SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS, GENDER ASYMMETRIES, AND SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF NIRVANA’S “ABOUT A GIRL” (1989)

Abstrak

This study conducts a sociolinguistic analysis of “About a Girl,” a song composed by Kurt Cobain and recorded by Nirvana on their 1989 debut album Bleach. While the song has attracted considerable musicological and cultural attention, the existing researches has largely overlooked its linguistic dimensions as a site of identity construction, register negotiation, and discourse-level power dynamics. Drawing on Halliday’s (1978) systemic functional linguistics, Goffman’s (1981) notion of footing, and theories of gendered discourse (Cameron, 1997; Lakoff, 1975), this paper examines how Cobain’s lyrical choices, including: pronominal deixis, hedging strategies, conversational implicature, and speech act theory encode social relationships, gender asymmetries, and subcultural identity. The findings reveal that the song operates simultaneously as a direct-address speech event, a coded negotiation of domestic intimacy, and a reflexive commentary on communicative failure between interlocutors occupying unequal social positions. This analysis contributes to the underexplored intersection of sociolinguistics and rock lyric studies, proposing that popular song lyrics constitute legitimate and analytically productive discourse corpora.