Meaning and Pleasure

Brian Longhurst’s article on “Text & Meaning” in Popular Music and Society and Ien Ang’s piece Watching Dallas have an interesting point of intersection in that they discuss the two most fundamental points of evaluation for cultural material: meaning and pleasure. To begin with, while Longhurst states that his article “is concerned with the ways in which pop music creates and conveys meaning” (Longhurst, 158), he does not give a definition of what meaning is, but rather seems intent to challenge how meaning is evaluated and analyzed through the decoding of structure and content of a cultural medium. Ang, in contrast, gives the sociological definition of pleasure as “the experience of satisfaction whenever a certain pre-existent need is fulfilled” (Ang, 9). Her article is more oriented with why so many people find Dallas pleasurable to watch. More provocatively, Ang then goes on to explain her “ambivalence” about soap operas such as Dallas due to her intellectual and feminist sensibilities, while also admitting that she has always enjoyed such shows (Ang, 12). She feels that she should not find pleasure in Dallas because it does not contain enough “meaning”. Thus, Ang’s definition of meaning seems to be related to the degree to which a particular medium has substance and divorces itself from the realm of superficial.

Longhurst takes up this point in his article when he discusses “value-laden terms” in musicology” (Longhurst, 158), which despite having the same definitions as other standard terms while carrying more favorable connotations. In this way, certain genres of music, namely Western classical music, have been traditionally deemed to have more meaning than other genres such as popular music. The very nature of being classical implies that something has some special meaning which has enabled it to endure the passage of time and still be present in culture. The nature of something popular implies pleasure; it must be enjoyable in order for mass consumption to occur. Yet the question remains, must a cultural artifact have a certain level of intrinsic meaning in order for it to be popular? My own mind is not yet made up, but it is certainly a notion worth further consideration.