It is Saturday, September 9th 2017, and we are watching a family television show on Norwegian Public Broadcasting (NRK) – “Stjernekamp” (“Star Battle”). The show concept is having artists performing songs from different genres. Tonight’s genre is country music, a genre we only know superficially. The first artists all make decent performances and the mood in the sofa is good when the artist Aleksander Walmann enters the stage. To our surprise, tears are running down both our faces by the end of the first verse as he sings about heartbreak and how the lovers in the song “put a bottle to their heads and pull the trigger.”
Studies about country music lyrics often point to the lyrical importance in setting the stage and how some topics are typical for country music lyrics, such as lost love, loneliness, memories, and nostalgia. Further, they often construct a closed narrative that rarely comments actual events in the real world (Jaret 1982; Neal 2007). One tool that is being used to construct these narratives with these topics is alcohol. Alcohol has been shown to be particularly common to describe both unhappy love, pain and anguish, loneliness and failure, and, conversely, enjoying life and a comfort (Connors & Alpher 1989).
In this study we turn our focus to the different functions of alcohol in country music lyrics and explore the purposes and meanings of alcohol in the genre from 1990 up until today. Through a mixed methods approach, we have, first, quantitatively analyzed songs and album songs nominated for Country Music Awards (CMA) (N=1291). The qualitative analysis includes songs where alcohol plays a particularly important part. The lyrics will be analyzed through a narrative analysis and explored through Barthes’ concepts of myths; liquid modernity, and retrotopia (Bauman 2017).
2022.