In much of modern and contemporary literature (Conrad, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Hemingway, Eco) and even film (12 Monkeys, The Matrix, Memento), it often seems like there's supposed to be some kind of code to crack the work. What's important to remember is that writers/artists are working within the same cultural milieu as their audience, so you have the same access to references as they do. We actually deal with similar code-cracking all the time in pop music.
Below are some examples of contemporary pop music (more from the p.o.v. of someone who's adolescence began in the 1970's) that demonstrate a similar kind of gesture towards references and the use of referential structures in the creation of a message.
Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" is most famous for its role in the 1984 presidential campaign. Both the Republican and Democratic candidates, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, wanted to use the song on the trail. Springsteen didn't give his blessing, nor did he stop them.
The went on the trail for a while before the campaign staff caught that this wasn't such an overtly, shamelessly patriotic song. Originally recorded acoustically and solo, in a low, growling way that sounded like he sang it in a closet, the song depicts a subject who has lost all his options in a blue collar town, so signed up for the army and went to Vietnam. When he came back, the "hero" was no better off than before, and maybe worse, because the scales had been lifted from his eyes. The poppy version that made it on MTV is even more ironic, as its form gives the impression of the radio-friendly, unchallenging pop of the day, but that just allows each instance of the song to represent that same disconnect between presentation and reality that the song's protagonist goes through.
The old blues song "Midnight Special" was recorded by the likes of Leadbelly (who sang it in Texas prison camps), and later the 1960's rock band Creedance Clearwater Revival. The song is damn catchy, and asks for the Midnight Special to shine a light on the protagonist almost like god would shine a light on the chosen. But the song is more than that.
Why might CCR cover it? They loved that kind of music, yeah. But they were also openly against the Vietnam War (see "Senator's Son"), and many people who weren't willing to go in the military, like the character in Springsteen's song, headed North for escape.
REM had a breakthrough hit with "Orange Crush." But it's not just a soda pop. Orange Crush is also a euphemism for Agent Orange, a poison defoliant that was indiscriminately sprayed by U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1962-71 (Vietnam keeps coming up again and again!). Listen to the song carefully: "I've got my spine / I've got my orange crush." Agent Orange was responsible for a number of severe defects, including grotesque spinal birth defects, skin diseases, cancers, and death.
Public Enemy had a big hip-hop hit with "Night of the Living Baseheads" off their second release in 1988, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The record was part of a kind of second wave of rap that was in many ways a little harder hitting and more socially engaged (and for my money, this PE record is just about the final word in socially-engaged rap or just about any socially engaged popular music).
The song itself begins with part of a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and then moves into the fairly obvious anti-drug message, but not in a D.A.R.E. kind of way; this description of what crack is doing to their neighborhoods (keep in mind, this is 1988 and it the crack epidemic wasn't as nationally known). The drug message is all well and good, but it's the other references in here that really make this already booty-scootin' song into something more:
First, there's the samples lifted from James Brown, who stands alone as one of the first black artists to create his own sounds and controlled his own career as an musician. For Black America and black pop music of James Brown's day, this was nearly unheard of --a self-made and self-determining black man who managed to assert himself as a subject to be acknowledged. and in that was he served a positive model for others to look up to (like Chuck D).
But there's more: The title of the song obviously draws from the film Night of the Living Dead. Sure you could make the easy quick connection with how freebasing crack wrecks your head (baseheads) and brain-eating zombies, but George Romero's 1968 film itself was a social landmark: in 1968, the wounds of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X's assassinations were still fresh, and there were any number of civil rights battles being fought in the streets, including racial rights battles. The hero of the film, Ben, is a black man who keeps his head and protects those around him from the weirdly afflicted zombies (and no one knows what causes the zombies to arise). Ben helps those he's with survive the night of the zombies in a house; the next morning, a roving group of other people who survived the night see Ben, assume he is a zombie, and kill him. Romero claims he casted Duane Jones as Ben not because he was black, but because he was a great actor, which moves the film beyond a statement into something deeper. The urgency and sense of near-paranoia created through the sampled cuts and beats all cook together to create an overall song that's more than any of its references. You don't need to see the film, but you should. This is the kind of civil rights dialogue underpinning Public Enemy's song, and makes its overall statement a little more complex than it might at first seem.
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