect the meaning of mass culture texts (Fiske,
Popular 508).
3 A description of teeny bopper culture and of the forms of empowerment it offers to teenage fans appears in Angela McRobbie and Jenny
Garber (1976: 220-21).
4 A discussion of rock music and vocals as fundamentally pre-oedipal
appears in Reynolds and Press (217-221).

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