Briony Luttrell

Our Flag Means Death (2022) is a television series set in the Golden Age of Piracy, premiering in March 2022 to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that this show is a deliberate romantic queer reading of historical facts. In this article we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the historical and cultural contexts of fictional queer screen representations. We theorise queer reading as a practice of learning to recognize, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources, Intertextual Thematic Formations (Lemke 1995a, 1995b). This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext in fictional media, exacerbated by broader cultural and political contexts that criminalise, censor, and de-humanize LGBTQIA+ bodies and lives. We also make the case for queer reading being a particular form of audience labour, in that readers are asked to ‘do extra work’ to see queer bodies and communities in texts. This is especially important in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated, and those individuals are repeatedly required to perform that extra labour to “see themselves”. The popularity of Our Flag Means Death made it clear that this show resonated with both members of the LGBTQIA+ community and wider audiences. Season One is a unique case study where we explore how character, narrative, queerbaiting and coding are used to achieve a low/easy labour environment for a vulnerable viewer and how this is an act of care and empathy.   

Songs, pervasive sonic ephemeral acts that combine words and music, live in a contemporary world of commercialization as commodity. Flowing through our everyday lives as a given and oft-underacknowledged artifact to accompany our shopping, car trips, date nights, and gym days. Yet songs have a history as long as humanity and language. They hold a place, up until recently in our evolution, as an oral history library of the human species. Why then is there limited scholarship about how songs tell stories, and the ways in which those stories come together with sounds? And why is there a disconnect between songwriting as industrial practice and academic thought? This book argues that all songwriting choices are storytelling choices and asks the question: how can we think about Song as one of the most memorable, potent, multimodal, and portable storytelling devices ever devised. In doing so, the authors make the case for rethinking the analysis of songs and practice of songwriting with an emphasis on listening. This is a book for songwriters, scholars, and song lovers alike. Ultimately, the authors challenge contemporary thinking on music and song itself, and argue for a new theorisation of song as a multimodal storytelling sonic act. 

In this paper, we present a synthesis of Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of identification and Jay Lemke's social semiotics to frame Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles as a unique point in the phylogenesis of recorded popular music. We emphasise the social semiotic functioning of string arrangements as styles, with style also being understood in the manner of Burke, and style names and definitions being drawn from a corpus analysis of string arrangements for popular music. We argue that, through a rhetoric of style, Eleanor Rigby made canonical claims against rock's cultural counterpart, classical music. We demonstrate the working of the rhetoric and its political implications in the context of the counter-cultural forces active during the mid-1960s.