Heard And Not Seen: The Child in Contemporary Euro-American Pop Music

How do we make sense of the use of the xylophone in Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know,” Billboard’s #1 song of 2012? Using Peircian semiotics, this paper examines sounds and phrases associated with childhood in contemporary Euro-American pop music, ranging from toy instruments to nursery rhymes. What associations evoke “child-ish-ness” for the listener? How is innocence conveyed musically, and to what effect? I examine the ways these invocations adhere to ideas about the child propounded by queer theorists. The role of the child in popular music has remained largely unexplored, but I seek to bring these conversations into ethnomusicological discourse