"On Meaninglessness," JPMS 23:2

[justindburton]

This is probably the most intriguing piece in the "Amplifier" section for me. It seems like a good, short essay to assign in a popular music class as a broad overview of how popular music has been studied in academia over the last few decades. It's the kind of summary that would help with what we've discussed over in the "No Logos" thread - making students understand the battlegrounds of popular music in academia and how these battlegrounds often reflect or shape broader discourse on the topic.

I have a couple of specific thoughts/questions I'd like to float to the group:

1. I'm always eager for scholarship that foregrounds the body - both metaphorically and literally - and I like Demers' idea that focusing on music in the present moment instead of reflecting on its hermeneutical values is a way of privileging bodies over interiors: music's "physical form actually bears little relationship to content." This last quote, though, strikes me as simply a reversal of the kind of mind/body duality that tells us that the body's only use is the service it provides to one's mind. If we're paying attention to bodies (metaphorical or real) but assuming that they "bear little relationship to content," it feels like the same duality played out so that the underdog (the body) is the winner.

I wonder whether there's a route in popular music scholarship that really splits the difference and undoes the mind/body duality altogether. Content and form (or content and bodies) could each inform the other without one gaining precedence over the other. I think posthuman scholarship and art are often trying to do this sort of thing in the interest of a scholarly or artistic product that mirrors embodied reality, where minds and bodies (contents and forms) are in constant, equal-footed interaction with one another.

Of course, it's entirely possible that this is exactly what Demers is saying - that by arguing for a kind of popular music scholarship that sometimes focuses on bodies unattached to content, she is in essence arguing for a more balanced scholarship that recognizes the equality of content and form, mind and body.

2. The question, "What on earth would such a project look like?" (where such a project is listening to music "for what it does not communicate) is a version of what Abbate asked herself in her drastic/gnostic essay from a few years back (and Demers shouts her out). It's a legitimate one, and in the examples offered by both Abbate and Demers, the implication is that these projects would be relatively short. Demers, of course, is working with a brief essay by prescription, so it's possible that her drone music example could go on for a while. Abbate, though, spends the bulk of her piece on the background of hermeneutical analysis, then a couple of short pages on some examples. A couple of questions here: Can popular music work that focuses on what music does not communicate ever be very long? If not, how will it gain footing in academia, where attention (and tenure and raises, needless to say) is given to long-form articles and books?

There's also an interesting tension between an individual and a group in Demers' and Abbate's examples. In each case, listening to music for what it doesn't communicate is undertaken by a lone listener reflecting on her own immediate responses to music. But the reward that is implied is the freedom to enjoy music with others without having to stake a claim to any particular hermeneutic value. "Toxic" becomes a song whose corporeal body we can all simply admire on its own merits without needing to find meaningful content to justify it (a process that is sometimes alienating, especially if justification is lacking). This kind of communal enjoyment seems to settle in the Hegelian "becoming" that exists somewhere in the overlap between being and nothing, or perhaps between listening alone and listening together. I wonder how this tension can/will work itself into popular music scholarship.