Open Collections

Malloy, Bronwyn

University of British Columbia

It is difficult — maybe even ethically dubious — to be optimistic in the face of late-stage capitalism, the global rise of neo-fascism, the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing genocide, and climate emergency. In this dissertation, I argue that listening to and making music can become forms of empathetic resistance to the inertia of personal and collective trauma. I call this listening for “weak hope”: realistic, ethical, and active hope that is salvaged and assembled from the margins of conventional sources of strength. I listen for representations of weak hope in the work of five contemporary musicians — John K. Samson, Christine Fellows, the Mountain Goats (John Darnielle), the National (Matt Berninger and Carin Besser), and Taylor Swift — whose song lyrics have informed the vocabulary of my own survival. In so doing, I make a record of my own listening, attending especially to the ways in which I hear these songs resonate with scholarly conversations on listening, trauma, and the lyric. Though I borrow from the thinking and language of scholars working primarily in literary studies, I also develop my own terminology in order to approach song lyrics as audible, embodied works of literature. Attentive listening, which means listening closely and carefully in order to make meaning, has both conceptual and methodological valences, as I self-reflexively position my own ear as this project’s primary listening apparatus. I am interested in “making” in terms of meaning-making, artistic creation, and survival (“making it”), and argue that the three are intrinsically linked. Learning to listen — to tend and to attend — to one another is an urgent imperative. I posit that one way to “hold ourselves together,” both the collective “ourselves” and individual our/selves, might be “with our arms around the stereo” (the National, “Apartment Story,” Boxer).

Text

2024-07-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88719

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/