From Ireland to the States
The re-contextualisation of U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” in different political contexts
In this article I start from an understanding of songs as socio-cultural discourses which may
also perform a political function. This political function can be reflected in the promotion of particular
world-views about given socio-political events and/or in the attempt by the singer to make the audience
perform given political actions. To prove this, I will look at the re-contextualisation process undergone by a
well-known song by U2: “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (1983). This song was originally written to respond to the
violence of the Northern Irish conflict, but it has been later used to react to other socio-political events.
By relying on a cognitive approach to the study of songs, this paper tries to answer two questions: (i) how
can we explain the re-contextualisation process undergone by the song and why is it possible? and (ii) how is
politics embedded in musical performances?
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Context: U2, the Northern Irish conflict, 9/11 and other political events
- 3.Method
- 4.Analysis
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
Bar-Tal, Daniel; Ariel W. Kruglanski, and Yechiel Klar
1989 “
Conflict Termination: An Epistemological Analysis of International Cases.”
Political Psychology 10 (2): 233–255.
Benito García, Iván
2013 One Love… U2. Análisis de la Banda de Rock U2. Madrid: U2fanlife.
Bew, Paul, and Gordon Gillespie
1999 Northern Ireland. A Chronology of the Troubles. 1968–1999. Dublin: Gill & MacMillan.
Bordowitz, Frank
(ed) 2003 The U2 Reader. A Quarter Century of Commentary, Criticism, and Reviews. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation.
Bull, William E.
1960 Time, Tense and the Verb: A Study in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, with Particular Attention to Spanish. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chilton, Paul
2004 Analysing Political Discourse. Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
CNN
. “
September 11, 2001: Background and timeline of the attacks,”
CNN News,
September 8 2016 [URL]
Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison
1998 Music and Social Movements. Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Filardo-Llamas, Laura
2015 “
Re-contextualizing Political Discourse: An Analysis of Shifting Spaces in Songs Used as a Political Tool.”
Critical Discourse Studies 12 (3): 279–296.
Gavins, Joanna
2007 Text World Theory. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K.
2004 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Revised by
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. London: Edward Arnold. 3rd ed.
Hart, Christopher
2014 Discourse, Grammar and Ideology. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.
Hennessey, Thomas
1997 A History of Northern Ireland. 1920–1996. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
Jobling, John
2014 U2. The Definitive Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Jones, Rodney H.
2010 Creativity and discourse,
World Englishes 29 (4): 467–480.
Kootnikoff, David
2010 U2. A Musical Biography. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald
1991 Concept, Image, and Symbol. The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald
2008 Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lugea, Jane
2016 World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives. London: Bloomsbury.
Machin, David
2010 Analysing Popular Music: Image, Sound and Text. London: Sage.
Machin, David, and Andrea Mayr
2012 How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis. A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage.
Marvilli, Joe
2009 “
Rock History 101: U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday”,”
Consequence of Sound,
November 7 2009
[URL]
McKittrick, David, and David McVea
2001 Making Sense of the Troubles. London: Penguin.
Melnick, Jeffrey
2009 9/11 Culture. America under Construction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Neufeld, Timothy D.
2017 U2: Rock ‘n’ Roll to Change the World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Peddie, Ian
(ed.) 2011 Popular Music and Human Rights. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.
Pietzonka, Katrin
2008 “
List of Songs about ‘The Troubles’,”
CAIN. A Conflict Archive on the Internet.
[URL]
Quay, Sara E., and Amy M. Damico
(eds) 2010 September 11 in Popular Culture. A Guide. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC.
Shuker, Roy
1995 Understanding Popular Music. London: Routledge.
Street, John
1986 Rebel Rock. The Politics of Popular Music. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shepherd, John, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver, and Peter Wicke
(eds.) 2003 Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Volume 11.
Media, Industry and Society. London: Continuum.
Talmy, Leonard
2018 The Targeting System of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Trost, Theodore Louis
2015 “
Transgressive Theology: The Sacred and The Profane at U2’s PopMart.” In
U2 Above, Across and Beyond. Interdisciplinary Assessments, ed. by
Scott Calhoun, 91–104. Lanham: Lexinton Books.
Vagacs, Robert
2005 U2. Religious Nuts, Political Fanatics: U2 in Theological Perspective. Eugene: Wipf & Stock.
Van Dijk, Teun A.
1997 “
What is Political Discourse Analysis?” In
Political Linguistics, ed. by
Jan Blommaert and
Chris Bulcaen, 11–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Van Dijk, Teun A.
2008 Context. A Socio-cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Leeuwen, Theo
2012 “
The Critical Analysis of Musical Discourse.”
Critical Discourse Studies 9 (4): 319–328.
Way, Lyndon C. S., and Simon McKerrell
2017 Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest. London: Bloomsbury.
Way, Lyndon C. S.
2018 Popular Music and Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies: Ideology, Control and Resistance in Turkey since 2002. London: Bloomsbury.
Werth, Paul
1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. New York: Longman.
Williams, Michael
2014 “
Politics as Spectacle: U2’s 360º tour (2009–2011).” In
Power, Politics and International Events: Sociocultural Analysis of Festivals and Spectacles, ed. by
Udo Merkel, 174–190. London: Routledge.
Wodak, Ruth, and Norman Fairclough
2010 “
Recontextualizing European Higher Education Policies: The Cases of Austria and Romania.”
Critical Discourse Studies 7 (1): 19–40.
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart
1999 The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Zbikowski, Lawrence M.
2002 Conceptualizing Music. Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zbikowski, Lawrence M.
2015 “
Words, Music, and Meaning,”
Signata 61: 143–164.
[URL]
Zbikowski, Lawrence M.
2017 Foundations of Musical Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.