Agency and Non-Agency in Music
I have hypothesized that music is about emotion without agency.
That is, music encourages the listener to experience an emotion, while suppressing agency.
If non-agency is a fundamental aspect of music and how music affects our experience of emotion, then this implies that song lyrics will be most effective as an accompaniment to music if those lyrics are non-agentic.
Of course there are many different kinds of song lyrics found in the songs that people sing and listen to, and some of them are more agentic and some of them are less agentic.
But I propose that it is useful to analyse song lyrics in general with this hypothesis in mind.
There is the question of what exactly “agentic” means. Within the context of this hypothesis, I use “agency” to refer to the process of thinking about what to do with regard to a particular situation, where that situation is the thing that the emotion of the song is about.
Non-agency can be defined and measured in relation to an identified protagonist and the identified situation, where:
- The protagonist is in, or is affected by the situation.
- The protagonist feels emotion as a response to the situation. This is the emotion that the audience feels in the context of the music.
Non-agency can occur in various ways within song lyrics:
- The song lyrics may outright tell the listener not to do anything.
- The protagonist may have acted agentically in the situation, but the song does not dwell on that aspect of the situation.
- The protagonist might, for one reason or another, not be able to do anything with regard to the situation.
In some songs there is a major counter-protagonist that exists in the relation to the protagonist’s situation.
The counter-protagonist may somehow be acting to help the protagonist deal with their situation, or, the counter-protagonist may be the actual cause of the protagonist’s situation.
The counter-protagonist often does have agency in the song lyrics, but, the emotion of song is not about the counter-protagonist’s situation – it’s about the protagonist’s situation.
In many love songs the protagonist will be the singer (ie in first person) and the counter-protagonist will the person who is their partner, or who was their partner, or maybe is going to be their partner, or maybe they just wish that other person could be their partner but probably it’s not going to happen.
(In some love duets, there is an additional complexity where the two singers take turns being the protagonist with the other singer being the counter-protagonist. So who is the protagonist and who is the counter-protagonist changes as the song switches from one singer to the other. And at some point the two singers may sing simultaneously, implying, when that happens, that they are both simultaneously protagonist and counter-protagonist .)
Examples
Let It Be
The title of this song “Let It Be” can be understood as a direct command: “Don’t do anything” or “Don’t worry about doing anything”, even though you might be in some situation where things are bad and it seems like you should be trying to do something.
The song has multiple protagonists who are the various people who come to Mother Mary for advice, including the singer. (So there is more than one protagonist, but there is some consistency in that they are all in similar situations.)
Mother Mary is the counter-protagonist. She has some agency, although that agency consists entirely of handing out advice to just let things be. But, importantly, the song is not concerned with expressing or feeling any emotion that Mother Mary might be experiencing.
Bohemian Rhapsody
- “Mama, just killed a man”
Putting a gun against someone’s head and pulling the trigger seems like an extremely agentic action.
But, this is not a song about how there was a problem and the shooter felt an emotion about that problem and then they decided to get a gun and shoot someone.
The situation in the song is that the shooter has just shot someone dead. This is a problem with no solution – the victim is dead and there’s no way to make them alive again. Also the shooter is guilty of shooting the victim dead. This is also a problem that has no solution – if you are a person guilty of deliberatedly shooting someone dead, there is no way to turn yourself back into a person who is not guilty of shooting someone dead.
The following lines are slightly ambiguous:
- “Mama, life had just begun”
- “But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away”
The first interpretation is that this is talking about the person who has been shot dead. But it also could refer to the singer, ie their life has just begun, but they’ve thrown it all away by committing murder (and therefore becoming a wanted criminal).
There is no action one can take to “fix” the problem of someone being dead, but one possible solution to the problem of being guilty of murder is to run away, and line 6 hints at this, without going into any detail:
- “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow”
In this song “Mama” is a secondary protagonist – because she will have an emotional response to the situation where her son is a murderer, and for her it is also a problem that has no solution. (Something similar happens in other songs where the song lyrics address “Mama”, and the assumption is that Mama is a person who naturally empathizes with her son or daughter, and therefore Mama naturally shares whatever emotions her child feels with regard to the problems that they suffer in their lives.)
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
This song is a story that is presented with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Despite this narrative structure, it contains very little agency directly related to the situation that causes the major emotional response.
A summary of the narrative structure is as follows:
- Verse 1: Introduction and Summary
- Verse 2: Ship sets out on its journey, loaded up with cargo, nobody expects any issues. But, then, hints of bad weather.
- Verse 3: Weather gets bad, which affects the crew
- Verse 4: They can’t stop the ship from sinking, and it sinks and everyone dies.
- Verse 5: Post-log
The situation is that the ship sinks, despite any efforts to prevent that, and the crew all drown.
At the beginning, nobody is particularly expecting any problem, so nobody is doing anything in particular to prevent the ship sinking.
At the end, when it is all hopeless, there is nothing further that anyone can do.
If one was making a movie about this story, then there would agentic action in the part of the story where the weather is bad and the crew are doing everything they can to keep the ship afloat.
In the song there is only an indirect reference to any such action:
- “The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait”
Here the “the breakfast had to wait” is a very indirect way of saying that the crew were busy doing stuff to keep the ship afloat and moving.
This is followed by:
- “When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin’”
- “Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya”
This implies that the crew have been busy all day, from dawn to suppertime, working hard to save the ship.
Apart from those limited references, the rest of the lyrics are essentially non-agentic – describing the situation, and what happened, but not describing any agentic actions with regard to that situation.