Art can be a protest against convention, but art also defines its own conventions just as it is defined by convention. Does art escape convention? Asemics, as art, certainly has its own conventions. But what happens when asemics operates as a means to unground a convention? Does the ensuing criticism move into the circuit of State and Nomad as defined by Deleuze and Guattari?
The "XXL Rap Roundtable" skit from Saturday Night Live (December 12, 2020) makes a point of posing an asemic performance in a genre against the genre itself. How does asemics operate socially, politically, culturally, and artistically? Asemics here can be taken to be non-sense, i.e. words, utterances, songs, ... without [apparent or shared] meaning. [Note that semantics can be, but need not be, invoked here.]
And is the point at which performance within a genre establishes itself as contrary to convention, i.e. as not [presently] defined by that genre, a type of asemics as it disrupts the mode of meaning offered by the genre? Or do we need another term other than asemic performance for this use of non-sense?
SNL's XXL Rap Roundtable: Pop Culture Asemics
To what end is asemics as non-sense, as an empty placeholder of the formal, as disruption a method?
