What are love, happiness, and youth? Can a song help answer these questions? This thesis explores the connection between the consumption of popular music and the process of performing my self(s), my realities, my desires. Using the work of Roland Barthes, Simon Frith, Richard Schechner, Hlne Cixous and others, this autoethnographic textual performance explores how popular music, with its embodied hegemonic meta-narratives and mechanisms of social control, becomes somehow necessary, even desirable, to the process of performing my everyday life. Through the reflexive writing process in which I interact with my journals, songs, boy friends, theorists, supermarkets, music, mirrors, the mysteries of travel, and my various writerly selves, I strive to deconstruct the elusive affectations of youth, love and happiness as gifted to me in the Beach Boys Wouldnt It Be Nice.
