Young Americans

At my undergraduate alma mater Bethany College, I wrote my senior project on
“The Poetry of Rock.” I have since shifted my attention to studying composition and rhetoric and writing studies. But every once in a while, I like to look back at song lyrics and have a go at them!

In David Bowie’s song “Young American” the word “American” is at the center of the song, yet “American” is othered in the song. Instead of an American being the unuttered norm, the American is named and in effect othered, pointed out as one among many. What I mean is that the song (a song) could also be about a Young Brit or a Young Chinese or a Young Iranian. Often “an American” is the assumed universal protagonist of the pop tune – at least in my perception due to my socialization as a (former : ) young American!

I tended to imagine an American person at the center of every love song I crooned to on the radio. I never imagined a person from Ghana or Germany as I played videos in my mind (before the age of actual videos – yes I am that far from being a young American). David Bowie points out the plurality of possible protagonists by naming an “American” in a way that Bruce Springsteen does not in his Born in the USA (even thought that cannot be read as a blindly patriotic song); Bowie can only sing about a young American is as outsider, whereas Springsteen can sing about the USA as an American himself. As such, they position “the American” differently (all of this brings to mind now-dim memories of Henry James’s The American . . . ).

In my undergraduate days (my Young American days) this would be a great first draft for a paper explicating song lyrics, but now my scholarship has a different focus so I can use my blog as a sort of “essay germ” depository. This is fun!