Калина Захова

This thematic block of articles was written at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies (Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and the Institute for Literature (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) as part of the joint research project “Image and Text as a Means of Cross-Cultural Transfer” (2020–2022). Financial support from ZRC SAZU and BAS is gratefully acknowledged. The thematic block of articles is edited by Alenka Koron and Kalina Zahova.

Popular song lyrics are a very important object of study, although they are sometimes not appreciated properly. The last third of the twentieth century saw popular song receding from its lyrics by the image, namely the video – the image-based legislator of popular music for a few decades. However, the lyrics have found their way to strike back, and this article outlines some manifestations of their importance in contemporary culture(s). With the rise of lyric videos, popular music made a turn toward the interpretative challenges of written poetry because watching such videos involves a process of reading while listening. Further literaturization of popular music comes from the transformation of song lyrics into books – under certain conditions, reading the lyrics as written poems includes hearing them internally as songs.