Anyone Got a Corkscrew?

Anyone Got a Corkscrew?

We have Adorno to thank for that great image of new music as messages in a bottle. What he failed to mention was that said SOSes to the world are stopped by unremovable corks.

Written By

Colin Holter

Randy Nordschow’s been shaking things up on these pages with his assertion (long-standing, but recently rearticulated) that “music doesn’t mean anything.” I hope Randy will forgive me for cannibalizing his subject matter; whether I agree with his conclusions or not, his contributions to NewMusicBox always stimulate me. However, rather than embark on a tiresome and laborious examination of the ways in which music can mean things—an examination that would probably hinge on my definitions of “music,” “mean,” and “things”—I want to speculate. I want to basically just shoot off at the mouth about music with no particular commitment to objectively verifiable rhetorical protocols. Allow me, won’t you, to divest myself of C-3PO’s pristine golden exoskeleton and don instead the matted fur of Chewbacca.

Because that’s what music does. Music does not offer to program your vaporators, based on its years of experience with binary load lifters. It howls, Wookiee-like, and we, the Han Soli of the heuristic galaxy, somehow know (or think we know) what the hell it’s trying to say. We have Adorno to thank for that great image of new music as messages in a bottle. What he failed to mention was that said SOSes to the world are stopped by unremovable corks. But when we stroll out on the beach and find one, we know, deductively, that somebody sent it, and we kind of know certain things about —based on the bottle’s shape, the color of the paper, etc.—that plant suggestions, perhaps unfounded, in our puny minds with respect to what the poor sap who threw it overboard wanted to get across. We “get it” only because we are familiar with bottles and the written word; the idea of the “message in a bottle” is a romantic one, and we can sympathize with whatever unfortunate was in straits sufficiently dire for him to try such a low-return communicative gambit. It’s like how the superstitious folk of the past used to cut open animals and interpret the entrails: Humans have entrails, the possession and maintenance of which are crucial to our continued well-being. So we understand the importance—the meaning, if you will—of entrails. But a pile of tripe won’t tell you whether it’s going to rain. Even if music doesn’t mean anything, we desperately need it to mean something, and we will impute meaning to it on even the flimsiest basis. Who cares if music means anything? The question is whether it means anything to us—nay, to me, and to you, individually. And it is to you that I must render my thanks for reading this far and enduring such gratuitous use of italics.