Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalm 20:7
I report and link. You decide. - BJon
Bloom distills rock lyrics into three dominant themes: “sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.” First the sex: “The sexual revolution must overthrow all the forces of domination, the enemies of nature and happiness. From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform. A worldview is balanced on the sexual fulcrum. What were once unconscious or half-conscious childish resentments become the new Scripture. And then comes the longing for the classless, prejudice-free, conflictless, universal society that necessarily results from liberated consciousness—‘We Are The World.’”
From a New Criterion article, Twenty years ago today, more follows:
Counterpoints: 25 years of The New Criterion on culture and arts [/] Twenty years ago today [/] By Mark Steyn
We are all rockers now. National Review publishes its own chart of the Fifty Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, notwithstanding that most of the honorees are horrified to find themselves on such a hit parade. The National Review countdown of the All-Time Hot 100 Conservative Gangsta Rap Tracks can’t be far away. Even right-wingers want to get with the beat and no-one wants to look like the wallflower who can’t get a chick to dance with him. To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings. It was twen- ty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today—1987—that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say.
I don’t really like the expression “popular culture.” It’s just “culture” now: there is no other. “High culture” is high mainly in the sense we keep it in the attic and dust it off and bring it downstairs every now and then. But don’t worry, not too often. “Classical music,” wrote Bloom, “is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archaeology. Thirty years ago [i.e., now fifty years ago], most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids.” Not anymore. If you’d switched on TV at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 you’d have seen President and Mrs. Clinton and the massed ranks of American dignitaries ushering in the so-called new millennium to the strains of Tom Jones singing “I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour/ That’s when my love comes tumblin’ down.” Say what you like about JFK, but at least Mrs. Kennedy would have booked a cellist.
“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.
So the “Music” chapter is the most difficult one for young fans of The Closing Of The American Mind—because it’s the point at which you realize just how much Allan Bloom means it. And by “young fans,” I mean anyone under the age of Mick Jagger, who features heavily in that section. A couple of years ago, Sir Mick—as he now is—spent an agreeable hour being interviewed by a pleasant lady he’d carelessly assumed had been dispatched by one of the hip young magazines surfing the cutting edge of the zeitgeist. He was furious to discover subsequently that she was an emissary from Saga, the magazine for British seniors. They put him on the cover as the Pensioner of the Month, and he wasn’t happy about it, although one could see their point: When you think about it, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” makes a much better anthem for seniors than it ever did for rebellious youth. He should be grateful they didn’t send their medical correspondent: “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” “Well, it’s a common problem at your age. But the good news is that often it’s just psychological.” Twenty years on from Allan Bloom, this is the triumph of rock’s pseudo-revolution: elderly “street-fighting men” with knighthoods—Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, Sir Bob Geldof, Sir Bono.
[...] Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score.
[...] So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.
[...] Allan Bloom quotes Gotthold Lessing on Greek sculpture: “Beautiful men made beautiful statues, and the city had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.” “This formula,” writes Bloom, “encapsulates the fundamental principle of the esthetic education of man. Young men and women were attracted by the beauty of heroes whose very bodies expressed their nobility. The deeper understanding of the meaning of nobility comes later, but is prepared for by the sensuous experience and is actually contained in it.”
What happens when, instead of beautiful men making beautiful statues, angry men make angry songs? “Keepin’ it real,” in the current black vernacular, means the rapper Nelly making a video in which he swipes a credit card through his ho’s butt. “Keepin’ it real” means songs in which men are “angry” (as John Kerry says) and violent and nihilistic, and women are “sluts, bobbing chicken heads, and of course bitches.” “Authenticity” is surely a more reductive view of the black experience than your average nineteenth-century minstrel show ever attempted. I think we can guess how Nat “King” Cole would have felt about gangsta rap. Duke Ellington has more in common with Ravel than with Snoop Dogg. Scott Joplin had far more reason to be “angry” than any hip-hopper but he didn’t put it in the music. To eliminate a century and a half’s tradition of beauty and grace from your identity isn’t “keepin’ it real,” it’s keepin’ it unreal in deeply unhealthy ways. [/] Rap is, of course, an outlier, as the statisticians say, but it illustrates what happens when pop culture becomes unmoored from its inheritance, and can only justify itself in social terms.
[...] Recall Bloom’s list of what he calls “the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.” That’s not a critique of pop music but of society as a whole. First, sex: The narcissism and self-gratification of adolescent romance—the “slavery to self,” as Professor Robert P. George called it, that Bloom asks us to rise above—is now presumed to be the only basis of true fulfillment in the modern world. Then, hate: the bogus “social reform” that’s little more than a bit of cover for trashing the past. And finally, the “smarmy, hypocritical brotherly love,” the sappy one-worldism in which we sing songs about global brotherhood in order to avoid having to give a thought to the world.
This is the heart of the Bloom critique that “such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. It is of historic proportions that a society’s best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.” Confronted by these sentiments, many young readers just shrug: The old man doesn’t get it. Not his fault. He’s just old. In a way, their reaction or lack of it vindicates his final point: “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.” He’s mouthing away but they can’t hear. Like Britney when the lip-synching goes awry.
[...] Shorn of the other seven-eighths of the iceberg, the present-tense culture is insufficient. At my local school in New Hampshire, the music teacher eschews the classics and teaches boomer rock, much to the bemusement of her young charges for whom forty-year-old pop songs are as remote as 400-year-old sonatas. Children are asked to pick a favorite Beatle. Why would a six-year-old have such a thing? The Fab Four split up thirty years before he was born. It’s like my old music teacher asking me to pick my favorite member of Paul Whiteman’s Yacht Club Boys. [/] But she never did. And that’s the biggest difference between 2007 and 1987. What Allan Bloom observed in his students can now be found in the teachers. [/] This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26, November 2007, on page 18 [My ellipses and emphasis]
Jim :) Smiling aka Brother Jonathan aka Toto Of Kansas | Link to my Blogs, Forums & Essays
