Conference Agenda

In the 1960s and 70s, musical acts such as The Band, The Grateful Dead, and Neil Young pioneered a pastoral electric music that embraced the sounds of Nashville Country & Western, fusing them with the singer-songwriter folk revival aesthetics to create a politically escapist American identity reminiscent of 19^th-century transcendentalism. The emergence of this new sound attracted an audience that formed a collective identity embracing a desire for a pre-capitalist lifestyle. This identity, one easily accessible to the young, white, male middle-class listener, adopted the myth of a pre-imperialist nation by glorifying the rural lifestyle of an America still expanding westward while ignoring the historical dissonances it created. In this paper, I hold in tension the bootleg Basement Tapes of Bob Dylan and The Band, The Grateful Dead’s Working Man’s Dead (1970), and Neil Young’s Harvest (1972) as transcriptions and transductions of the mythic American-rural. Influenced by an understanding of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) I conceive how these popular artists took the American-rural imagination and commodified it into a reproducible space transduced through audio playback devices. Multifaceted techniques such as live-tracking in a 19th–century barn standing on Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch where both the room sound of the barn and the surrounding open-air atmosphere of the Ranch were used as aural representations of the listeners’ rural idealizations. This music allows the listener, one disenchanted with modernity, to manifest a patriotic nationalism divorced from the realities of the modern United States.

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of "Bohemian Rhapsody," one of the most iconic songs in the history of popular music. Given that its enigmatic lyrics and unusual musical structure have been the subject of much speculation, it is striking to note the stark contrast between the prominent role the notion of the “epic” has played in the reception of the track—especially among fans—and its near-total absence in musicological analyses. This paper approaches the epic and heroic dimensions not as casual descriptors, but as central narrative and semantic axes.

Through narrative theory, chronotopic analysis (drawing on the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin), topic theory, and Queer Studies, I propose that "Bohemian Rhapsody" enacts a common narrative trope of the time travel genre: a hero journeying to the past—evoked in the song through the old-fashioned operatic section—in an attempt to resolve a conflict in his present reality. Much like the film Back to the Future (1985), "Bohemian Rhapsody" builds its narrative around the protagonist’s entanglement with his mother (which evokes Oedipal resonances) and the pivotal event of a man's death. This aligns with James Gleick’s theory that time travel stories are, whether explicitly or implicitly, stories about death, symbolizing an attempt to escape the inevitability of time.

Beyond merely identifying narratological parallels with film, literature, and mythology, this article explores connections between time travel tropes and their potential queer implications. According to Judith Peraino, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not only a tale of murder, but also a melodrama of coming out and homoeroticism—its operatic section is a queer world of Italian opera, in which male voices also perform the high-pitched “female” parts. By disrupting the linear, teleological chrononormativity embedded in Western culture, Queen’s music invites listeners to inhabit alternative temporalities that resonate with queer experiences of time, identity, and loss.

For ABBA’s 1977 tour of Europe and Australia, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus wrote a “mini-musical” of four songs connected by a narration, The Girl with the Golden Hair. The protagonist, played by both Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad wearing identical costumes, becomes a star singer and dancer only to find herself reduced to a puppet controlled by managers and audiences in the end. This conclusion to a concert otherwise made up of light-hearted pop fare seemed at odds with the band’s image—even more so as the musical’s story turned against the band’s own industry. Correspondingly, the musical left audiences bewildered, and most reviews were dismissive.

The musical later came to be seen as an expression of conflicts in the band, both personal and artistic, that surfaced soon after 1977. Sabine Vogt published an article in German examining how the musical reflects ABBA's experience: “The Girl with the Golden Hair: ABBAcadabra – Gedanken über ein 'Mini-Musical' der schwedischen Popgruppe ABBA,” in Christian Kaden and Volker Kalisch, Musik und Urbanität (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2002). Some journalists have equated the protagonist with the real Agnetha outright (Björn has always denied such a connection).

Regrettably, the music has received less attention. Significantly altered studio versions of the musical’s first three songs—“Thank You for the Music,” “I Wonder (Departure),” and “I’m a Marionette”—were released on ABBA – The Album (1977). They are polished to the perfection that was the band’s hallmark, and “Thank You for the Music” became a classic in this guise. But “I’m a Marionette” suffered from the transformation. While still rhythmically adventurous and pervaded by quasi-Lisztian harmony, its reputation does not rise above that of a curiosity. Only a comparison with the soundtrack of Lasse Hallström’s film ABBA – The Movie (1977), which preserves the original version, reveals the true quality, freshness, and compelling force of the song. Together with the final song of the musical, “Get on the Carousel,” which was never released as an audio recording, the original version of “I’m a Marionette” stands out as arguably the darkest and most violent music ABBA ever produced.