Methodology Of Textual Analysis

CHAPTER THREE

THE METHODOLOGY

3.1 Introduction

This chapter describes the methodology adopted by this research. The thesis engages an amalgam of methods comprising critical discourse analysis, con-textual analysis, and an assortment of qualitative and quantitative audience contributory approaches in isolating a ‘political music’ genre. Data for this research was gathered and obtained from both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources were drawn from my fieldwork on Nigeria’s popular music and popular music audiences conducted between 2012 and 2014 in the cities of Lagos, Bayelsa, and Adamawa. I have had personal communication with artists and conducted interviews with them including music patrons, marketers, producers and other music

textual and contextual analyses - underlying these theories. It therefore defies any single all-inclusive definition, although there is common agreement among scholars associated with CDA on two key elements: CDA researches ‘discourse’ as manifested in ‘texts’; and does so from a ‘critical’ perspective. Thus it is imperative to examine the range of meanings associated with these concepts in social and cultural theory. For example, most critical discourse analysts consider the notion of “critical” in CDA that stands it apart from similar methods of text analysis such as rhetorical analysis, lexical analysis etc. For most theorists and practitioners, CDA is critical because it is self-reflexive, that is, it openly admits and reflects upon the interests for which it is biased rather than claiming the possibility of objectivity and for this reason committed to progressive social change (Titscher et al., 2000: 144). Furthermore, discourse research is critical because it focuses on the discursive aspects of social problems and engages the ideological workings of discourse in the interest of power and the powerful by seeking to reveal the connections between language use and other elements of social life (van Dijk, 2008: 86; Fairclough, 2001: 230). Finally, CDA is critical because it assumes that “all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations

As Luke (2002: 96) notes, CDA is “an explicitly normative analysis of how texts and discourses work in ideological interests with powerful political consequences”. CDA is mainly concerned with social issues and problems, thus attempts to understand how language or more properly, discourse, figures in social interactions on the assumptions that language use is socially determined and therefore intimately connected to relations of power. It argues that power relations are discursive; that discourse serves ideological and hegemonic purposes and hence mediates the link between text and society. In the words of one of its founders, critical discourse analysis