Listening to the Unconscious

Kenneth Smith is Professor of music at the University of Liverpool, UK, and President of the Society for Music Analysis. He is the author of Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire (2017) and Desire in Chromatic Harmony (2020) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis (2018). Stephen Overy is Lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, UK. He specialises in philosophy of the unconscious and desire, situating the work of a line of thinkers from Kant to Deleuze in relation to its implications for materialism.

• Introduction1. Charting Three Freudian Hypotheses with Pop Music: the economic, the topographic, the structural2. Freud, Music, and the Psychological Condition3. Bright Eyes (and friends) and the Antlers Meet Jacques Lacan4. Phallocentrism, Sexuation and the Chora, from Lacan to Kristeva; Gaga to Björk5. The Death Drive and Unconscious Production6. “Do you want to be the ebb of this great tide?” Lacan, Freud, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and “Joy in Repetition”: Prince and LCD Soundsystem7. S & M, & Pop Perversion8. Polly Jean Harvey asks,“Is this desire [enough]?”BibliographyIndex

Exploring how conscious and unconscious states of mind are channeled through musical expression, Kenneth Smith and Stephen Overy collaborate here to offer post-Freudian and post-Lacanian readings of popular songs. With clear reference to psychoanalytic concepts, their analytic applications reveal remarkable ways in which states of being emerge through expressive musical strategies. Listening to the Unconscious will reward readers with persuasive and stimulating reflections on how music channels the very core of human experience.