by Sarah Evans (saevans@vassar.edu)
I know that the relationship between music and semiotics has come up before in this course, but since we’re moving into studying performativity and speech acts in class, and I love taking things just a little bit too literally, I really wanted to talk about musical performances, especially with regards to music videos. Music videos are a strange type of performance. especially since they aren’t always clearly a performance: a general template for the band-made video is that it’s a short film built around a band’s performance, but the band isn’t really performing, it’s lip-syncing to the perfectly mixed and mastered version of the song that’s on their record. Fan made videos, usually hobbled by a lack of funds, tend to be either flash-made, or, most commonly, a series of photos of a band or the lyrics of a single with a single playing in the background. However, some videos make it obvious (sometimes ludicrously so) that not only are they performances, but they also change the meaning of the songs by placing them in contexts that are contraindicated by the music, in effect creating completely new meanings and utterances based upon the interplay between the infelicitous statement and a counter-intuitive context, capitalizing on what Grice dubs the conversational implicative.
Although Grice calls his idea “conversational implicature”, I’m going to stretch the idea past language and into music. I’m talking a very specific type of music video, one which takes the stance that what you’re watching is not only not real, but not even a staged performance, and it tends to do so by subverting the felicity of their actual statements within the song. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is thus: musical performances tend to occupy a nebulous space–there is generally no assurance that the singer is voicing his own thoughts or not unless the song directly indicates that that is so–but it can generally be assumed that a performance, especially within the context of a music video is just that–a performance, where the words being spoken do not directly perform any work on behalf of the speaker because they are inherently infelicitous, to apply Austin’s definition. Lyrics sung during a song are generally considered, like poetry and fiction, to be the words of a narrator who is not the singer, so that when the speaker is singing them, he cannot be held to anything that he sings because he is speaking on behalf of something else. It’s comparable, but by no means identical to Hanks’ example of Jack’s hypothetical infelicitous statement, “I promise that you [Natalia] will be home by 6:00”, which Jack cannot felicitously say unless the onus is on him to furnish Natalia with the means to be home by 6:00. Any promises, injunctions, requests, or other personal statements within a song’s lyrics are not actually being enacted by the singer; the singer is just singing.
However, this is just an Austinian interpretation, and, moreover, one that only really takes lyrics into account. In terms of music videos, especially ones that derive humor from the contradiction of the song being used in a specific way in the video, the focus tends to be on factors like the composition of the video, its personnel, its concept, and so on and so forth, as well as the context in which all of this is happening. The song is taken as a piece of fictitious entertainment, so the singer’s rendition and how it meshes with the rest of the video within the context in which the video exists is what produces humor. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, specifically the idea of implicature, is at work here: “Grice’s theory assumes that speakers routinely make utterances that are infelicitous, at the level of what they actually say” (Hanks 101). In terms of songs, it seems safe to say that, in light of Grice’s theory, it is both assumed and not problematic that a song’s lyrics as they are sung is infelicitous because the content (regardless of its connection to the performance of such) and context are logical.
This is where the blatant ludicrousness of certain performances in videos comes in: the song’s lyrics are logical, the context is logical, and what is being said is ridiculousness. Just consider the video for the song “Dance Yrself Clean”.
Now, the Muppets are not hipster party animals, or if they are, then that’s clearly an aspect of them that I glossed over during my infatuation with them sometime in elementary school. On just a basic level, this music video is funny because the Muppets are doing things that would never be associated with them outside the realm of parody; even if all of the parts of the video with all of them performing were excised and there was no music in the background, the images would still be funny (or at least trying to be funny) simply because watching puppets who are ingrained in our cultural consciousness as being family friendly, a little corny, and definitely safe for kids are put in situations that conform to a completely different stereotype, one which was, before it became primarily a source of ridicule for the very people for whom it used to apply, associated with adults and the underground. Even in the video, the passers-by laugh when the puppets do something that they would consider to be out of character.
In fact, the video would also work if it were just the puppets and the song, or just the song and the concept: the former has the same incongruities, whereas the latter syncs up pretty perfectly with the content of the song. What’s peculiar about this video is watching the performance–there is no speech or song more infelicitous in its delivery than this one with Kermit the frog sing it. It’s the exact same version of the song that appears on the album, not a cover, and Kermit is not singing it in his voice, he’s lip-syncing with James Murphy’s voice. For anyone who has heard Kermit’s voice actor, there is no way that he could be mistaken for singing this song, so it becomes plain that he’s singing for someone else. Taking a step back: the video is not only funny because it has muppets doing inappropriate things, it’s also funny and strange because one’s first instinct is to associate Kermit with the song and the lyrics because he’s singing it, but he’s no more beholden to them than Murphy would be if he were performing in the video instead. It’s blatantly artificial.
The logical conclusion of this line of thought, of building a music video that is predicated upon exposing the infelicity of performance that videos are, is the video for “Strictly Game”.
Where “Dance Yrself Clean” was funny because it exploited the incongruity of the performance, “Strictly Game” is funny because it conforms to the tropes of a specific type of fan-made music video. It has that as the most recognizable part of its context. At the very beginning, it actually looks completely like one of those videos (the same static images, the same font, even the same wipes from photo to photo), as though that was what the band wanted to do. However, what appears to be static at the beginning grows gradually and more obviously into a series of videos, almost as though the images are coming to life. Watching it a second time, I looked for indications that every “photo” was actually a staged video of the band, and it was. The video was funny and intriguing because it was so perfectly integrated with the concept of it looking like a fan-made product, but the way that it played with the form called attention to the fact that it was made by the band, even if the song and the band-in-the-video were not in any way synced so that there was an obvious disconnect between the band and the performance.
To bring this back to Grice, “Strictly Game” looks like a fan-made video, which connotes that the person who made it has no involvement with the band but enjoys their music. It also, in that vein, emphasizes that while there is a connection between the people in the video and the people singing, it is not the connection that those people are in the act of singing that song to an audience. Altogether, it is an example of implicature: the audience (or, in this case, the YouTube commenter population and myself) assumed one relationship, a completely infelicitous relationship as sundered in content and delivery as Kermit singing LCD Soundsystem, but by the end of the video, we understood that the band was actually directly involved in presenting this, and while it is in no way identical in meaning with the song itself, the video presents a performance unique to that video which actually suggests an infelicitous, but still communicative and performative utterance of parodic humor in the same way as “Dance Yrself Clean”–by capitalizing on both the understanding that what’s being presented is a performance, a rendition, and playing with that idea as it applies to music videos.
Implicatures, as a inferences functioning within a systemized set maxims, help us solve the apparent “failure of the speaker [and interlocutor] to be cooperative at the level of literal meaning” (Hanks 100). Implicatures act as the bridge between what is said and what in conveyed. The humor behind the first video may emerge from the tension created by two different things being said (what a muppet “says” and what a hipster song “says” — not actually any lyric) at the same time. In joining together through the act of a muppet sining a hipster song, these two things become one, but with a set of conflicting implicatures. The muppets say “cute” and “wholesome” and “puppets,” and the song and the actions say “filthy” and “hipster,” but when crossed, we get “cute, filthy, wholesome, hipsters.” Saying something like that violates Grice’s first maxim: It is false (“cute, filthy, wholesome, hipster puppets exist” is a historically false statement). Fortunately, we can employ implicature to understand that while the video is saying that literally, it is conveying rather, that the statement is itself a joke. And we delight in uncovering this implicature — that’s why its funny. It’s a joke and we delight in understanding that it is a joke, not a historic impossibility. But wait, in truly self-referential hipster fashion, the architect behind all of this is indeed a “”cute, filthy, wholesome, hipster puppet” — James Murphy.
http://slaksindex.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/james-murphy.jpg
okay, that’s not fair. He didn’t make the video. But sill…
The kind of music videos that I seem to see the most of, for whatever reason, are the highly symbolic, often surreal ones — you know, with special effects budgets and so forth. Again referring to the disconnect between the lyrics and the video typical to OMVs, oftentimes the video will depict some kind of linear story. The music video creates a fictional world in which characters, setting and story interact in unreal or unexpected ways. When the song lyrics do not match the video, which is often, it’s normal for the viewer to try to reconcile the two, no matter how difficult this task may be. To what extent is the singer experiencing the fictional world around them? To what extent is that fiction “real”, within the fiction of the video? Trying to make the lyrics of the song and the dual identity of the singer as a performer/character fit the (sometimes obscure) plot of the MV is entertaining but frustrating.
It can also be a great breeding ground for another kind of parody. If you’ve never seen a “literal music video”, now is your chance. Here’s a pretty good one for “Total Eclipse of the Heart”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-x9ygQEGA
The literal music video is still as funny — probably more so — than the original video it is parodying. But it has removed the disconnect between the lyrics and the video completely. In this case the video is funny because it subverts our assumptions about music videos themselves, rather than our understanding of linear storytelling. Let’s face it, a lot of music videos are just plain weird, and the majority of them rely on highly surreal imagery that makes all clear-cut interpretation difficult.
Is most art infelicitous? Consider this not just as a dialectical speech act, but as a preformative gesture in general. A portrait may be an icon, but it is a tasteful incongruity of the original form, most likely emphasizing the subject’s bright blue eyes instead of their well-pronounced nose (a truly felicitous form would illustrate both with pride.) I am reminded of A Softer World (http://www.asofterworld.com/), a compilation of pictures—and once again, what could be more felicitous than an exact replica of the original form?— captioned with statements that tend to contradict or redefine the original image. Take the latest installment: http://www.asofterworld.com/clean/futurists.jpg
The paradox here is that statement was never infelicitous to begin with– we just hadn’t received the whole statement. But I find it strange how the mind sets itself up for error like this. We see the first panel, see the picture of the child with “children are the future” written on it, immediately conjure up some Kumbaya scene, and expect no foul play. There’s no period in the first panel to signal the completion of a thought. We know that there are panels to come, and frequent readers of A Softer World may even anticipate the upheaval of their first impression, but none of this undermines the fact that we set ourselves up for deception by not taking the first image with a grain of salt. Language and art are full of such pitfalls—why aren’t we more discerning? We seem to harbor an inherent belief that everyone and everything adheres to Grice’s cooperative principles, which of course isn’t true. Comedians and artists have been clever enough to realize what happens when they defy those expectations: we sit up, we pay attention, and emote something in our surprise, if only disdain at being so effectively hoodwinked. So why don’t we know better by now?
As mentioned, the infelicitous disparity between the song and its accompanying music video can be funny. My question is–why? I understand the following answer could be a description of subverting expectations and breaking the anticipated and pre-set rules of logic, but my question goes deeper than that. Why would breaking these rules offer an effective comedic device? Basically, why do we think it’s funny to break the rules in the first place?
Humor is a social creature, fed by cultural conventions. In the Western world, we view this incongruity between content and context as humorous. Does this hold up in a more universal context? Or is this comedic procedure socialized as part of a unique linguistic niche?
In regard to Grice’s work, Hanks says, “Conversational practices, in contrast, seem to be nonlogical. So, to be provocative, we could say that logic reigns both at the deep level of literal sense and at the most superficial level of conveyed meaning. It is in the middle, the fit between literal content and context, that problems arise” (101). I just wanted to bring up that conversational practices are “nonlogical” only in terms of this system created to describe language. This model, however, is descriptive and not prescriptive; keeping this in mind, I’d like to point out that maybe it’s not the conversational practices that are nonlogical, but the way in which we describe them.
A large part of this post focused on how the incongruity between the video and the lyrics is what makes the music video funny (in addition to the fact that we cannot hold the singer responsible for the lyrics). However, there is another side of that coin–over-congruity. There are many music videos that use an extremely literal interpretation of lyrics, and that is often hilarious as well. Some good examples of this are NicePeter’s picture songs. NicePeter takes a series of pictures and writes a song while he is looking at them, describing exactly what he thinks while he sees the pictures. In this instance, not only do we know that the lyrics are truly the thoughts of the performer (he writes the lyrics as he sings the song; he improvises), but the video as a whole is funny because of how well the lyrics and the video match up. The lyrics are not exactly what is in the pictures, but are a funny thought that seems to match up completely with the pictures. The song is funny because of over-felicity. Here’s a video in which he films a picture song and explains how he does it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgCyvSDD7As&feature=channel_video_title
He does not look at each picture completely literally as he doesn’t explain the pictures, but sort of takes the point of view of the person or animal in the picture and interprets it from a comical standpoint. However, because everything he says matches up very well with the pictures, one could argue that the extreme felicity makes the video funny.
Oh goodness forgot the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGuPpYYXIUo
“Strictly Game”‘s infelicity seems to be an indirect speech act- though no one ever literally said that the videos were pictures or that the video was fan-made, we feel lied to when we eventually discover the truth. If we follow Grice, it violates the maxims of cooperation, “Avoid obscurity of expression” and “Avoid ambiguity” and “Make your contribution as informative as is required”, but does not violate “Don’t say what you believe is false”.
It’s also an example of the association between time and language. If we saw the video as a single non-divisible entity it is not infelicitous because at the end we are quite aware of what is going on. But we can’t process anything like a music video as a single symbol because it takes place over time.
Another example of time-based infelicity can be found in this video. (Disclaimers: it’s in Portuguese and not PG…or is it?)