What is literature? And why is it also rock-n-roll?
What is literature? Seems like an easy enough question for the poet, the teacher, the literature person, right? After 15 years of teaching an introductory literature class to undergraduates (for whom the course is a General Education requirement), I am still obsessed with this question. How does a clear but expansive understanding of literature help us transform our practice for teaching it at the university level? Are any genres off limits?
Before the first day of class, I don’t suspect many (more likely any) of my students have devoted their summer breaks to pondering this question. If we ask it on the first day, we might say of literature: It’s books. Words on paper. Novels. Soon, we will discover, for many of the students, the designation simply called “the novel” is actually just another word for “long chapter book,” not necessarily long-form fiction, with its many sub-genres.
What I have discovered more generally about my students is that they might understand the idea of “genre” with some nuance for music or movies, but maybe not so much for books. Or at least that’s been my experience.
Remember, the folks in my class are not literature majors, unless they declare later. They’re often future engineers, computer scientists, physical therapists, nurses, elementary school teachers, but not necessarily the nerds of fiction and poetry that were my college cohort. Although when I have asked them to write either fiction or poetry, it’s always exciting and engaging to discover how imaginative their content usually is.
Very early in my teaching career, when the teaching load was all writing classes, or as it’s frequently called, composition--that is, comp, comp, and more comp--I looked longingly at the instructors and professors who taught the Gen Ed sophomore literature classes. Maybe, one day, I would get to teach one of those? At the rank of instructor, this was one of my basic career goals, and it began with regularity in 2008.
Mind you, this was at another institution and over 20 years ago, but I remember peering at a sample reading list and syllabus. Often there was an intimidating anthology like Norton involved. Sometimes the syllabus divided the semester into three genres: fiction, poetry, drama.
So that’s it, right? This is literature: “Fiction, poetry, and drama.” That’s the core definition.
But are those the entirety of literary genres? Maybe not. Pamphlets, political documents, religious treatises, newspapers, and personal correspondence have all been studied academically as literature by someone. There are even classes on The Bible “As Literature”-- even though it’s pretty clear that the Bible is literature. The “as” is just there for emphasis, to show that it’s not being studied first as a sacred confessional and doctrinal text in a religious context, when the biblical canon is studied as literature.
Grasping for a more expansive take, I notice that many film studies courses are housed in the English departments. As a paid movie critic and English Major in the early 1990s, I inhabited the intersection of cinema studies and literature for a brief, fierce time. Years ago, my institution added an upper division graphic novel course. At stable and sophisticated enough institutions, such classes and endeavors may get properly categorized as “pop culture studies,” “American studies,” or simply “cultural studies,” but in these kinds of seminars, movies and comics receive the in-depth attention of which they are worthy.
Once upon a time at an academic conference, while doing a deep browse of the book booths, I stumbled across a “what is literature” type of primer. After a quick perusal of expert opinions found in this text, it immediately dawned on me that “literature” was an incredibly fluid, politicized, and probably imploding field, with fewer and fewer institutional gatekeepers to defend any fortified notion of the canon, the canon being that rarefied set of texts that are set aside from other texts as the important texts, the ones that everyone should read, if they want to be a well-rounded human intellectual. Literature, it turns out, according to the authors of this professional primer, is many things, most of them debatable and forever changing. Literature is whatever we say it is, and what gets included in our syllabi is as good an instrument as any to determine the simultaneously evolving and self-destructing nature of our field of study. These insights, for me, lead us inevitably toward rock-n-roll and my mixtape syllabus.
So what about popular music, then? Doesn’t that belong in the music department? Or if we are to study music with a cultural lens, as I attempt to do, maybe that belongs in the history department or even sociology or maybe in a field called something like “ethnomusicology.” But literature? Can folk songs and rock songs and pop songs and hip-hop-raps really be classified as a kind of poetry? Aren’t all the 33 and 1/3 books--that popular series of pocket-size-paperbacks about important albums--aren’t these just highfalutin lit-crit doubling as dissertation-length record reviews? Yes, rock music can be studied in all those other academic contexts, but definitely, always, absolutely as literature.
It’s been more than a decade since I first got serious about including popular music in some form or fashion within my American literature curriculum. The ambitious “annotated playlist and fanzine” final project has only evolved and intensified over the years. The literature about rock is also always included: poems, novels, biography and autobiography, and of course, the “gonzo” or new journalism, where the writer is joyfully immersed in the rock scene or whatever aspects they are researching, like Amanda Petrusich’s stunning study of the collectors of 78 blues records.
A few years ago, discovering Rob Sheffield’s “Love is a Mixtape” memoir was such a profound breakthrough for me that led to the debut of “The American Mixtape” class during the Spring 2022 semester. The “mixtape,” which had previously been a component of just about every literature course for several semesters running, as a final creative project, was now the main thing.
With the launch of “The American Mixtape” class that bold January on Google Meeting, our interconnected American playlists were announced as the comprehensive theme and cohesive glue of an entire literary curriculum. In addition to asking students to write their own responses to the literature about music, such as Sheffield and so many others, they finally are taking a deep dive into a variety of songs or albums.
My frequent visits to the “books-about-music” section in every independent bookstore in every city I visit led to a startling and amazing discovery in late 2021. I don’t remember which trip it was, but we were in Louisville and at Carmichaels on Bardstown Road. The beautiful book cover, like a psychedelic poster from a show in San Francisco or Detroit or Atlanta or several other places in the late 1960s, this art immediately pulled me into the book’s orbit. But then the title further enticed me, called Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry.
It’s like the authors here, one musician Mike Mattison and one scholar Ernest Suarez, it’s as if they had been thinking and researching and writing about the topics from inside my brain, or at least with their own obsessions that directly overlap with mine. In this amazing book, they are going to lay claim to a game-changing concept that will expand my heart and lungs and dancing feet and tell my brain about it, with a clearer, braver, and better nerve for teaching and talking about the sonic audacity of audio texts. They are proposing an entire new literary genre called the “poetic song verse,” that includes the song and the poem expressed together.
Everyone who has tried to explore this intersection before probably knows or suspects that the college and counterculture conversations about rock and poetry are as old and faded as grandpa’s embroidered jeans. It’s illustrated when Zooey Deschanel’s Almost Famous sister, insists to the supermom portrayed by Frances McDormand, that Simon & Garfunkel perform poetry. And Mom responds succinctly: “Yes it's poetry. It is the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex!”
But even if they are older than pawpaw and meemaw, these ideas just keep fighting their way back to the surface. Recently, the rock and literature conversation has intensified with every honor and accolade afforded to Bob Dylan, culminating with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, granted to Robert Zimmerman for “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
But this Dylan-saturated conversation has been percolating for 60 years. We just keep stumbling over our own literary tools concerning how to talk about it. From Richard Goldstein’s 1969 volume The Poetry Of Rock to Charlotte Pence’s 2012 anthology The Poetics of American Song Lyrics and including numerous other similar forays, the “lyrics as lit” move itself has faltered and fallen, or better, collided and collapsed, into a premise much more accurate and beautiful.
Let me provide a comparative aside to clarify this. Think back to the colleague’s syllabus at which I stole glances more than 20 years ago. The main literary genres there were fiction, poetry, and drama. But assuming correctly that drama is literature (it is), then, is the literature found in the script or the performance of the play or some combination therein? I recently posed this question to my dearest local thespians.
One colleague answered: “The script alone is necessarily unfinished. It requires the interpretations of theater artists to present the completed work. That doesn’t mean literary aspects cannot be analyzed on the page. We just have to keep in mind that when we do, it is sort of like assessing a short story when it is still unpublished and fragmentary.” Another actor-director added, “I think it is best to study both. If you only study the script, you miss out on how it transforms once it is in performance.” A similar logic applies when we amplify “poetic song verse” as its own distinct genre. We cannot study the words in isolation.
For all the years that I thought that “lyrics as literature” was the best that we rock-professor-scholars could come up with, like a kind of shortcut or workaround to required textbook credibility, I had missed talking about the obvious payoff in my pedagogy of rock, that according to Mattison and Suarez, “rests on the symbiotic relationship that most often occurs when potent lyrics and sonics are developed together.” Why had I not already grasped and insisted on this obvious “duh,” which of course I had already experienced firsthand, time and again? It’s not just the words, but those words in their full and funky and fabulous and freaky audio contexts.
I never wake up in the morning with a recitation of lyrics in my head. I wake up with a song stuck in my head.
I never wake up just needing to read lyrics printed on a page. I wake up hungry for that fix and need to find my high-quality headphones and listen to a song that includes lyrics, but also incorporates “every aural dimension of song, including voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production” (again quoting Mattison and Suarez).
Novelist Michael Chabon intervenes on this topic with his remarks in “Let It Rock,” that were occasioned by Bob Dylan’s induction ceremony into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chabon sets the stage for the literary genre being named is found inside the song, not partitioned off. Because the real links between lyrics and literature are through the song itself.
Chabon rejects the need for making some kind of exegetical fetish for lyrics-only-on-a-page: “I saw that rock lyrics could not really be poetry because when you took away the melody, the instrumentation, and above all the voice of the singer, a song lyric just kind of huddled there on a page looking plucked and forlorn, like Foghorn Leghorn after a brush with the Tasmanian Devil.” Reading this again and again, I know that he is correct, my 8th grade presentation and recitation on the poetic merits of Don McLean’s “American Pie,” notwithstanding.
But this is not to dismiss or derail the lyrics’ own literary quality, only to acknowledge their elevated and amplified arc, into some intimate yet cosmic places, within our very beings, when experienced as part of the song. Chabon intensifies: “Song lyrics are part of my literary firmware, programmed permanently into my read-only memory. Not just words: writing. Tropes and devices, rhetorical strategies, writerly techniques, entire structures of allusion and imagery: entire skeins of the synapses in my cerebral cortex by now are made up entirely of all this unforgettable literature.”
What makes literature into “literature” always remains fluid, but rock (or rap or twang or screamo or whatever) was already literature, long before I felt the incredible need to talk about it incessantly and endlessly, in this way.
While instrumental songs may be poetic or literary in ways I have yet to describe, every genre needs boundaries, even soft ones. So lyrics, plus. Lyrics plus vocalization with every bit of pitch and grit and emotional shading. Lyrics plus electric guitars, often turned up loud. Actually, lyrics plus any kind of musical anchor, depending on your tastes and the artist’s sense of mission and genre. So we are not ignoring or kicking the lyrics to the side, but studying them in the same place we experience them, on good stereo equipment, on banging car stereos, on excellent headphones, and in live performance.
Could the literature of rock include a nicely noodled 20-minute wordless ambient trance track? I would not say so at this point, but I am open to being convinced.
The words of rock, whether on the best stereo or even read from a lyrics sheet or shouted over a crappy PA and the cacophony of impolite fans talking, these vast and sprawling catalogs comprise a literature because they traffic in myth and meaning, in beauty and bitterness, in grief and generosity. They take us to those elusive nuggets of naked reality that are the irrepressible reasons for all things truly compelling, also including religion and sex, sport and war. They tell our larger cultural story.
