ABSTRACT

Through multi-channel rhetoric—verbal, musical, and visual—popular music multiplies decentered rhetorical agency. The Beatles’s cultural watershed, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, brilliantly exploits this capacity and arguably exemplifies “genius,” conceptualized as an extraordinary confluence of agency channeled both from and to audience and culture. My analysis of Sgt. Pepper’s cover art and songs reveals a singular combination of irony, dialogism, reconstitutive rhetoric, and enthymematic/enthymodal elements working to galvanize listeners’ agency in ways that exceed the Beatles’s designs. This study demonstrates how rhetorical criticism of culturally significant popular music can benefit from close reading attentive to the synergy of lyrics, musical form, visual presentation, and artist–audience relations.

摘要

流行音乐通过多渠道的言语，音乐和视觉修辞，使偏心的修辞机构倍增。甲壳虫乐队的文化分水岭。Pepper的“寂寞之心俱乐部乐队”（Lonely Hearts Club Band）巧妙地利用了这种能力，可以说是“天才”的代表，“天才”被概念化为代理机构与观众和文化之间的非凡融合。我对中士的分析。胡椒的封面艺术和歌曲揭示了讽刺，对话，重构性修辞学和音韵/精神形态元素的奇异组合，以超出甲壳虫乐队设计的方式激发听众的注意力。这项研究表明，注重文化的流行音乐的修辞批评如何从专注于歌词，音乐形式，视觉呈现和艺术家与听众关系的协同作用的近距离阅读中受益。