Thank you for these clarifications.
I appreciate your adjacent point RE gatekeeping. While I can understand passing through that limited mindset as part of a person's journey, we agree.
Regarding my pinnacle statement, that's a reasonable interpretation and point. Yet, regarding:
> it is so open to interpretation
I expect some, if not most, artists are aware. Further, I expect that some of those who are aware revel in, embrace, and plan for that environment. Bjork and Mutual Core, for example... Can be interpreted as a discussion of global politics, geology, romance, and more; none more "correct" than any other. Yet the arrangement of the multi-interpretable dimensions (each of which can itself be interesting) forms a loose pattern across them (or, arguably, many patterns in their own diversity) that in a sense can apply to each of the possible perspectives and is meta-perspective building. An intellectually constructed environment in which to consider advanced, complex considerations about existence. But perhaps that's only the ways I "misuse" artist's work (I believe, as you seem to that artists give up that power, largely willingly). As art, it mostly isn't trying to tell you what to conclude but only painting a scene, an arrangement, if you so choose for consideration and potential mental expansion.
The way in which I which I enjoyed PHM, for example, was an auto-reversing tape player that I pretty much filled every spare, at-least-semi-appropriate moment with as a teen so long as the batteries held out. I probably carry a partially unreasoned bias towards it because of that.
While I reject the post-modernist, post-truth hypothesis/stance, so to do I reject any claims of perfect access to any objective fact even while some claims demonstrate better evidence and support while I would consider some things such as terminal values to be exist within a relative to constructed "relationships between" and "purposes for" environment. Even those can be expressed in a contingent to the constructs manner.
An adjacent medium is comics and among my favorite examples is Promethea by Alan Moore who draws this hypothesis forth that one can consider ideas to exist more (and be "more real") than our concrete physical presences. There too, like Mutual Core and so many other works, there is an assemblage of ideas, given deeper meaning through narrative, and through the structure. I believe one of the purposes of some artists artist's creations are screams into the void, calling out for solutions finding in cooperation even where we reject solution as meaning singular configurations due to the variance of contexts and persons to which the solutions may be applied. The solutions there can rest upon assumptions made. Another is to just see what comes back in response.
Regardless or any artist's purpose, intents, or frameworks while well structured philosophy might at times be more efficient and only less error prone, I would expect we agree that music is a fair bit more broadly appealing.