1.

Songs are meaningless. This is not to say that it is impossible to place them in situations - personal, social, historical, and so on - where they can be assigned meaning or take part in the production of meaning. It happens all the time. 

2.

Songs do philosophy. Replace ‘do’ with ‘perform,’ ‘embody,’ ‘enact,’ perhaps ‘stage,’ and, with some caution, ‘represent.’

3.

Philosophy takes place when I listen through and around the song; that is, when I miss it, when I hear past it, when I mishear it.

Meaning arises from mishearing to a greater degree than from hearing, because mishearing creates more differences or variations.

Whenever I interpret, or understand, a song, I misunderstand it. To understand is a shorthand for to misunderstand. Different genres of songs are misunderstood in different ways; understanding a Dylan track is different from understanding a Lady Gaga track.

4.

Songs are irresponsible. Music relieves language of its responsibility to mean things.

Songs are cognitive and verbal residues (sedimentations, or garbage). They are productions of minds and bodies distracted by rhythm, melody, texture, and timbre. They enact an ultimately (in)authentic cognition. 

5.

Songs are songs only insofar as they are repeated. Through repetition, songs take up residence in minds, grooves, digital and analogue signals, radio waves, optical modulations, and other media, among which they establish equivalences and interfaces.

6.

Songs are un-self-referential: they do not relate to their own meaning (their own meaning is irrelevant to them).

Yet they may do so in relation to what lies outside them, i.e. other songs, recording technologies, and human and non-human minds.

Any given song introduces variations into what other things, including songs, can mean. Variations can function as distortions, clarifications, or be neutral.

7.

Songs constitute me as a subject by letting me inhabit, rehearse, and try on different communicative positions, negotiating between interior and exterior, between address and response, between guiding and following.

Each time a song is inscribed in my mind and body through repetition, it causes changes in my affects, my cognition, and my behavior that (re)connects me to the experience of philosophy I seem to both undergo and produce.