De la poésie avant toute chosepour une approche textuelle des musiques amplifiées

Abstract

Popular songs bear a sense which results from the cooperation of verbal language (referential) and musical language (non referential), embodied in performance. Although in the logics of everyday life songs can become a sound décor, almost deprived of semantic content, lyrics can also be carefully listened to, deciphered, interpreted, memorized and repeated. They thus acquire fullness, relevance, depth and literality, which all constitute the proof of their poeticity. A linguistic communication, of aesthetic nature, is then established between the speaker (here, the artist) and the receptor (here, the audience). Words in songs have a different status from everyday words, they have the necessary margins of silence (or of music) to attain the poetic status referred to by Genette. In fact, they convey functions which don�t have a primary pragmatic purpose and which will be here defined as poetic. This article proposes therefore to apply a textual approach to contemporary popular music based on the identification and study of these poetic functions as textual structuring factors. This will complete the musicological and sociological approaches to popular music.