“A meter beating time…a strange form of knowledge..”

These words from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge came to mind while reflecting upon our nine month old grand daughter’s response to the rock tune by Journey, “Any Way You Want It.”  When the evening meal was finished yesterday, I selected a rock station on the FM stereo.  Finlea was crawling about the carpeted floor as the music played.  This tune is a luscious complex of guitar chords, the melody anchored by a rhythmic beat.  Finlea pulled herself erect and while standing by the stereo, her body began to move with the cadence of the beat.  She continued  as long as the song played.  She, at nine months, is capable of making a variety of sounds but yet does not have the use of language.  The tune, particularly the beat conveyed something that her body knew, and affirmed by moving in timed response to the beat..

A fourth aspect of narrative knowledge meriting careful examina­tion is its effect on time. Narrative form follows a rhythm; it is the synthesis of a meter beating time in regular periods and of accent modifying the length or amplitude of certain of those periods…

And yet this kind of knowledge is quite common; nursery rhymes are of this type, and repetitive forms of contemporary music have tried to recapture or at least approximate it.  —  excerpt The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard  p. 22

The lyric of the tune is not the sole conveyor of meaning.  The rhythmic beat is a carrier of narrative knowledge, even taking precedence over the words, which in rock often are indistinct, indecipherable to the mind.