‘I wanna thank you friends/I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you’[1]

False sincerity, deliberate irony signified in the timbre of the voice, the grain of insouciance. How can words signify the meaning in the symbolic mode alone? We learn the tone of disingenuity, irony or sarcasm through the language of the body, the shape and proportions of its sounds. Observing the manner of the body, knowing prior context, knowing the individual.

I think of the words of someone I knew, not the linguistic words, but the sound of his voice; a bitterness, a defensiveness, a dismissiveness, a tragedy. I try to retrieve the timbre of his voice, I try to reconcile absence with a series of sounds that are at once attached and detached to spoken language. I try to think of some words he said, well not words but his thoughts. I think of his comments concerning a woman he knew when younger that he had recently seen in the street. He said he still felt something for her, the idea of her attractiveness had not shifted over many years. Yet a certain tone of the voice suggested the past had become an object of lust. The tone of these comments are all that remain, a sense of the connoted meaning.

Other words and their readings come to mind; ‘Your eyes couldn’t hid anything/I saw you staring out into space’.[2] Harmonies, broken, split then put back together. Sounds lying beneath piercing through, cutting the language, the lyrics. He took offence to this song, thought it immature and stupid, did not like the fact that the writer intentionally sabotaged it. He also reacted to the lyrics, or I should say his reading of the lyrics; the doxa of the language of youth on longing and sexual tension are unmistakable. And thus his longing for the woman of the past he viewed in the street (with whom he did not actually talk) and the fragmented harmonies of the song must have been a context for reading, to which I was not privileged. These are now my interpretations, writings on his words, the sound of his voice and the tragedy of his shortened life.

I reflect on his strong reaction to the song, and wonder if that song pierced him in a way that was a very personal rendering of its meaning, his writing of the text. The song as a representation of coded signs especially for the individual reader is the mythology behind the doxa of overused signs—linguistic and melodic/harmonic—in pop music. Thus his interpretation was not unique, except that it cut into his life in a way similar to the woman in the street. It was the context of his life—the pain, the regrets, the history, the loss—that he read into the song.

This particular song seems to fit within the realm of the readerly text, yet the intent of its writer to undermine its conventional signs (disrupt the harmonies/pierce the melodies) in an act of self-sabotage allows it to shift in and out as a writerly text. In other words the lyrics are conventional yet the instrumentation is no longer situated as a comfortable supporting structure as it is spliced, ruptured and disfigured to produce a pop song that is almost falling apart. This is its writerly quality, it almost opens itself out into a series of fragments surreptiously strung together, the threads of pop doxa just bind. So it is this tension of almost becoming a un-pop song that allows it to expose the nature of its mythology and thus the possibility for a limited writing.

But I am trying to remember his voice again; it was laconic and drawling, quick (somewhat autodidactic) and gravelly (through smoking). It broke up and opened out like the song. His voice tired; I wonder what is this voice now, where are those sounds? What is in the reading of a song for the dead? I have the sounds of some of his words, but the specific meanings are gone, the texture remains. I wonder how long the texture will linger. Beyond this texture, all that remains is a text; a song.