Deceit, Desire, and the Popular Song
The five core instruments in pop and rock are guitar, bass, drums, voice, and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.
Note: This piece is not exactly an introduction to René Girard, though you may use it that way. This is a story and a reading (with a playlist) of Girard through pop and rock and vice-versa. For a proper introduction to the thinker, see Cynthia Haven’s compendium All Desire is a Desire for Being or her biography Evolution of Desire. See Luke Burgis’s body of work, including his book Wanting or his Substack post Mimetic Desire 101. Or see David Cayley’s deep dive CBC Radio Series The Scapegoat: The Ideas of René Girard.
IN 1961, the year Elvis Presley hit Number 1 with both a question—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—and a solution—“Surrender” (“When we kiss my heart’s on fire/burning with a strange desire”)—René Girard published his first book—Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.
The book launched Girard’s famous and controversial theory that our desires are not really our own. Called “the mimetic theory,” it was born from Girard’s close reading of the great novelists. He could just as easily have studied great pop songs. I have chosen sixteen for their quality as songs and for the light they shine on some aspect of his theory. This was not a difficult task. So general and elemental is his theory that finding Girard in pop is like shooting kitsch in a carol. You will probably think of a thousand other songs. I’d love to hear about them. (I’ve written elsewhere of the extraordinary similarities between the vast corpuses of Girard and Bob Dylan, so no Dylan here.)
The Mimetic Triangle
Here is a graphical illustration of the human predicament as laid out by Girard in his first book:
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The human thinks, If only I…
had what they have
knew what they knew
could be seen with them
could beat them
could destroy them
could possess them
could be like them
could become them…
I should want what they want, or the opposite of what they want.
The human has now “surrender[ed] their most individual prerogative, that of choosing their own desire.” (René Girard. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, p. 55, hereafter referred to as DDN). The human is now trapped in the mimetic cage.
Part I - Please Tell Me Who I Am
Once upon a time, a young man aspired to be a young man. He took himself to the disco. Fever. A disco ball reflected shards of identity, broken glass in the same emergency. Everyone was having a wonderful time.
He approached a beautiful woman. They danced. She took him home. There were fifty others just like her. Replicas, simulations.
As we wander the base of the triangle, imitating our models even as others model us, we become more similar than different. Clones. Moving like fish in schools of taste or fashion, confident in our most dishonest moments (as most of our moments are), that our desires are our own, that we really want to be here wearing this listening to that. This is the psychology of desire for which Girard is best known.
Back in 1978, when No Wave was, alas, a wave, the always-brutal Cristina made a disco song. But it is not a disco song. It is an imitation of a disco song. It’s an anti-disco song, a non-disco song as Thomas Chatterton may have made it, which is to say: it is a disco song. It imagines a man desiring a clone. We are both.
The young man fled the commedia of clones and ran back to the disco. He didn’t go inside. He went into the place next door. An anti-disco joint. A band came on and played a song. It seemed familiar, like an imitation of another song. It mocked itself, and it mocked the people on the TV and the radio that tell a person how to be, but in its mocking it also seemed to prescribe and proscribe, to tell a person how to be, or how to not be, or what to want, or what to not want.
After a while, the anti-disco band itself seemed like clones. “Then am I a clone?” the young aspirant asked himself. “I will not be a clone to these clones! But I won’t be an anti-clone either, because then I will be a clone’s anti-clone clone, and I shouldn’t be that! I gotta get out of this place. I hate disco, and I hate anti-disco too!”
He went back into the cold night and noticed another neon sign across the road. Inside, the light was warm, golden. He saw a saddle and a rope. Leather, twine, twang. Cowboys! This was no disco.
He sat at the bar where real men discussed real things in a very authentic way in big booming voices like real men with big voices. He regretted not wearing Wranglers or Lees or a pearl snap shirt, but the guys didn’t seem to mind. They had whiskey, so he had whiskey too. It was real fine whiskey, or at least it must have been because the real men told him it was. They told him the difference between whiskey with an e and whisky without an e and now he knew something he hadn’t known before. He forgot it immediately, but whichever one he was having made him feel real.
“I will be a cowboy,” he thought. Isn’t a cowboy the very ideal of self-assurance and determination, happiest alone, riding the range? Identity and the proof of existence are not the cowboy’s burdens.
This is of course not true, and I’d reckon about 80% of cowboy songs and stories are really about the impossibility of being a cowboy. Like theologians and Australians, “cowboys” talk so incessantly about being cowboys you wonder if they exist at all. Until Toby Keith’s untimely death in 2024, throngs of suburbanites got dolled up as cowboys and went to see Toby dolled up as a cowboy singing about how he wished he would have been a cowboy like the guys who dressed up as cowboys in the movies. Novelist and Girard reader A. Natasha Joukovsky, whose book The Portrait of a Mirror and whose substack quite useless are delightful, might call the cowboy recursive, an American matryoshka doll, a simulation all the way down.
Note the irregular verb in the title of Keith’s 1994 smash hit, “I Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” Note also that every single verse catalogs who Keith wants to be like: Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers, Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke, the Lone Ranger. These are the mediators of Keith’s desire.
One of the cowboys, an older one, leaned back in his chair and said, “You see that woman over there?”
The posse looked over at a woman shooting darts. She downed a shot and laughed so loud the whole bar could hear her. Her face looked like a racing form on Monday. The man said she used to be his girl “back in the day”. She had been a good girl, but he took her to places like these and she had tried so hard to please him that she became exactly like him and now they sit at opposite ends of this place and they are both completely alone. It was the saddest story he had ever heard.
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Our boy decided he didn’t want to be a cowboy anymore. He went back outside and followed the beat around the corner, down the red velvet ropes, and into a club.
An MC on the stage told everybody to clap, which they did, then the MC introduced the eighth wonder of the world, the flow of the century, and a woman started singing his name, which sounded like God himself: Jehova.
God came on with a crew and told his story: drugs, cops, district attorneys, how he had suffered for all the rest of us. He was realer than real, and he knew the target was on his back, so threatened the crowd with the exact punishment the aspiring young man was trying to transcend:
…he who does not feel me
Is not real to me, therefore he doesn't exist
So poof, vamoose, son of a bitch!
To “be real” and “realer” is an obsession of all artificers, especially in country and rap. Like the seemingly disparate characters of Proust and Dostoevsky, the cowboys and the gangsters aren’t so different.
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The aspiring young man returned again to the cold night and walked slowly, ripping off the elements of the costume he had so earnestly assembled. He passed the disco, the anti-disco, the cowboy bar. He tried to recall the faces and names, but they all blurred together. He wished we didn’t have faces or names. Maybe then we wouldn’t be so jealous and mean all the time. He wished he could become a robot or a machine. He decided he would only look and listen and not talk. It was a very dark night.
“Face and Names” is John Cale’s summoning of things his friend Andy Warhol said. Andy Warhol, who made endless copies of famous faces and common objects until they meant nothing or everything. Andy Warhol, who was nearly assassinated by a woman who loved him so much she just had to kill him.
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The aspiring young man disappeared into the wall of his room and decided never to desire or speak again.
Due to space limitations, this essay will be published in 3 parts.
Fascinating!