1(b): Meaningless as aesthetic judgment

The debate about ‘the meaningless and the meaningful’ has a political and an economic slant. Consider hiphop: the great (racist) accusation is invariably that it ‘just isn’t music’.

James Brown

You don’t often hear anyone calling hiphop ‘meaningless’, which is a neat rhetorical trick – steering the debate away from the pivotal function: to demonstrate ‘lyrical skills’ even in the absence of a band, musicianship, or originality. Hiphop is profoundly democratic in its most basic (and affordable) formula: not even two turntables and a microphone, but one. Effectively, Hiphop is supremely meaningful in its central gesture: to assert the validity and audibility of its underprivileged, under-represented voices, which is why the main line of attack for critics must be on the musical front, where old soul records are recycled. (Arguably, there are complex semiotics here, too: using the records themselves suggests a knowledge of cultural history, unlike white musicians passing off black music as their own.)

Public Enemy

Music aside, to be meaningful is threatening: Public Enemy‘s snapshots of black history made them targets for FBI phonetaps, although NWA‘s exhortations to comparatively random violence (albeit in response to police brutality) made them inadvertent agents of normativity. Admittedly, Hiphop shades into meaningless (or inaudibility) when it adds to the chorus of black and white voices normalising consumer-capitalism. In the 1960s, black-owned record labels were at the vanguard of black businesses (see Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On), but the current commodity fetishism of mainstream hiphop is a massive debasement of the (already problematic) ‘Big Payback’ demanded by James Brown, referencing Martin Luther King. Is it subversive to make ‘art’ that’s so openly about making money? Or is it defeatist?

WEB DuBois

Still, there’s an underlying urge toward significance (or ‘being taken seriously as public speakers rather than entertainers’) that can be traced back to figures like Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and MLK. White mainstream pop music has no qualms about meaninglessness in lyrics… although try telling that (as an adult or parent) to a teen or pre-teen who then complains “you just don’t understand”. I’d argue that the inanities of manufactured pop music are strangely comforting to parents who actually shell out for the stuff – contra David Cameron and others, there aren’t really all that many exhortations to flaunt your teen sexuality, spend lots of money, let alone challenge the values of your parents: just irritate them, which you’re bound to do anyway. (The day after writing that, I dug up a quote from Mick Jagger – in Doggett, 2008 – claiming that rock’n'roll was never about protest, just winding up your parents, and even that’s pointless when they listen to the same music as you; it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t being cynical, but despairing of the failure of the counter-culture.)

Finally, what about the pseudo-meaningful? Take the post-Radiohead generation of bands, who intersperse their morbid or self-regarding lyrics with the odd high-register word, and reference to modern technology – little signifiers of sophistication. Risking similar charges of pretension are the bands aping Bowie in their surrealism-lite without any real interest in psychedelic exploration, subversive sexuality, or the difficulty of navigating the modern world; it takes a certain amount of imagination to throw together all those images on records by Placebo, Bush, Pavement but a distinct lack of reflection on why they came about. Personally, I don’t buy the argument that ‘it’s only rock’n'roll – now that’s meaningless.

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