"Measure me in metered lines": unreliable narration and the hermeneutics of narrative identity in contemporary 'Indie' song lyrics
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the interest of exploring the hermeneutics of narrative identity in popular song lyrics, that is, the textual process by which a song's narrator imparts their story to the listener, this thesis examines a specific generic and temporal group of 'narrative' song lyrics against the branch of narrative theory relating to unreliable narration. Theories of unreliable narration have been selected as this study's key theoretical framework both because the area is central to contemporary literary studies (Nünning 2005: 2), and because, like song lyrics themselves, theories of unreliable narration problematize the notion of a unidirectional flow of meaning from the speaker/implied author to the reader/listener. Thoughtful, well-researched, highly literate (and often literary) lyrics are a central facet of the "indie music" genre's aesthetic. In this thesis I will therefore primarily focus on two of the indie music scene's most critically lauded lyricists, Colin Meloy of American indie-prog-rock band The Decemberists and John K. Samson of Canadian indie-folk-punk band The Weakerthans. Both Meloy and Samson's lyrics, I suggest, not only withstand such close critical scrutiny, but actually invite it. Demanding (and, arguably, enforcing) a new contract with the listener, Meloy and Samson's lyrics are representative of a larger shift in what an 'ideal' audience looks like in indie music, from casual listeners to an active (Schafer; Nancy), practiced, and critical audience. Engaging with a range of literary theoretical and musicological texts, the broad intentions of this project are to explore the formal complexities of first-person narration in contemporary indie song lyrics and to simultaneously diversify the potential scope for the application of theories of unreliable narration.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it