"Perhaps that is that value of music then: to be a good metaphor."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw


In "Music, Voice, Language," Roland Barthes writes, "Music is both what is expressed and what is implicit in the text: what is pronounced (submitted to inflections) but is not articulated: what is at once outside meaning and non-meaning, fulfilled in that signifying (significance) which the theory of the text today seeks to postulate and to situate." This quote reminded me of "Hotel California" by the Eagles because the song seems to be one that both expresses or pronounces something explicitly and, at the same time, does not articulate "what is implicit in the text." The song compares the fickle, temporary, and false nature found in all the glamour of Hollywood to that of a short stay at a hotel. It's "such a lovely place" but "this could be heaven or this could be hell." The song seems to be explicitly expressing the experience of a short stay at a hotel in California where one can be "livin' it up," but this could also be understood as saying something more "implicit in the text," namely that no one knows how long they will be famous so they ought to live it up and make the most of it. This song seems to be "musical" in the sense that it is "successful in that it magnates to say the implicit without articulating it."