What's "meaningful" mean, anyway?

To me, much of the purely-traditional folksong favored by many of our brethern hereabouts is pretty shallow in lyrical content, especially in comparison to much of the recently-written stuff (e.g., mid-20th-century acoustic "singer/songwriter" material) that they reject.

The "s/s" stuff I like most is, not surprisingly, the product of artists of my own approximate age (Dylan, Paxton, Hunter/Garcia, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, Smokey Robinson, our buddy Bruce, etc., etc.). No one of the younger generation(s) has really caught my fancy, but then I'm not listening to very much of their output.

I wonder if the appeal of much really old material has anything to do with "meaning," as much as the simple appeal of evoking an earlier age.

Barbership certainly evokes an earlier, and presumably "simpler," era...but maybe it's not earlier enough (far enough into the past) to have the same appeal as, say, a Child ballad.

And, to clarify things further, I have noting againt "meaningless" songs per se. There are songs I really love with nothing but nonsense lyrics; I do not fully understand why I like 'em so much, but whatever the reasons might be, they obviously must be purely musical.