An Oppositional Reading

"An Oppositional Reading." A term everyone uses quite a lot in my Media Studies class, meaning the consumer of a text has a completely different interpretation of the meaning behind the text that its producer intended (as opposed to the more obvious interpretation, the Preferred Reading). It's often because of religion, sexuality, lifestyle choices, or perhaps most importantly, personal experience.

The example of this I remember from class is two people having an argument about James Blunt's song "Goodbye My Lover". The first argues the Preferred Reading - "This song is about someone going through a breakup."
But the second says, "I know why you think that, but it's actually about somebody who stepped on an insect and they're really guilty about it."
Obviously "Goodbye My Lover" isn't about an insect at all, but this person has a really traumatic experience and they're so desperate to find something to relate it to that they grab at the nearest thing to find similarity and comfort in.

The insect thing is a really bad example, but this whole theory is really interesting to me, especially as a music fan and somebody who often tries to find things within the lyrics of a song. The problem with the example above is that it makes it seem as if any Oppositional Reading is obvious, obscure and insane, which isn't the case. Thinking about it, I realised people have them all the time.

A few months ago, my dad was starting to like Noah and the Whale, one of my favourite bands, and we would listen to them a lot when it was just him and me in the car, and his favourite song of theirs was "Tonight's the Kind of Night". I remember one of the first things he said about it was, "It's about a boy leaving home to go to university."

It made me smile. I can see where he's coming from, "Tonight's the Kind of Night" talks of a young boy getting on a bus to leave. "Tonight's the kind of night where everything could change." "He waves goodbye to the town he grew up him, he knows that he'll never go back." "Tonight he's not gonna come back home." "His heart is full of perfect joy, his eyes begin to flood." He's going away from where he's always lived, moving away from his parents and his family, and it's an adventure.

My dad grew up in Bolton, an area that was quite a tight-knit community, and left there at eighteen to go to university and from what I know I think he loved it there: he met some of his current best friends there, did really well in his degree, was in a band etc.

Him leaving to go and live in Coventry is easily relatable to "Tonight's the Kind of Night", because it's about a boy of age eighteen-ish leaving home, but if you think about it there's no reason he should think it's about going to university. It's either an easy assumption to make about somebody student-aged, or my dad just subconsciously applied this to himself and his memories.

I've done it myself, too. There's a song on Laura Marling's new record* called "The Beast". After I'd listened to it a few times I started to really focus on the lyrics, and I thought I'd found it and someone was finally talking about this thing that causes all of my guilt and rage. It's probably more complicated than that, it's difficult to explain because I don't understand it either - Poppy referred to this unexplainable negativity as my "monsters" before, and "The Beast" also seemed a good way to put at it. I really recognised the illustration of the guilt and dread as something that comes at night and lies beside you in bed, and that sometimes you submit to.

I've thought about it and she probably isn't referring to that, at least not specifically, and it's childish that the identification of what I thought was a common ground increased my love for Laura Marling's music. I think it's likely that "The Beast" is about similar feelings, but probably not that "snap!" exactness that I thought I'd found the first time around.

Does it mean we should stop listening to songs and applying them to our lives? Is an "Oppositional" reading any less of an interpretation? Of course not. That is one of the things music is for, a comfort blanket and a friend, a lifeline in the dark because somebody else has probably felt like this before.

I don't know who Imogen Heap wrote "Swoon" about, but I know who it will always have been about to me, the feelings it stirred in me, and for that I can give the song a name and a face. "The Beast" will still always be a description of someone having similar feelings to mine, "Tonight's the Kind of Night" makes my dad think of things that were happening to him when he was eighteen.

A song's story starts with the thing that happened or the person that it was written about, but once it's out in the world and provides a listener with emotion suddenly it's about them to and thousands of stories are unknowingly interlinked. I think that's an incredible representation of the music community. And that's why of course "Goodbye My Lover" by James Blunt is about a squashed insect.

*I hope nobody's counting how many times I've said "Laura Marling" in the past month...