Music has special power in the depiction of fantasy. It does not merely describe a scenario - it *is* the scenario, it produces the scenario.
One of the fundamental problems in imagining a future paradigm is the lack of conceptual links with current ideas. Even if we could see the lives of our future descendants in advance, we would not see through their eyes. How many of us have ancestors who would disapprove of our acts and beliefs, were they to see us through their own eyes? I for one might be burned at the stake for the heresies I frequently speak.
But if we were to listen to the music of the future on its own terms, without expectation, we may perhaps learn something about the emotional identities of the participants without the differences in worldview (conceptual connotations of grammar and vocab) coming between the expression and the audience. Perhaps music can be used to communicate about our visions of the yet unseen.
When we look at a painting, we must first resolve the blobs of paint or pixels into hypothetical world-objects. One must judge a bending oval to be a clock before one ascertains that it is absurd or surreal (or as perfectly reasonable given the circumstances). When we hear a story in a native tongue, we resolve the phoneme-complexes to words, word-complexes to grammar, and grammatical complexes to thoughts, feelings, objects, actions, and links to further descriptions.
Music itself does not describe (although lyrics may, technically), but is itself what would be described. Like a painting of a landscape, it is depiction for its own sake, rather than attempt to convey some "other" message.
Rather than 'resolving' to visual social cues or cultural place-time motifs embodied in acts and situations of actors, music resolves to feeling itself; the very desire production of the cognition machinery itself.
Newer dance forms and modern abstract art are the same in this - they seek not to code for a code, but to directly access the codes of daily emotional life - the unspoken necessity of relating to one's situation in th world via an emotional identity, integrated from the unconscious to the awareness of desire as patterns which can be recognized, predicted, and shaped by conscious modulation of through-routing.
Music subscenes these days tend to start as this authentic, nearly asocial endeavor. The music strikes you because it is fresh and true - a truth you have not heard in that way before.
But "music" itself is a code for these emotional truths-as-objects, as well as the importance of acknowledging them, (hence the tireless repetition of the quote "one good thing about music...") whose social value is high.
So as the truth is recognized by more, fewer see primarily the emotional truth of the music, but rather its social signification - whether you like it or not, listening to the music puts you among the body of people who listen to that music. The act of listening to and sharing music becomes a social motif which insinuates emotional awareness commensurate with the scene's dominant aesthetic, whether or not this is personally true for the listener.
Therefore it's not always unambiguous what a sound or lyric *means* in scene music - is it an emotional truth, or a social cue?
These categories do not exclude one another. One might well understand that listening to certain artists opens one up to ridicule from a particular social group - but one may still enjoy it on its own terms in secret.
In musical cultures in which sampling is expected or tolerated, popular samples often emerge, and it can be difficult to distinguish whether someone has used the sample because they loved how it sounded, or because they thought people would think it associated them with The Cool. Folks like Riff Raff play on
this ambiguity (sometimes extremely profitably).
And yet, all the social posturing in the world will not change how a person experiences the music for themselves. They may attempt, through mimicry, to act out an experience other than their own, for social purposes, but this cannot negate the experience of the music itself, which, in that case, would be thereafter linked with the experience of posturing, and may continue to evoke such a response in the future.
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