So my title really has to do with the 11th song (and I recognize, thus, the misnomer of "FRT," but you'll forgive me, since I originally posted this as an unordered list and didn't realize I had exceeded ten songs)--which, in fact, both thematizes and dramatizes my title.
- 'Insistor,' Tapes 'n Tapes
- 'Daughters Of The Soho Riots,' The National
- 'The Official Ironmen Rally Song,' Guided by Voices
- 'Halloweenhead,' Ryan Adams
- 'The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,' Of Montreal
- 'High And Dry,' Radiohead
- 'Rainfall,' The Apples in Stereo
- 'Protein and Poison,' Maritime
- 'Window,' Doug Martsch
- 'Time to Go,' John Vanderslice
- 'You Were Right,' Built to Spill
Originally, I wanted to say I'm especially curious about this phenomenon. That is, on SongMeanings.net, we really see democracy at work in interpretation. After awhile, posters do flesh out all the references Martsch makes in "You Were Right." But of course, no one's really studying such a site for evidence of meaning, at least not in a meta-interpretive way. Surely, there are all kinds of reasons for ignoring such data, reasons it might be interesting to think about (e.g., most songs "interpreted" here aren't that difficult to understand, so that the acumen of the scholars who congregate here isn't quite, er, rarified, and hence, the discourse isn't all that sophisticated). But I'm not gonna do that.
What's more interesting to me is the voice of the posters: there's an ethos-related move that pervades popular explications of pop-cultural texts, and it finds its most habituated verbal tick in using present-progressive verbs. For instance, one poster writes of "High and Dry" that "This song is about selling you soul. The narrator is talking about this person who has compromised his integrity for success." And another says, "I think this song is about thie guy who is trying to impress everyone, and wanting acceptance." Does shifting the verb into this mood--and hence, distancing the interpreter from h/er offered interpretation--signal a lack of confidence, much like the other characteristic move, peppering comments with "I think"? At any rate, it's a bizarre move, since it's not something one comes across in literary criticism--the genre such commenters are otherwise trying so hard to emulate.
