Emotional vs Pragmatic Response
I have proposed a hypothesis that music encourages an emotional response in the listener, but at the same time it discourages or suppresses any thought process involved in formulating a pragmatic response to the situation.
It’s as if music is giving a listener two distinct instructions with regard to some situation:
- “Tell me how you feel about this situation.”
- “Do not bother making any effort to think about formulating a plan of pragmatic action to deal with the situation.”
When music is accompanied by lyrics, ie when it’s a song, the lyrics work best if they conform to the constraints of these commands:
- The lyrics should describe a situation which provokes an emotional response in the listener.
- But, at the same time, the lyrics should avoid describing the situation in enough detail that the listener would naturally start thinking about how someone would act to deal with that situation.
Devices Used Within Song Lyrics
The following is a list of some literary devices that are commonly used with song lyrics, and which can be understood to relate to my hypothesis about emotional response vs pragmatic response.
This identification can help streamline the analysis of actual song lyrics. For example, the starting point for the analysis of the lyrics of a particular song would be to label individual lines in the lyrics with labels such as (for the devices described below) “abstraction”, “metaphor”, “selective detail”, “nonsense” or “temptation”.
Abstraction
Emotions are intrinsically abstract.
An emotion is an abstract perception of the situation that the person having the emotion is in.
For example, to be “happy” means something like “I now have a good (or better than previously expected) chance of achieving my biological goals”.
To be “sad” means “I now have a poor (or worse than previously expected) chance of achieving my biological goals”.
To be “angry” means “some thing or someone has suddenly frustrated my ongoing attempts to achieve my biological goals”.
Whereas pragmatic action usually depends on the specific details of the situation.
So, for example, a statement like “I have lost everything” is a fairly abstract description of a situation that would, typically, provoke sadness.
But there is no way to formulate a plan of action to deal with this situation unless one has more detailed information to work on.
For example, in a situation where you are told that someone has lost everything, and you want to help them deal with their situation, you would naturally ask questions like:
- What is the “everything” that you lost?
- How did you lose it all?
- Was it your fault, or did someone else do a bad thing to you? Or was it just some kind of accident or “act of God”?
- What are the consequences of having lost “everything”?
The implication for song lyrics is that if you keep them abstract, then your lyrics can have an emotional impact on the listener (“Oh no, you lost everything, that is so sad”), and as long as you don’t add any specific details, then the listener cannot even begin to start thinking about how you might make the situation better.
Metaphor
Metaphor is a literary device where you say something that isn’t literally true, or at least doesn’t literally apply to the current context, therefore it must have some kind of non-literal interpretation.
Usually this means that the metaphor is a statement about one situation A within the context of some other situation B, and the metaphor kind of makes sense because situation A has some abstract similarities with situation B, and therefore the metaphor can be understood as an abstract statement within the abstract context that is shared between A and B.
So metaphor is a means of using language that seems somewhat specific, but actually, because it’s a metaphor, it has an abstract meaning.
Selective Detail
One issue with being too abstract is that it can limit the intensity of emotional response. We will naturally feel more emotion about a situation if we are given more specific details about that situation.
The trick with song lyrics is to give some specific details, in a manner that heightens the emotional impact to the listener, while at the same time not providing the kind of details that would be relevant to formulating a plan of action to deal with the situation.
Nonsense
Sometimes song lyrics are just nonsensical. It is a bit like metaphor, where it seems obvious that the words have no literal interpretation within the context of the lyrics, but at the same time it is difficult to discern what even a non-literal interpretation of those words would be.
The trick with nonsensical lyrics is for them to still have some kind of emotional impact, even though the listener is not quite too sure what they mean.
Temptation (or “No-Brainer”)
There is one type of song where a pragmatic course of action is strongly suggested.
A specific version of this is where a young woman is suggesting to her boyfriend (or some potential male partner), by some means or another, that she is “up for it”.
This does seem to deviate from my hypothesis that song lyrics should leave a listener unable to formulate a plan of action.
What seems to be happening in this case is that the desired course of action is so obvious that no actual thought is required, ie the singer has provided overwhelming evidence that she wants to do it with you (the presumed male listener), so you should just do it.
This is consistent with the idea that what is suppressed by music is not so much the actual pragmatic response, but rather the process of thinking about what a pragmatic response should be. So if no actual thought is required, then an intention to initiate that pragmatic response is consistent with the state of mind induced by the music.
One can take the view that the problem of a male suitor interacting with a potential female partner is to advance a relationship to the point where she “wants to do it”. So if she states that indeed the relationship has reached that point, then effectively she is saying that it’s “problem solved”, and therefore no further thought is required with regard to solving that particular problem.
(Songs involving direct sexual suggestion are much more commonly performed by females because males are much less sexually discriminating than females, and a man singing to another woman or even his girlfriend a song with lyrics like “I’m available and up for it so therefore we should just do it” doesn’t make so much sense.)