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Abstract
This project explores recorded songs as a mode through which the crises of our present historical moment become sensible. It conceives of songs as listening environments that position listeners with respect to an object world—the voices, instruments, and spaces that fill a song. It identifies a tendency for post-millennial pop songs to frustrate the listener’s capacity to get a grip on the song’s environment. The four chapters explore two distinct ways that song and studio figure such incapacity: dissolution, which pushes objects just beyond the listener’s reach through blur and dispersal; and definition, which throws objects into states of sharp focus that register as artificial or hallucinatory. Taken together, these terms produce a figurative space—or, as I call it, a metalistening environment—according to which listeners apprehend the realities presented in and through song.
The dissertation’s chapters traverse this space through four distinct tropes laid out over four chapters. Chapter One (“Setting the Tone”) introduces dissolution through a close reading of “Nobody” by indie-pop artist Mitski. It explores what happens when the expressive persona that grounds a song dissolves into its atmosphere, arguing that such dissolution betrays a distrust in personal expression as a political mode. Chapter Two (“Holding It Together”) develops the notion of dissolution by listening to the sonic atmospheres of Billie Eilish’s award-winning song “What Was I Made For?,” a song whose calming effect, I show, issues from how it is able to convert an under-resourced listening environment into a source of abundance. Chapter Three (“Making an Appearance”) shifts the dissertation’s focus away from the blurry and ambiguous toward the focused and hyperreal. As a way into definition, the chapter centers an analysis of Charli XCX’s song “Sympathy Is a Knife,” arguing that the artist registers a loss of reality that accords with our image-obsessed media culture. Chapter Four (“Staying in Contact”) pursues the clarity and precision associated with definition through the concept of the phatic, a communicative mode concerned with affirming presence rather than engaging in symbolic exchange. It theorizes such affirmations of presence as a backstop to meaning breakdown and undifferentiated experience, a provisional form of clarity that functions simultaneously as opening and closure to forms of sociality.