Natural languages and all other language-like systems of signs produce the meanings which make up consciousness. In its classical structuralist form, semiotics considers the conscious subject to be a pure product of language. Also observing the psychoanalytic finding that individuals do not become social beings very simply or easily, semiotics has been especially interested in the problem of the subject . Popular music is of course meaningful to us subjects. Recordings are calculatingly produced industrial mass products, but they bring about undeniably concrete, in fact even physiologically measurable, feelings in both their producers and consumers.
Music can at most make a sophisticated mapping of potential feelings.
This is true, in a sense. But one cannot deduce the validity of formalism from it. The somatic and instinctive features of music, overlooked by formalist aesthetics, do in fact emanate from the form-content's not being so atomistic that it cannot contradict itself psychologically. The tune begins with piano and guitar vamping between major and minor chords as if to urge the vocalist, John Lennon, to get on with it. No, no, no, not a second time As heard on disc, however, it feels like something completely different.