So why have I been opening so many of our classes lately by trying to play music on our janky off-brand Bluetooth speaker? What valid pedagogical role could songs by Human League or Talking Heads play in a very serious English literature course like this one? Is the instructor pursuing a personal agenda to promote the appreciation of 1980s synth-pop in today’s generation? Well, no, not exactly (although if you ended up checking out Fear of Music because you first heard “Heaven” in my class, that would be okay by me). Aside from the fact that it nicely breaks up the monotony and puts us all in a good mood when we listen to “Mr. Blue Sky” before launching into the second half of discussion—a song so full of earworms that the entire class will have little snippets of bouncy chords, freaky vocoder effects, and the jauntiest guitar solo ever recorded ricocheting around in our heads for the rest of the day—music serves as a uniquely crucial element of this novel’s evocation of Jason Taylor’s world. For one previous iteration of this course (2019) I tried to go for deep authenticity and produced a mixtape of the songs in these chapters on my cassette deck on my home stereo system. I was borrowing the library's boombox, which featured a cassette player, but the player was in pretty bad shape, and the music sounded terrible. So now we're using Spotify, which Jason Taylor wouldn't have had access to. He needs to overhear music from his sister's room, or be turned on to cool new music like Talking Heads by her boyfriend. And in this way, he reflects a lot about the role of music in popular youth culture in the 1980s.
Music is a part of Holden Caulfield’s world, too, of course. Our picture of late-1940s New York in The Catcher in the Rye might be enhanced if we listened to a general example of the kind of music Ernie must have been playing in the piano bar, or if we could track down the (fictional) song “Little Shirley Beans” by (real-life) Estelle Fletcher (even though Phoebe herself never gets to hear the song). But the vital place of music in Jason’s world reflects significant changes in the role of popular culture by the latter half of the twentieth century, and we’ll see the same thing in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which is set in the same era. David Mitchell is so specific about the songs that are playing in crucial scenes throughout this novel—“Don’t You Want Me?” by Human League is namedropped in the very first paragraph, like a theme song over opening credits. For many readers, a reference to a song like this will immediately evoke the era, along with the other pop-cultural references to The Rockford Files or The Empire Strikes Back.
But what if you’ve never heard the song before? Does a novel like this require a supplementary playlist in order to be fully understood? Are these musical allusions akin to the literary allusions throughout Fun Home, which depend on a reader’s familiarity with Greek myth or the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald? When I first started teaching this novel, in 2009, most students in class associated “Don’t You Want Me?” with a Swiffer commercial (apparently the broom is upset because the homeowner has started using a Swiffer exclusively?), which is not the association David Mitchell has in mind. For me, in contrast, the song inevitably evokes the local roller rink when I was 12 years old, cruising in wide circles on urethane wheels to the sweet synth sounds of British pop ("Cars" by Gary Numan was also a big hit at the rink).
I have put together a 24-song Spotify playlist for Black Swan Green (and I will do the same for Sag Harbor, which is similarly anchored in musical references), and while it does include some stuff I haven't played in class, it doesn’t even include every song mentioned in the novel (by the chapter “Disco,” we’re getting two or three songs mentioned per page! I do include most of the DJ's inspired playlist). It also no longer includes "Words," by Neil Young, since Neil pulled all of his catalog off Spotify last year, to protest their production and promotion of the Joe Rogan podcast. Typically, there’s one song per chapter, and listening to these songs in order works as a nice parallel to the novel—we think of lovelorn Julia up in her room, blasting Kate Bush, or newly stoked Jason kicking back and playing “Mr. Blue Sky” five or six times in his room, or fantasizing about escaping the stresses of his life in the front seat of Ewan’s car while listening to David Byrne sing about heaven as a “place where nothing ever happens.” The songs are a key part of these scenes, and a reader should be able to “hear” them (either literally or in our minds’ ear) when we read. These are more than superficial details; a reader really misses something important about this book if they aren’t familiar with the songs Mitchell cites.
Some critics have suggested that contemporary writers like David
Mitchell, Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Nick Hornby, and
others run the risk of dating their works by packing them with references to
popular culture. Literature aspires to the eternal and the universal, in this
view; a novel should cut more deeply than an episode of “I Love the 80s” on
VH1. I can sort of see the logic here—would a reader of Black Swan Green in 2123 require audio footnotes to “explain” all
these allusions to long-obscure pop music from the twentieth century?
The music in Black Swan Green is more than simply a nostalgic trigger for Gen X readers. It’s a fundamental part of what it was to be a kid Jason’s age at the time. He doesn’t go to shows to hear live music, he doesn’t go to clubs, he doesn’t play music himself. He listens to recorded music, often alone, on the radio and on LPs and cassettes, and the author marks important moments in his character’s story by specifying the exact song that was playing at the time. He pays close attention to what his older sister and her friends listen to, and he sneaks a chance to play her records whenever he can. We can observe a progression over the course of the novel, as Jason goes from overhearing Human League in his sister's room, to "borrowing" her records without permission, to playing her records when she's not home, to being introduced to new stuff by Ewan and Julia (via a mixtape, a quintessential genre of 1980s music culture), to choosing and listening to his own music in the later chapters. He has strong feelings about the music he hears—Jason is rarely indifferent to a song, and he deploys (often italicized) adjectives like “incredible” and “kazookering” to describe what he hears. Forming his musical tastes is a significant part of Jason’s formation of a self, and David Mitchell namedrops songs in part as a method of characterization.
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