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Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Bielen, Kenneth G. "Lyrics of Civility: The Language of Popular Music and the Secularization of American Culture," American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University, December 1994.
This is a study of religious images in best-selling recordings from the first seven decades of the century, though the study deals primarily with the 1950s and 1960s. Using lyric analysis, I focus on the “civil” language of lyrics that embrace the Biblical sacred order. I argue that this language dilutes the meaning found in the Biblical tradition and, therefore, even though certain songs may appear to uphold the Biblical order, they are agents of secularization. Further, popular songs of the late 1960s that rejected the Biblical sacred order, unlike songs that accepted the tradition, used specific, meaningful language.
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