Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

Erskine’s remark treats music as a uniquely non-denotative “language”: it can communicate feeling, structure, tension, and release, but it cannot straightforwardly encode the propositional content needed for a cutting insult or a sarcastic aside. The point is less that music is always morally uplifting than that its meanings are indirect and affective rather than literal; without fixed reference, it resists the precise targeting that meanness requires. The aphorism also implies an ethical hope: that immersion in music draws people into a realm where expression tends toward shared emotion and formal beauty, tempering the impulse to belittle others.