Radiohead and Identity: A Moon Shaped Pool and the Process of Identity Construction

Abstract

This dissertation synthesizes critical theories of identity with music theoretical analysis to explore how listeners use popular music as a means of identity construction. Focusing on Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, the dissertation investigates the various sociological and musical frameworks that illuminate how the songs interact with listener expectations in the process of interpretation. Work on popular music and personal expression is already present in sociology, anthropology, musicology, and other disciplines, though that work rarely engages the close readings of musical processes that I employ in the dissertation. Richard Middleton (Studying Popular Music) and Tia DeNora (Music in Everyday Life), for example, apply a wide variety of methodologies toward identifying the complexities of identity and popular music. For the dissertation, though, I focus primarily on how Judith Butler’s conception of interpellation in Giving an Account of Oneself can be used as a model for how musical conventions and listener expectations impact the types of identity positions available to listeners. For Butler, interpellation refers to how frameworks of social norms force subjects to adhere to specific identity positions. This dissertation will explore both the social and musical conventions that allow for nuanced and critical interpretations of popular songs. Although many theorists have probed Radiohead’s music, this dissertation synthesizes robust analytical approaches with hermeneutics in order to explore how Radiohead’s music signifies, both in the context of their acoustic components and with regard to how this music impacts the construction of listener identities. Radiohead’s music is apt for these analyses because it often straddles the line between convention and surprise, opening several avenues for critical and musical scrutiny. I also argue that listeners interact with this music as if the songs are agents themselves––they have powerful emotional and physical effects on us.