«Build Yourself A Levee Deep Inside» : Perspectives On Violence In Female Songwriters Music

From Firenze University Press Journal: Studi sulla Formazione

Claudia Secci, Ricercatrice di Pedagogia generale e sociale, Università di Cagliari

«I always picture it as a car. All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?».

This are Bruce Springsteen’s words on the depressive condition that accompanied him through his life and career since his youth. We draw inspiration from them, to reflect on the fact that songwriter’s music is a «place» of identity storytelling. Not only because music — especially authorial music — in form of the «song», is aimed to tell a complex but organic story, with a beginning and an end, but also because the sound, the melody and the rhythm, intrinsically narrate, transmitting emotions, evoking atmospheres and memories, representing cultures and identifying individuals and generations.

Nonetheless, it is never easy to introduce popular music in the humanities — as well as you can’t refer permanently to cinema — partly because it can be difficult to convincingly and universally remove the barriers that separate noble and popular culture, partly because recurring to the arts, especially the popular ones, in the pedagogical reflection and in the educational intervention, may lose on effectiveness, whenever it becomes a foreordained method and it relies on a technical/scientific interpretation that doesn’t fit to the subject.

In this field. the term of «artistry», as Coppi defines it, seems to be more appropriate than «art» itself; from a pedagogical point of view, the arts, with their special languages, requiring specific and long-term trained competencies, are not as important as the creative process and attitude (artistry) itself, that can be exercised by everyone in every developmental step4.After the youth movements season around 1968, as Madrussan discusses, some cultural paths surface, that highlight and develop the emerging of a counterculture, with its own aesthetic and own unique meanings, that has in popular music its main mediatic tool.

Nevertheless, the very notion of «popular music» remains somewhat puzzling and it suggests a wide and articulated field of traditions carrying relevant differences between commercial and more cultured expressions, especially as it comes to generational approaches: while the mid- and older generations identify popular music with rock, the young ones take more and more distance from it.

For some time now, some authors engage in the effort of bringing humanistic knowledges and «pop» culture (meant as a set of musical, visual, stylistic, theatrical expressions) closer from one to another. This theorizing effort has been carried out partly by pedagogists, partly by writers, that, from other theoretical points of view, tended to validate the removal of too strict fences between knowledge dimensions. Some authors have described the cultural change in the observation of popular music, debating how, in the last decades, the «song» can be confronted with the most prestigious products of the arts and culture and is even celebrated by some as the real poetry of our time.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/ssf-12022

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