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Music is both deeply personal and a reflection of a larger society and popular culture. In 

Joan Didion’s The White Album, music plays a crucial role in depicting how current events affect us personally. Throughout the book, Didion’s accounts of the late 1960s alternate between her psychological condition and the worries of the larger public. The reader, suspended between these two states of being, is left uncertain with the feeling of a truly lived experience. In The White Album, Didion utilizes music to portray American culture, society, and politics but also to configure a world for the reader to inhabit.

There is an undeniable link between music and memory. Music has the ability to spark memory and reanimate the past. This contributes to the sense that one has lived or relived the 1960s through Didion’s essays. This link between music and memory is apparent through Didion’s vivid imagery surrounding passages concerning music. Although overall The White Album feels mysterious and fragmented, the parts relating to music are highly detailed. Didion uses music as a portal of remembrances, recalling the cold studio of The Doors with its “masses of wires and blanks of the ominous blinking electronic circuitry” Throughout the book, music is what opens up details of a memory, filling in glimpses of information that allude to the otherwise missing pieces. 

Many major events are left out of the book but their presence is felt through Didion’s subtle suggestions through music. For example, the title itself: The White Album. Didion’s title provides the book with information and sets the scene before even reaching the first line. A series of connections can be made from The Beatles' unofficial 1968 album title to the Manson Family murders, the death of Sharon Tate, and the overall paranoia felt by the American public. That is the nature of music. There is an inherent connection between music and cultural or historic events. Because of this, Didion can make certain points and paint a clear picture without having to lay everything out for the reader. The length of the book is a testament to this. The book is rich with cultural nuances without dragging on. And music plays a significant role in this being possible.

Didion illustrates how American society towards the end of the 1960s was on edge, almost expecting something bad to happen. And she does so through the depiction of artists like Jim Morrison. The fear and paranoia evident in the passages involving The Doors’ studio is representative of the larger anxiety of that time. By bringing up Morrison’s name, Didion instantly creates a sense of doom. Something bad will happen. Morrison’s death is inevitable, yet she is writing from the period just before, when there was still uncertainty. She uses subtle references to this fact through the position of Morrison's band members waiting for him to show up for a studio session. Laying out this scene, Didion points to a much larger issue in light of Jim Morrison's death: What happens when an icon dies? Where do their movements go? Do movements die with the artist? The death of Jim Morrison could be just another way in which Didion describes the cultural confusion of the late ‘60s. The band made the music possible, but what were they without the leader of their revolution of “erotic politicians?” After all, “it was Morrison who got up there in his black vinyl pants and projected the idea, and it was Morrison they were waiting for.” 

On a personal level, Didion writes about how she used music “in an effort to erase six words from (her) mind.” She attempts to drown out the words of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” with her car radio. This goes to show the role that music plays as a form of escapism, especially during times of social turmoil and change. Didion describes how Pound’s words “seemed that year to signal the onset of anxiety or fright,” and she is using music to literally drown out her worries. She parallels her mental struggles with the broader conflicts of that time. A good portion of this section is simple prose, describing what was on the radio but it manages to bring forth the desolation of the late 1960s. 

By stating the music playing in a sequence of events, Didion is able to express a specific mood and depict the types of people that one would expect in that situation. Laying out the house of Kathleen and Eldrige Cleaver, Didion recounts what they were doing in detail and mentions jazz playing in the room. Didion is able to enlighten the reader efficiently about the elevated setting with just three words: “John Coltrane record.” One could make assumptions about the people in the room as jazz’s identity in popular culture was fading during the late 1960s. The conversations in this paragraph align with this idea: Conversations about the Guardian dinners and publishing books and expenses.

Didion doesn’t just use music in a referential way but also utilizes it in her choice of language. In order to recount the feeling of a moment, Didion turns to sound. Because music itself is something so abstract and linked to emotion it is a perfect vehicle to portray this. When something is in the air, Didion uses terms like “off-key” and “jingle-jangle.” And when recounting the state of chaos on the college campus, Didion describes it as “that of a musical comedy about college life.” Didion captures the intangible so well in The White Album, and she does so through the use of music in the themes and content as well as language. Often, the starting line of a paragraph in The White Album will refer to music, setting a particular mood. On the morning of August 9, 1969, Didion starts out the paragraph, she “put ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on the record player, and ‘Suzanne’ (and) went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos.” Using music as a means to transport the reader throughout the book, Didion is able to succinctly capture the feeling that accompanies strange and difficult circumstances.

In the same way that a feeling isn’t rational, recollecting the past through music doesn’t clarify what happened. Music and art don’t explain the late 1960s: they describe it. And that is exactly what The White Album is about. Didion is not concerned with the facts of what happened but rather with the relative feeling that came with what happened. In aiming to preserve her experiences of the late ‘60s, Didion leaves the reader slightly confused, with a sense or suspicion, but no information. And in a way, this allusive quality does more in encapsulating the reality of the time than the facts themselves. This idea is concluded in the last line of the book. Didion reflects back to when “Jim Morrison died in Paris,” and how since then she has “known very little about the movements of the people who seemed emblematic of those years.” The White Album and music do not exist to make sense of the events that happened at the end of the 1960s, but rather to embody them. 

Rania Mouawad is a sophomore at the School of Visual Arts majoring in Visual and Critical studies.