Figurative language used in Blackpink featuring Selena Gomez's song lyric "Ice Cream": A discourse analysis

Abstract

A pop song is one of the popular genres widespread in society. The label 'popular' is used as it covers a diverse range of masses, started from pre-dominantly youth to adult, that target them as the market. To the extent of the popular meaning, a song is supported with alluring music video clips, entertaining musical instruments, and lyrics that make an addiction by turning the repeat mode on a music player. Regardless, no all of the songs carried by singers incorporate lyric meanings of what they indeed seem. They thus frequently embed figurative features of the language to fit the context of a song. The figurative language feature is a variety of language that authors operate to convey out of the comprehension of literal meaning. It then involves no surface context instead of a deep one. Therefore, this descriptive qualitative analysis study was conducted to investigate how figurative language features carry and influence the meaning behind BLACKPINK-Selena Gomez's song Ice Cream. The findings showed that metaphor (48%) was the most frequent figure spotted in the musical discourse, followed respectively by simile (28%), hyperbole (12%), and repetition (12%). It indicated the song was intended to convey the lyrics contained no real-context meanings that can cause misleading or even be puzzlement if the listeners cannot comprehend the song as a whole. Therefore, further research may comprehensively consider this issue with different perspectives to broaden the language field.

Keywords

• discourse analysis
• figurative language
• song lyric