Neil Young With Crazy Horse/Rhett Miller

Joe Levy -- I always thought one of the reasons Kurt killed himself (besides bipolar disorder and heroin addiction, I mean) was because there were millions of people who liked to sing along to all his pretty songs but they "don't know what it mean."  For every one person who bought that record because it hit a nerve, I'm betting there were at least ten more who bought it "just because."  At least, that's how I've always thought.

[Note that this was outlined but not written before Joe Levy’s contribution. It overlaps with what he said, from a different angle.]

Jason,

First: something I did unintentionally that you caused me to reflect on. Bob Dylan and Nirvana are conspicuous examples. Both found the meaning-creation process that they and their audience engaged in completely unbearable, leading Dylan to hide from and misdirect his audience to the greatest extent he could work out, and Cobain to kill himself. Whatever else this means, it clearly means that the artist is not in control of her/his own meanings. The artist has intention, but there’s no special reason to believe that that intention has any force, once the work is out there.

That said: meaning is made at the intersection of the text (sorry, my training is in European theory) and the society that both produces and consumes it (and in marxism).

So, in regard to Nirvana, the only example you gave. It is trivial to write a simple one or two paragraph summation of the set of meanings created out of their oeuvre: mall products as the standard of smell; the ironic demand to “entertain us”; the ironic demand to “rape me”; etc. These add up. They mean something. You can write this essay as easily as I can.

Of course it is also easy to find fault with any such one or two paragraph summation: the formula, once written down, is much less than the body of the work, much less than its full “meaning.” But such fault finding is silly and trivial, as though it wouldn’t be possible to find fault with any summary of anything. The summary is not the meaning; if it’s a good summary, it’s a useful approximation of the meaning.

The point about Prince is not that one couldn’t also summarize his work. One can and one should. The point is that once summarized, it looks sillier – and unintentionally so (since silliness is not in itself a bad thing). Whether or not this is important in a critical evaluation of the music a matter of your tastes and mine.