ABSTRACT
The voice as index or sign, when it comes to writing about popular music, generally takes precedence over the voice as affect, where even the affect itself is thought of as a sign or index. There is no doubt that affects are constantly captured by signs and referred to indexes, because they are attracted to and seized by them. To immediately identify affects with signs and indexes is to leave unexplained how this fascination and seizure happens. The way a song moves me is not the same as the meaning of the song, where this meaning is confused or not. This affect is not the same as the affection. That you can have ideas without representations is one of the most surprising conclusions of Spinoza’s Ethics. The primacy of representation forgets that without the affect there would be no creativity to music, and therefore no change or transformation.
