The rhetoric of recovery in Social Distortion’s White Light, White Heat, White Trash

Abstract

Social Distortion’s 1996 album White Light, White Heat, White Trash is a concept album reflecting the recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) of lead singer and songwriter Mike Ness: twelve songs, with each of the songs describing Ness’s experience of the corresponding step in AA’s twelve-step programme. The rhetoric of recovery in the song lyrics has an intertextual relationship to Alcoholics Anonymous (the ‘Big Book’), with Ness’s lyrics quoting directly from the programme of recovery outlined in the basic text of AA. Though the rhetoric of recovery in the album reflects Ness’s own experience, it also demonstrates how individual authentic experience is constructed interdiscursively through broader cultural trends, both within the Lou Reed-inflected rockist history of guitars, drugs and confessional authenticity and, more broadly, how the rhetoric of recovery has permeated other genres of American popular music and culture.