Nonlinear Narrative and Identity Construction in Music Memoirs: The Cases of Jarvis Cocker's Good Pop, Bad Pop and Nick Cave's The Sick Bag Song

Abstract

Music memoirs have become one of the most commercially visible forms of contemporary life writing, yet their formal departures from chronological autobiography are still frequently read as defects rather than as deliberate strategies of identity construction. This paper compares two deliberately non-sequential music memoirs — Jarvis Cocker's Good Pop, Bad Pop (2022) and Nick Cave's The Sick Bag Song (2015) — and argues that their shared rejection of linear chronology sustains two opposed but structurally comparable identity projects. Both books replace narrative with inventory: Cocker organises his text around an attic of kept and discarded objects, Cave around twenty-two airline sick bags whose originals are reproduced beside their revised versions. Reading these material conceits against theories of the autobiographical pact, of mediated stardom, and of collective memory, the paper shows that Cocker uses nonlinear form to deflate the industrial myth of the rock star into a studied performance of ordinariness, while Cave uses it to inflate a private register into an explicitly mythological public persona. The paper concludes that both memoirs dissolve the opposition between authenticity and artifice on which popular-music biography usually depends. Nonlinearity, on this account, is not a failure of autobiographical truth but the formal condition under which a musician's identity is authored and contested.