Introduction

Irish culture has traditionally been seen as a very musical culture. In fact, Irish culture is seen to find its most authentic expression in music. Traditional music has made an unrivalled impact on audiences in every part of the globe, at the same time the maybe most influential pop group of the past 20 years, U2, happens to be Irish as well. More recently, successful pop bands have emerged from the same small country, achieving global success. These are just three example that can be consulted to confirm that music plays a significant role in Irish culture. However, all three examples are also highly influenced by non-Irish determinants: In the case of traditional music, its revival was initiated by the Irish diaspora in North America and is partly a product of nostalgia. U2 made use of a musical idiom that is more American than Irish. And finally, boy and girl groups are an example of globally fabricated pop music which, too, is not an exclusively Irish phenomenon.

At the same time, another musical development has emerged which has gone largely unnoticed. On the new generation growing up in Ireland in the 1960 and 70ies, television and popular media, including music, played a more central role and exercised a more formative cultural influence than the more traditional values of Irish society.[1] A deep sense of estrangement with the parent culture was resolved in the creative journey for a redefinition of one's identity for which music was the preferred medium. This music, though influenced by various musical traditions, has not always global ambitions.

If a label for this music has to be established, I would choose to describe it as a songwriter scene, as genre labels such as folk, rock, pop or others are inadequate, when considering the conventions that define each genre, and moreover such labels are rejected by most of the participants. The significance of this new genre hails from its specifically local character, i.e. it is made by local musicians for a local audience, but it has also contributed to promote cultural, social, historical and political debates in Ireland. The objective of this paper is to investigate the practice of contemporary political song and its impact on the cultural debate by retracing the origins of political songs in Ireland.

the song and the message

I assume a broad definition of "political song": A political song is a song that deals with an issue that belongs to the public rather than the personal sphere of existence. This approach implies a thematic perspective to the meaning of songs which implicitly assumes that songs communicate a "message" through their text. And I use "text" here as a broad term which includes song lyrics, music, genre, voice, style, performance and communicative situation during the performance, and the socio-political and socio-economical context of the song. But, in how far can we assume that songs communicate a message from a sender, the musician, to a receiver, the audience? Let's have a quick glance at how musical, and particularly political meaning, has been approached. When the interpretation of the song "Eve of Destruction" was analysed among socio-politically interested university students, 14% of the questioned students interpreted the song "correctly", another 44.8% were found to understand the theme partially. This result was used both by those predisposed to dismiss the usefulness of lyrical content analysis and those supporting lyrical content analysis. While the former argued that the percentage who understood the theme of the song was shockingly low and that the only conclusion to be drawn from this evidence was that people did not listen to the lyrics of songs,[2] the latter maintained that two thirds of the audience did understand the song and thus must be listening to the lyrics.[3] What we can learn from this is that both interpretations of this data ignores the actual practice of making and listening to music. Depending on genre and social setting (both the micro-context of a musical event and the macro-context of the socio-cultural context), I would argue, lyrics may become important, or may lose their relevance altogether. It is this context which needs to be analysed in order to adequately study the meaning of songs.

This sociological approach to music stresses the significance of an active construction of meaning through the participants in musical events or in musical production and consumption which places the performance in a central position.[4]. It is necessary to analyse the "meanings" of music as they manifest themselves in the usage of a musical piece and the ways in which meaning can be, is, or is not established as well as the changes in meaning that a song undergoes when the context (social, audience, or other) is altered. Musical and political meaning is therefore "negotiable"[5] and unstable, as it is influenced by its socio-historical context:[6] "It is perhaps the way that music connects with meanings that indicates how it can work and be made to work for particular political agendas."[7] This intertextual character of musical meaning, its connectedness assmues that music has a dialogical relation to cultural narratives on the one hand and individual cultural knowledge on the other. "Meaning, in any situation, is thus a consequence of an intense dialectical interaction between text, other adjacent texts (lyrics, images, movement) and social, cultural and biographical contexts"[8]

The interactional[9] character of the construction of meaning makes the nature of musical meaning social in principle and links music intrinsically to a specific culture and event:[10] "any significance assigned to music must be ultimately and necessarily located in the commonly agreed meanings of the group or society in which the particular music is created".[11] It is within the "performing conventions",[12] i.e. the conventions of production and consumption, that an evaluation of the generation of meaning has to be undertaken. Once the conventions are established, it is possible to evaluate the importance of musical aspects such as lyrical contents analysis. These performing conventions are musical genres, if the term genre is to describe a structure of a musical piece comprised of elements such as lyrical text, music, style, and context. Political meaning can then be communicated when there is a predisposition on the side of both producers and consumers of music to read the musical text politically. This is, I would argue, the case for Irish music for two reasons: Firstly, there is a history of using songs and ballads as a means of political and cultural expression and the revival of political songwriting in the 1960s and 80s fell on a soil previously ploughed by the founders of the nation at the start of the century, when literary and political figures used the medium of songs for the construction of a national narration, cultural identity and political expression. Secondly, in the past two decades, there appeared to be a need for an alternative medium for political expression outwith the dominant political and cultural discourse.

Therefore it is two genres that have influenced our object of study: on an intramusical level, the performing conventions are strongly influenced by the genre of folk music;[13] and on an extramusical level, attitudes towards music are influenced by the street ballad and literary ballad tradition. Both genres have been used for political expression. This is relevant for a assumedly political message because the songs draw on generic conventions where political meaning is expected by the participants of the musical event.

histories of political expression through music

Performative conventions of contemporary Irish songs constitute intertextual references to older genres and thus offer frames of reference for the construction of meaning. The knowledge of genre markers of both traditional street ballads and folk songs can be assumed among the participants due to the continuous practice and presence of such songs.

With the labour force exchange between Ireland and Britain, a large number of British ballads in English were imported from at least 1730 onwards.[14] These ballads were easily integrated in the existing system which distinguishes between songs by learned aristocratic poets, the filí, and the songs genre amhrán,which is part of the sráid-éigse or “street-learning”.[15] These were sung by the people or the bards (i.e. untrained poets and songsters) and not collected or transmitted by the filí. With the downfall of the bardic schools in the 17th century both traditions merged to a subculture relative to the dominant colonial discourse[16]. The classical ballad and the street ballad mirrored this distinction between learned and popular culture and with the persecution of the filí and bards, both strands merged into a prime tool for critical political expression and a medium of continued dissatisfaction with the political situation, borrowing strongly from the literary tradition of vision poetry, allegory and double meanings. [17]

Ballads increased in popularity in the wake of the Wexford rebellion of 1798. The street ballad proved to be the ideal medium for the propagation of political ideas and for commentary on the events and their aftermath. During the same time, Wordsworth rediscovered the ballad and used it for making a revolutionary literary statement, attempting to bring literature back to a more primitive idiom. By contrast, the increased popularity of the ballad genre in Ireland was not a literary statement or poetic revolution but was born out of necessity and due to the lack of an appropriate literary idiom in English, coinciding with the change of the language of everyday speech and political activism from Irish to English. The ballad can thus be considered to be the first English language literary genre used by a large section of the population.[18]

As Zimmermann maintains,

                   In most European countries, songs were inspired by political events, but few of them, if any, were retained by tradition ... Ireland is one of the countries where patriotic and political songs have been for a long time peculiarly popular, and perhaps influential[19].

 The street ballads and songs were closely linked, from the beginning, to the Home Rule and later the Republican movement. As many Irish politicians advocating independence were also poets, they too wrote and sang ballads and songs. This tradition continued through the times of the Land League and Daniel O’Connell to the leaders of 1848, with O’Donovan Rossa, Michael Davitt and Arthur Griffith having composed rebel songs, and the major figures of the 1916 Easter Rising, among these poet-politicians James Connolly, Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet[20].

                In the 19th century, the movement of the Young Ireland and the Irish Literary Revival developed an even more explicit interest in ballads and songs. They were recognised to have a potential as an educational instrument, for instructing people in the ideas of nationalism. Cultural politics of the early 20^th century accredited songs and ballads with being one of the main cultural forms of expression to shape the language of literary, cultural and political discourse and an idiom that could be qualitatively different from that of the former colonial power. Songs thus became central to the formation of a national and cultural identity distinct from the United Kingdom. This lead to a politicisation of the use and functions of Irish songs, whether they were overtly political or not. In this respect, ballads and songs continued to be used in literary works as a medium to question and/or establish cultural and national Irish identity by writers such as Yeats, Joyce, Behan and, most recently, Friel.

Conventions of performance

The nature of the musical event is an activity set aside from obligatory activities in life. Music is consumed within the context of leisure and entertainment and offers a creative space which is mirrored in the use of the word “play” when referring to making music. The terrain music and song occupy is therefore more open with regards to the rules, norms and values voiced in other areas of social life. This allows greater liberty in expression but also leads to a different set of constraints. Since music is mainly expected to entertain, it cannot be ignorant of the expectations of the audience. Instead, the

chief function of music is to involve people in shared experiences within the framework of their cultural experience. For that very reason, it mirrors a community’s cultural past, present and future.[21]

This special social context of the musical event accounts for the relation of its internal discourse with the external political discourse. In relation to the dominant, external political and cultural discourse, the musical discourse assumes a peripheral position because it is not perceived as a form of serious political expression by those who contribute to the dominant political or cultural discourse. But it is just at the periphery that conventional conceptions are challenged and that new ideas originate. This give peripheral discourses a significant role as new cultural assumptions, questions and definitions may be played out here before they find their way into the dominant discourse. Thus, "many genres of popular music may be understood as sites on which struggles relative to the acceptance or rejection of many features of capitalist social structures and ideologies have been played out."[22].

Moreover, the local musical event brings people together and evokes for them a collective emotional experience to which common meanings are assigned. Popular music, then, has a potential to create, define and articulate the idea of community and with it, a collective identity.[23] The musical event is thus a tolerated and accepted way of expressing accumulated feelings of various kinds. Because music is directed at the audiences emotions and characterised by an immediate emotional involvement, it may offer "cathartic episodes" and have "affectively empowering implications"[24] which, provided they are not transitory, can in turn be used for political means. As the songwriter and performer Allan Taylor observes: "Whilst song may not have actually brought about change it did give people a sense of unity once they were singing together"[25]. He further ascertains that. "an audience becomes like-minded during the space of the evening, almost as if disparate members of society become a community for one night a week."[26]

Damien Dempsey, Dublin Town

It was difficult to select a song for a practical discussion and I decided on the song "Dublin Town", written in 1996 by a lesser known artist, Damien Dempsey, for the reason that he seems to combine traditional and innovative elements like few other songwriters. Dempsey is musically interesting because he is both a performer of traditional ballads while challenging this tradition with his idiosyncratic performing style when performing his original material.

performative setting

Dempsey usually performs on his own, standing up on stage and accompanying his voice with the guitar. Occasionally, he employs a band which is a concession to the audience's tastes (cf. interview). During his performance, he is receptive to performing together with other musicians, most of them songwriters like himself.

The venues he performs in are mostly small function rooms to small purpose built concert halls, all of them allow social interaction as part of the musical event. Some of these venues do not provide amplification. The format of most of the musical events he performs in puts emphasis on the artistic value of the performance. Thus he performs at designated songwriters nights where the audience is keen to spot new talents, or he performs at venues that are frequented by an audience that is interested in local music.

The social characteristics of the audience are an age of between 18 and 35 years with an open minded attitude towards innovative music. Most participants of the musical event are resident in Dublin and have a keen interest in music which constitutes a large part of their free time activity, be it in an active or passive role. The audience generally listens intensively to the music and only speaks before or after the gig, or in between songs. In the venues without amplification, members of the audience who speak during songs are asked to leave. Before and after Dempsey's performance, he is present in the auditorium and approachable to the audience.

relation to audience

Dempsey establishes a rapport with his audience through the uses of gestures and facial expression, commentaries, and the structural set up of his songs.

Before starting to perform, Dempsey ensures that he has the undivided attention of his audience. He employs pauses, anecdotes and jokes to establish a rapport with his audience which, to a certain extent, is a two-way communication. During the songs, he keeps his eyes shut and makes use of elaborate facial expressions to underline his emotional involvment with his music. His unusual gestures and mannerism add to this: thus he moves the guitar for sound effects rather than more conventional methods.

Integral to the performance of each song is its previous or subsequent commentary. While this is a common feature in traditional and folk music, it also hails from the Irish song tradition, where the words brí ‘force, meaning’, míniú ‘explanation’ or údar ‘authority, justification’ describe the practice of commenting on a song.[27] This places the song in time and place, underlines its authenticity and facilitate memorisation by linking it to an anecdote. It also serves to captivate the audience. The commentary may also repeat the story of the song being redundant with regards to the information provided. It is, however, a normal procedure in Irish folklore and literature to give the plot in both a verse and a prose version. The nature and functions of the commentary underline the potential of songs for generating narratives and vice versa.[28] Furthermore, it puts the songs into a wider context of cultural items, narratives, issues and thus reaching out beyond the confinements of the songs as such.

Finally, the interaction with the audience is established by starting the song with the catchy chorus which the audience quickly picks up and rightly understands as an invitation to join in at its next occurrence. The refrain thus serves as a choral response involving the listeners,[29] which is also a feature of the traditional street ballad as is the direct address of the audience which too is present in this song. The employment of a chorus leads us to an investigation of the intrinsic song structure:

structure of song lyrics

The structure of the song is characterised by the nature and interaction of chorus and verse, rhythm, rhyme, pauses, intertextual motifs, thematic concerns and pronunciation.

As has already been established for the performative setting, the song structure too is geared towards increasing the audience's attention on the textual message. Dempsey thus recites the verses rather than singing them. The melodic line of the verses is monotonous and unexciting; while the chorus serves to please the ear with its melody. The interaction between music and lyrics, then, attempts to overturn passive listening habits.To this end, changes of tempo, scale and breaks from the rhythmic or melodic pattern can be detected. Rhyme is employed with the selfsame objective, in particular, through the use of dialectally specific rhymes thus increasing textual awareness among the listeners.

The song employs imagery and intertextual motifs which belong to a set pool of symbols relating to conventional interpretations of Irish identity, history and culture. These can be described in a cognitive context as mental schemata, or, in the context of discourse, as frames of reference. They are ideologemes characteristic of the specific group identity and have the advantage of quickly and effectively drawing on common values and knowledge. But Dempsey attaches new meaning to these clichés by putting them into musical quotation marks: thus he pauses before proclaiming "I love my people", the adamant cliché, and, to our amazement - the audience sings along in unison, re-prossessing the cliché alongside Dempsey.

Thematically he draws on common issues of a contemporary and urban context. Thus he addresses the problems of poverty, unemployment and violence by the use of the image of the Northside and Southside of Dublin, an image used frequently by other urban songwriters. These geographic locations act as symbols for different social class. Further geographical references draw a sociological map of Dublin. In this way, he involves the audience who can follow the itinary described by the song by connecting it to their own frames of reference. By stressing the local and immediate in his song, he increases the relevance for his audience. The local is established by mentioning street names, weaving ballad titles into the song's textual makeup, and the use of accent.. Only after he establishes the local reference, does he continue to generalise this experience to that of "any old town or country", however, insisting on a homogenous notion of "we", which stresses the group cohesion between singer and audience.

Following the 1995 famine commemoration, the general self-perception as a victim of history was a central issue of competing views regarding Irish identity. Dempsey's song draws on this conventional self-perception while simultaneously attempting to move further afield from it with the objective to enable active participation in Irish society and the construction of a more self-confident identity.

Dempsey employs a poignant north Dublin accent, an innovative feature due to the general stigma attached to this particular accent. The use of this accent is incongruous with the linguistic conventions of popular music. The audience's reaction differs according to the context of consumption: while his live audience interprets the use of this social dialect in terms of group cohesion, his accent causes amusement among those consuming his music on the clubbers' dance floor due to the stigma attached to it.[30]

music and genre

Dempsey is primarily a live performer and although his songs are stylistically not part of the folk idiom, the performative setting bears resemblance to this genre: thus he starts the song with the singable chorus, which, in folk terms, prompts the audience to sing along. The tune of the chorus is comparable to a ballad, while the verse is recited in a rhymed staccato fashion typical of the genre of rap. Furthermore, he includes many intertextual references to specific ballads (the title and chorus recall the lyrics of the Rocky Road to Dublin, in the second verse to "the Foggy Dew" and Paul Bradys "The Island" when he sings "this was meant to be a love song", "Irish laws and Irish ways") as well as using a local and social accent.

While the practice of acoustic guitar accompaniment is a genre convention for the folk genre, it is stylistically situated in the genre of reggae, whereas the rhymed staccato singing style of the verses is reminiscent of the rap genre. These intertextual genre references to folk, rap and reggae are designed to situate the song within genres where political statements are to be expected. Reggae music was "developed initially as a way of signifying a particular experience of being black" and "it was soon used by white musicians to construct a sense of their own 'ethnicity' and their relationship to blackness".[31] Moreover, the musical event is a site for the exploration and construction of both a collective and an individual identity. This general function of the musical event is enhanced by the use of raggae and rap to instigate a context suitable for the exploration of individual and group identities. This identity suggested by Demsey is post colonial and urban in nature but yet in touch with the native ballad tradition.

The intergeneric subtext created by employing musical characteristics of rap places the song in an urban context, in an explicit contrast to the folk genre. This assigns the statement of a perceived insufficiency of the folk genre for the expression of a specifically urban experiences to the intergeneric subtext. Dempsey thus bases his music firmly in a native genre while adding layers of meaning through the use of foreign genre markers in order to develop a new musical idiom which is a more suitable tool for the political expression of the contemporary urban Irish youth. This practice literally gives voice to the lobbyless by employing their dialect. The political message of his songs is, however, only received in a live performing context, because the performative conventions of this setting place the music in a context where a peripheral political discourse is expected by its participants.

I hope that the discussion of this contextual background of political songwriting and the case study of Damien Dempsey's song Dublin Town have illustrated that there is a manifest peripheral political discourse in popular music which attempts to challenge traditional values and understandings of Irishness. While the issues raised in such songs are taken from general debates relating to group identities and political issues, they may, by force of the relevance assigned to the musical discourse in Ireland, exert an influence on the dominant political discourse - as exercised by mediators between these discourses such as the journalists John Waters and Fintan O'Toole.