Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Let me just throw this out there. I’ve recently become obsessed with Miley Cyrus’ “See You Again.” And here’s the result of me trying to intellectually justify that.

At first listen, the lyrics are weird and allusive. I mean, most songs that talk about longing for a certain person and how that persons makes the narrator feel strange are really about sex. So, when she talks about “freaking out” and how “she couldn’t breathe” and the “next time we hang out,” we would generally assume that she wasn’t really talking about getting short of breath when she saw some guy she had a huge crush on. But this isn’t just any pop-tart singing, it’s America’s most virginal daughter-of-a-lame-country singer, Miley Cyrus.

So, here’s the interpretive question. We know that Miley Cyrus, at least in the iteration featured on Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, is not intending to talk about sex. But maybe we’re not committing the intentional fallacy. We can derive that Cyrus isn’t talking about sex not from our knowledge of biographical facts of Cyrus’ life (the much dreaded external evidence in Wimsatt and Beardsley original essay), but from the fact that reading “See You Again” as really being about sex is a pretty big stretch within the context of the larger ‘poem’ within which See You Again is presented (that would be the album as a whole). Basically, if HM2 featured songs that were any more suggestive than See You Again, it would be a fair assumption to read some extra meaning into the childish lyrics, but it doesn’t.

But maybe trying to graft a framework for reading poetry onto music is a big mistake. That’s because there’s a lot more to a song than the words (and lest I sound obvious, there’s more than than the music too). Affectation and presentation matter a lot. And here’s where the real tension is. Closely related to the intentional fallacy is the affective fallacy. Whereas the intentional fallacy is “a confusion between the poem and its origins” (like, for example, the fact we know that Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana wouldn’t actually be talking about sex) the affective fallacy is “a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does).” But what’s affect and what’s not affect when it comes to music? Isn’t affect the difference between a Radiohead cover band playing Paranoid Android and Radiohead doing it?

Or, to get back to our original example, when, say, an all-male a capella group sings the song to a specific, female member of the audience, how are we supposed to deal with this litany of new and different facts about the song. Surely, when Freshmen 15 performs the song, it’s probably appropriate to read more purient intentions into the lyrics.  And I don’t think we’re committing any interpretative fallacy by doing so.

PS – To commit the interpretative fallacy, I must admit that a big motivation for writing the post is the fact that I’ve been listening to “See You Again” over and over while I’m supposed to be writing a paper about Sailing to Byzantium. I didn’t want to put my mind to waste.

PPS – I really need to salvage some cred here, so allow me to be really annoying for a second. I’ve seen Radiohead live, I’ve seen Beck, Manu Chao, Stars, Arcade Fire (twice) and the last album I listened to in its entirety was Liquid Swords.