Music as a Cultural System: Sensibility and Interpretation

My favourite Borges fable is that of Pierre Menard, the man who wanted to rewrite Don Quixote. Menard’s ambition, Borges recounts in his dry parody of literary criticism, was not merely to reproduce Cervantes’s work, but to do so spontaneously: to (re)write the Quixote not by a labour of research, nor by somehow mystically channeling the original author, but as an act of original creativity. By the end of the story Menard has succeeded, in part, producing several word-perfect passages. In the final pages of the story, Borges subjects two identical passages, one written in seventeenth-century Spain, and the other in early twentieth-century France, to a comparative analysis. Breathtakingly, Borges is able to produce compelling, and utterly discordant, interpretations of the two works. His argument—one that anticipates those of the post-structuralists by decades—is, of course, that context is everything. Texts are unstable, polysemic potentials for meaning, rather than the bearers of extractable truths. In this essay I want to do something similar. I will be writing of those listeners constituting a ‘hip hop community’ in Sydney in the mid-1990s. I will take two recordings that are, for all intents and purposes, identical in terms of instrumentation, structure and stylistic conventions. Each was recorded around the same time, and each circulated in the same milieus. One was the subject of acclaim, the other of disdain. One was considered to be ‘hip hop,’ the other not. My interest is not in aesthetic judgements about the relative worth of each of these recordings. For insiders—those for whom hip hop was an organising principle for their social and aesthetic identities—it was quite easy to point to the superiority of one over the other, in terms of the relative quality and content of the raps, for example. Rather, my concern is with the judgement