Zerbinetta’s Laughter: An Introduction to the Marginality of Song

“If you once begin, sir,” added the cheerful Pedgift, “you’ll find it get uncommonly easy as you go on. Music is a science which requires to be taken by the throat at starting.”

“Law may be hard, but it can’t be harder than music.”

Wilkie Collins, Armadale

What is a liner note? It takes a lot of physical protection to ensure the safety of the immaterial body of music. Records can get scratched, compact discs can break, and iPods can be stained irretrievably by the slightest touch of water. Hence the need for sleeves, jewel cases, and various other packaging media, all of which strive to preserve the purity of that non-physical object, “a song,” from the dangers that threaten the material technologies that convey it, allow it to circulate, and present it for our enjoyment. The phenomenon of liner notes may arise merely from the insistence of textuality in our culture, our desire to mark every surface with legible words, to inscribe every dangerously blank or flat canvas with the depth of some sort of meaning. Liner notes would then seek to negate the materiality of the physical presentation of music, by channeling its meanings teleologically toward the purity of linguistics.

Certainly, textuality has accompanied and protected the musical experience from meaninglessness (or even the possibility of meaning something unexpected or unprogrammed) for longer than records have existed. Every opera lover has heard the myth of Wagner maniacs bringing massive references, libretti supplemented with cross-referenced lists of every leitmotif, into the auditorium at Bayreuth; similarly, Theodor Adorno describes how “both text and music hang on the wall above” the space of the salons where early-twentieth-century devotees of pop music could go to pay for the chance to have their favorite songs played in a solitary booth, for their pleasure alone.¹ The hieroglyphic emblem of the liner note hangs as a sign that the potential entanglements of music—abandonment of self, entry into a multiplicity of listening subjects—have been reduced or mastered by one predetermined methodology of lyrical affective experience.

The liner note, then, would seem to suggest the overwhelming triumph of words over music, but it may also allow us to attend more thoughtfully on what falls away once that triumph is ensured. The liner note writes itself in the space where song is used: where it is practiced, where it negotiates the boundaries between material and immaterial, text and sound, where it wears out, frays in contact with these opposing forces. The “liner” note might be the sign of what is thrown out, what is ejected from song. Certainly, the liner note is one of the forms of “bits of paper” (chiffons de papier) that, Jacques Derrida claims, are defined precisely by that “withdrawal” that is “the mode of being, the process, the very movement of what we call ‘paper.’”² The insistence on the space of the liner, as a process that must withdraw itself before the arrival of its “real” content (the song itself), may also remind us of Roland Barthes’s discussion of other forms of Derridean chiffons de papier. Discussing wrapping paper in Japanese culture, which means nothing in itself but nevertheless provides a site for the pleasurable engagement in everything that the delivery of the content will disappoint, Barthes explores a logic in which “the triviality of the thing [must] be disproportionate to the luxury of the envelope.”³ Certainly, the disposability of this object obviously lends itself to fetishization, as the epithet “vinyl fetishist” literalizes. But by enjoying the process of preparing—and thus imagining, reimagining, and mediating between multiple imaginings—the sublime content it promises, we are forced to linger outside and inside of the song-system, to see what it will discard as it moves toward the promised luxury of its content.

For select albums branded as “deluxe,” iTunes offers the chance to have a link to a PDF version of the album’s “physical” liner (as if records are actually physically recorded anymore) permanently inscribed in its interface, alongside and even perhaps...