Semiotics as a mode of popular music analysis and interpretation

Semiotics is a powerful and influential concept in the analysis of music (both sound and notation), lyrics and visual images alike, making it particularly useful for popular music. Because of its concern with meaning as well as means, it is also an important tool for approaches such as those informed by feminist and queer theory. It links general cultural concepts and methodologies to the unique specificity of music. This chapter gives an overview of the field, followed by original illustrations of different applications of semiotic analysis to popular music.
Acknowledgment is given to the foundational work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Pierce. The influence of music semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez is recognised through his model of poiesis – trace – esthesis and the paradigmatic analyses of musical structures. Along with Kofi Agawu’s combination of this approach with topic theory, I make it relatable to popular music. Within popular music semiotics I examine the pioneering work of Philip Tagg, through his concept of ‘musemes’ and interpretation of topics as musical codes.
The chapter concludes with a semiotic reading of Sandi Thom’s ‘I wish I were a punk rocker with flowers in my hair’. The theoretical frame is derived from Nattiez, with methods of Agawu and Tagg used for introversive and extroversive semiosis. The latter leads to a wider contextualisation within the Britpop inheritance, using songs by The Feeling and The Divine Comedy for comparison in considering the hermeneutic significance of the dactylic rhythm.