Mapping Desire in Popular Music

In his book 'The Spatial Turn', Robert Tally argues that literature is a means of understanding the spaces that we occupy and seek. Equally, he says it "projects" imaginary spaces and new worlds that can be seen as "mental maps" which help us to either navigate our present realities or create new fissures in our existing realities. According to Tally, literature has inevitably been influenced by spatial studies over the 19th and 20th Centuries due to a host of factors which include but are not limited to- inclination towards scientific accuracy, increased data collection of space, decolonization, interconnected global capital and trade and mass displacement. He argues that it is the "human condition" that as a result of these factors, we remain in a state of disorientation, and rather "lost". I am interested in his argument that this present post-modern condition calls for a cognitive mapping that will help us to parley with our post-modern spaces. As our spaces change and the ways that we occupy and perceive them change, the modes of literature through which we navigate them are also bound to change. 

My argument comes in three phases. First, that popular culture and specifically, song writing and music could be a method of "clarifying difficulties" in our post-modern era. Second, that popular music is a form of literature in the present form that it exists in. Third, and most importantly, that much of the music that we consume is symptomatic of our post-modern disorientation and the usage of maps as a tool to navigate these complexities is not unfamiliar in songs. I will be focusing on the scope of popular music as a medium to helm through these, and act as the new mode of cognitive mapping that Tally suggests we need. For the sake of this piece, I will be 'mapping desire' in popular music and observing how the phenomenon of being "lost" is (sometimes) resolved or thought of in these songs. I will be limiting myself to Popular English music in this piece, and focusing on three popular songs for us to think about. 

We live in the age of thriving late capitalism where we are defined by globalization. Everything is capital, and capital is global. Music is no exception to this trap. There have been various reports showing this, some of which record the widespread streaming of music and the platforms on which music is being consumed. In 2019, the Indian Population in particular has been recorded to have spent more time listening to music than the rest of the world combined. However, these surveys come with various limitations on recording actual music consumption. They usually focus on Euro-American centered consumption (a trending pattern with everything in our post-colonial world) and do not account for the plethora of informal methods of consuming music which are unique to different spaces across the world. However, they do give us a formal starting point to understand that a huge part of our population listens to music- and popular music in specific, is highly in demand. This global interconnection is a primary feature of our post modern era, making popular music an extremely effective medium to do what Tally suggests as "clarifying difficulties" that we undergo in our spaces. As Foucault has said, "we are in the epoch of simultaneity"- and what is more symbolic of this than multiple people listening to the same music across the world?

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. To put it lightly, people across the world were confused as to why this beloved American country-folk singer and song writer, an icon in our popular culture, had received a Nobel Prize for Literature. This re-sparked a debate on whether song writing can be considered as a form of literature in itself. Much of this debate got lost in trying to circumscribe song writing within poetry, when in fact, it would have been more meaningful to consider it as a separate literary form. While many literary scholars attempted to gate-keep literature and immediately dismissed that song writing could "match" literary work, other academics argued strongly that this was the beginning of recognizing song writing to be an important literary work of its own. Many of the arguments which supported this recognition were etched on the principle that it allowed for song writing to derive "legitimacy" to be read as literary work. However, this is not the most sustainable argument as it dismisses popular culture as a serious, legitimate analytical tool on its own. Rather, it should be the form and method of the art itself that should qualify it as a literary art form. Literature is expansive in nature, and the impact of it is to tell stories, create imagined realities and weave connections through words. Song writing also finds historical roots in literature where novelists have turned song writers, and one form has influenced the other. Dylan himself has said that his music is influenced not only by other music artists but also several "literary war horses" such as Moby Dick and The Odyssey. Literature is ever changing. As our spatial and temporal realities change, literature adapts and evolves too. It only grows more expansive and on a fundamental level, is not interested in being constrained. 

In the light of understanding songs as literature and accepting music as a medium of thinking about space, I now ask- how does popular music think about maps? 

The first song that I'm thinking of is 'Maps' by Maroon 5. Released in 2014, this song is about a man who yearns for his former partner whom he is no longer with (the video gives more context to this, but I am more interested in the framing of the lyrics). He recollects the days that they used to spend together- a temporal recollection, but the solution that he finds to reconnect with his partner is entirely spatial in nature. He says, "I'm following the maps that lead to you" and declares that there is no other way to resolve his desires and love for her. 

The second song is less obvious in how it deals with emotional cartography but introduces this idea of being "lost" in the post modern world and wanting to be "found". I am referring to Flightless Bird, American Mouth by Iron & Wine (2007) which famously plays in the film 'Twilight', although it was relevant even before that. There have been both deeply political and profoundly romantic (with a caveat that the two are not necessarily a binary) interpretations to this song. The first part of this song follows an innocent boy with idealistic dreams who is full of energy, hoping to orchestrate change in the world as some would say or simply searching for the love of his life. Interestingly, he follows this dream using a "dog-eared map" referring to a map that has been so over-used that it has been worn and torn with time. It can be said that he's chasing the "American Dream" as so many before him have done, or for his "soulmate"- and perhaps, neither journey is too different in their characterization. He sees a big future looming once he finds it, but he is asking if he did find what he is looking for, or upon finding it, that he may have lost what he had hoped to find. In the second half of the song, the innocent boy becomes a mature man, worn down almost as much as the map. The American Dream (or perhaps his soulmate?) is not what he's hoped it would be. Corruption seems to surround him and yet again, he asks where his journey has brought him and if he is still lost. While the previous song referred to multiple maps, there is a linear movement in time over here, but it is characterized as a spatial navigation. 

The final song that I will be discussing here in detail is a personal favorite, and perhaps the most familiar to us all. Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2004) is about someone who traverses on his life roads alone, about the isolating streets of this post modern world, while the others "sleep" or are oblivious to each person near them being alone. It nails to the ground the disorientation that the late capitalist world has brought on us, with everyone seeking someone other than their own shadows to support them through their turmoils. Strikingly, the song not only draws one linear road that the singer endlessly walks on, but also refers to their mind struggling on the edge of a "borderline" and at a crossroads on who and how to be. The song's name itself creates an imagined 'Boulevard' of the person's broken dreams. 

Some other songs which also help us think about these spatial concepts and being "lost" or "found" are I Found by Amber Run  and You Found Me by The Fray. 

These songs take us to the imagined spaces that we often live in, even more than in our realities. Most of what we have built around us spatially are constructed and a product of our imagination. One of Karl Marx's primary critique on Capitalism is that it is instrumental for it to thrive on alienation- from the product, from oneself and from each other. The songs that I have highlighted over here express one's desire to overcome their alienation through their dreams or love (or both). They show us that we are stuck behind the borders that we have created and try to draw maps to make sense of these situations, and find each other. These maps are as important as the drawn ones we often discuss on paper and have been observing historically. Literature tells us stories of how we cope with our post-colonial, late-capitalist and post-modern era, it tells us stories of our desires and the maps that we draw every day; and song-writing is one of its predominant and far-reaching forms in today's world. As Tally says, we need new methods of art and analysis to aid our understanding of our "Brave New World" and here, we seem to have one.