How Relevant Is Context?

[redbrunja]

This is probably not a surprise to most of my flist, but I'm a big believer in the Death of the Author, that a text should be taken on its own, without the creator stepping in to explain or justify his/her creative choices. (That said, I deliberately try not to know details about authors/actors/etc, because if I learn things I don't like it will forever taint the text for me).

Last night, I was listening to Not Ready To Make Nice:

(please give this song a listen, especially if you are not familiar with the Dixie Chicks or the specific background of this song).

What I was wondering was, does this song make any sense without the context of the Iraq War? If you don't know that the Dixie Chicks spoke out against Bush and had a lot of hate-mail because of it, what do you think this song is about? Even if you do know, does the song's overt political bias make it easier/harder to relate to?

Inquiring minds want to know. Speaking personally, while I greatly enjoy this song, I think it's cementation in one particular time period of American history is actually a weakness. I think Unsteady Ground:

has a much more nuanced touch with the politics of the Iraq War and For What It's Worth is a much more universal protest song.

Although, granted, neither one of those has the anger or righteousness of Not Ready To Make Nice, which I certainly don't want to devalue.

Comments

I always loved that line "I made my bed and I sleep like a baby."

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I think you're right that this song is extremely dependent on political and social context of the artist's opinions, but I disagree that this devalues the song.

From what you're saying you feel that the universal appeal of the song is dependent on its maleability and the room it allows for people to impress on it their own current expectations. Yet it's impossible to separate any piece of art from the circumstances of its inception/creation, and while some songs feel easy to take outside of that framework, that framework never truly disappears. It's just overlooked for the viewer's convenience.

I'd also argue that part of the universality of art that it can do the reverse: rather than you bringing a song into current events and finding similarities there, art can take you somewhere and somewhen else, and help you find the similarities [to that past situation] in yourself.

Re: I always loved that line "I made my bed and I sleep like a baby."

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

From what you're saying you feel that the universal appeal of the song is dependent on its maleability and the room it allows for people to impress on it their own current expectations.

Not quite. I think that there are pieces of art that require the viewer understand less context than others while still retaining the original meaning. Take some of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example; some of them don't require more context than, say a Pablo Neruda poem, because they're working with themes that seem to stay largely the same (love) regardless of time period. One the other hand, you have the pre-Impressionist paintings and NRTMN, with which if you're not in on the code (what specific items in paintings represented, the context of some of the stories being illustrated, what was going on politically in the US) you're going to miss a lot of information.

What I shouldn't have done was say that a text being heavily coded is automatically a negative; requesting that the viewer put some effort into the work isn't automatically a bad thing, and I can think of several pieces of art and literature that would not be considered such if they didn't ask the reader/viewer to make the effort.