Posted on 11/04/2007 10:25:18 AM PST by Rummyfan
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 cant be far away. Even right-wingers want to get with the beat and no-one wants to look like the wallflower who cant 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 today1987that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say.
I dont really like the expression popular culture. Its 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 dont 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 youd switched on TV at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 youd 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 Im gonna wait till the midnight hour/ Thats 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: Youre celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. Were 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 lateror 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, whats 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 Mindbecause its 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 Mickas he now isspent an agreeable hour being interviewed by a pleasant lady hed 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 wasnt happy about it, although one could see their point: When you think about it, I Cant Get No Satisfaction makes a much better anthem for seniors than it ever did for rebellious youth. He should be grateful they didnt send their medical correspondent: I Cant Get No Satisfaction. Well, its a common problem at your age. But the good news is that often its just psychological. Twenty years on from Allan Bloom, this is the triumph of rocks pseudo-revolution: elderly street-fighting men with knighthoodsSir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, Sir Bob Geldof, Sir Bono.
For Bloom to write his chapter on Music seems to many of us braver than attacking the 1960s or the race hucksters or his various other targets. No-one wants to be Mister Squaresville. And its interesting to see the reaction it gets from readers. Told by Bloom that they know nothing about Brahms or Mozart, they respond that he knows nothing about well, whomsoever they happen to dig. They point out that his chapter is full of generalities: Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. Etc. Turning teacher on the professor, they demand that the assertions be bolstered by examples, by specifics, by an understanding of the difference between the lyrics of, say, Bob Dylan and Britney Spears.
But Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. Youve no interest in the stuff, you dont buy the albums, you dont tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experienceand yet its all around you. You go to buy some socks, and its playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we dont have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. 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 its perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, its very weirdthough, as he notes, It may well be that a societys 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, its a literal soundtrack: its like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Blooms not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Blooms book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But hes not doing album reviews, hes pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.
Thats another reason I dont like the term popular culturebecause hardly any individual examples of popular culture are that popular. I dont mean that whatever the current Number One single is this week will sell far fewer copies than the Number Ones of the 1940s, but in the sense that a gangsta rapper is not as popular as Puccini was ninety years ago, or Franz Lehár a century ago, or Offenbach. Popular culture has dwindled down to a bunch of mutually hostile unpopular popular cultures. The only thing about it thats universally popular is its overall undemanding aesthetic.
So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a societys incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to whats 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, its not about culture vs. counter-culture but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: Its all lined up for you and you pick what you want. Its 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 its proved, most exhaustively, in music.
Recently, I was sent a clipping from Newsweeks 1964 cover story on the arrival in America of the Beatles:
Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of yeah, yeah, yeah!) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.
There was nothing unusual about those sentiments in 1964. As Bryce Zadel of the Instant History website put it, The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasnt just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty. Including some quite cool people over twenty. That same year, in the film of Goldfinger, James Bond compares drinking unchilled champagne to listening to the Beatles without earmuffs. Nobody at Newsweek would be so confidently dismissive of any pop culture figure on the way up today. Compare and contrast that analysis with this MTV show more or less exactly forty years later2004. The interviewer asks his guest: Well, we know that you were into rock and roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?
And the guestpresidential candidate John Kerryreplied: Oh sure. I follow and Im interested. Im fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think theres a lot of poetry in it. Theres a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think youd better listen to it pretty carefully, cause its important. Im still listening because I know that its a reflection of the street and its a reflection of life.
Really? John Kerry is fascinated by rap and listening to hip-hop? Think if you broke into the Kerry household and riffled through John and Teresas CD collection youd find a single rap album? I didnt mind Senator Kerry when he was being mocked as a flip-flopper, but I find him even less plausible as Americas first flip-flopper hip-hopper. You can smell the fear in his answer.
And consider his recitation of raps virtues: theres a lot of anger, a lot of social energy its a reflection of the street. Thats something else that happens in a relativist culture. First, if Tupac Shakur is just as good as Milton, then everybody drops Milton. Then comes the second stage: once Miltons dropped, and Bach and Keats and Mozart, you no longer have a very clear idea of who exactly Tupac Shakur is meant to be as good as. Its not comparative anymore: hes all there is. The argument is that, oh, well, you uptight squares are always objecting to stuff: you thought Sinatra exciting bobbysoxers was dangerous, and the Viennese waltz was the mating dance of a hypersexualized culture. No. Benny Goodman, noted by Bloom, was a huge pop star but he could play the Mozart clarinet concerto. Popular culture used to be very at ease with the inheritance of the past. One of the trends of the last forty years is not just the vanishing of high culture but of low-culture jokes about high culturethe variety-show sketches in which Schuberts mates urge him to come down the pub with him and he says No, Ive got to stay in and finish my symphony. It assumes a residual familiarityfrom some half-recalled school lessonwith a bloke called Schubert who wrote an Unfinished Symphony.
Likewise, P. G. Wodehouse is stuffed with literary and classical and Biblical allusions: He conveyed to young Mr. Rastall-Retford the impression that, in the dear old Varsity days, they had shared each others joys and sorrows, and, generally, had made Damon and Pythias look like a pair of cross-talk knockabouts at one of the rowdier music-halls. Wodehouse assumes you know who Damon and Pythias are: They were best pals back in the fourth century BC. Ran into a spot of bother with Dionysius of Syracuse. You could junk Damon and Pythias and replace them with Damon and AffleckMatt Damon and Ben Affleck: Theyre also best pals, they make movies together. But eventually you dwindle down to a present-tense culture unable to refer to anything beyond itself. You can make the argument that, say, Jerome Kern, the first great Broadway composer of the twentieth century, is at his best as harmonically sophisticated as Schubert. But to do that you would first have to know something about Schubert. I think its harder to make the claim to harmonic sophistication in the Beatles, but William Mann, the music critic of The Times of London, gave it a go in 1963, comparing the Aeolian cadence in Not A Second Time with the end of Mahlers Song of the Earth. But, as I said, to do that you have to know about Mahler.
And once Mahlers gone and Schuberts gone, you can no longer make musical claims for rock and rap, so all you do is hail it for its authenticity and its energy and, as John Kerry did, its copious amounts of anger. Thus, the loss of a high-culture aesthetic eventually undermines your pop culture, too. Imagine if talking pictures hadnt been invented in 1927, but eighty years later, in 2007. Do you think Hollywood studios today would conclude that they needed to hire house composers and full orchestras to accompany the drama with symphonic scores? Something we take for granted about the form of modern talking picturesdialogue accompanied by orchestral musicarose from a particular kind of cultural aspiration that no longer exists. 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 hos 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 didnt put it in the music. To eliminate a century and a halfs tradition of beauty and grace from your identity isnt keepin it real, its 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. 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 consciousnessWe Are The World.
The music biz have been humbug revolutionaries ever since 1955 when Bill Haley and Elvis put them in the permanent-revolution business. The kids tore up movie seats to Rock Around the Clock, even though its composer wrote it as a foxtrot, and its lyricist was born in 1890. When Max Freedman was a rebellious teenager, the big hits were The Merry Widow Waltz, Kiplings Road To Mandalay, and When A Fellows On The Level With A Girl Thats On The Square. And, unlike most revolutions, the regime itselfin the shape of RCA, Columbia, Warner Brothers, and the other corporate entities that dominate the business to this dayproved far wilier survivors than Louis XVI. Theyve made a very nice living out of ersatz revolution.
Well, theyre the suits in the back room. What of the revolutionaries themselves? The last time I saw Paul McCartney on stage he was urging us all to give our money to Africa. Yet I found myself thinking of Sir Pauls late wife. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades, but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state. That way she could avoid the 40 percent death duties levied by Her Majestys Government.
At the Live8 extravaganza in London two years ago, Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd said: I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the Third World. Its crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.
No, its not. Its no more crazy than Linda McCartney giving such a paltry percentage of her estatei.e., 0 percentto the British Treasury. Africa is a hard place to help. Madonna urged the people to start a revolution. Like Africa hasnt had enough of those these past forty years? The rockers demand we give our money to African dictators to manage, while they give their money to Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts to manage. Which of those models makes more sense?
Thats the impact of a pop-culture aesthetic: The revolutionary principles Warner and Sony and BMG pay mere lip service to as a necessary façade for maintaining market share have been taken up for real by the rest of us. Recall Blooms list of what he calls the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Thats not a critique of pop music but of society as a whole. First, sex: The narcissism and self-gratification of adolescent romancethe slavery to self, as Professor Robert P. George called it, that Bloom asks us to rise aboveis now presumed to be the only basis of true fulfillment in the modern world. Then, hate: the bogus social reform thats 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 societys 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 doesnt get it. Not his fault. Hes 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. Hes mouthing away but they cant hear. Like Britney when the lip-synching goes awry.
And most of us of Sir Mick Jaggers age and younger dont want to hear, either. To be sure, this or that gangsta rapper is a bit much, and Britneys a sad old slapper, and Madonnas a clapped-out provocateur, but whats wrong with a bit of rock and roll? Nothing. Except that, when its ubiquitous, its stunting. Paul Simon and I once had a longish conversation about this and eventually he conceded that even the best rockers had nevertheless been unable to develop beyond a very basic harmonic language: There isnt enough there to teach in a music course. But what else is left? The old middle-brow middle-class couples who subscribed to the symphony every season and dutifully sat there through Beethoven, Bartók, Brahms, and Bernstein are all but extinct, and pitied for their inability to cut loose and boogie in the same way we feel sorry for those trapped in a loveless marriage. What a difference it would make if grade-schoolers could know just enough of a smattering of Beethovens Pastoral Symphony to recognize the excellent joke The Simpsons makes of it. What an achievement it would be if every high-school could acquire a classical catalogue as rich as that used in Looney Tunes when Elmer Fudd goes hunting Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. Carl Stalling, who scored those cartoons, often fell back on formula: If someone was in a cave, the orchestra would play Fingals Cave. But you cant even do that any more, because no-one gets the joke.
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. Its like my old music teacher asking me to pick my favorite member of Paul Whitemans Yacht Club Boys.
But she never did. And thats the biggest difference between 2007 and 1987. What Allan Bloom observed in his students can now be found in the teachers.
Great styff - as always...
Lengthy, but worth every minute it took to read it. Thanks for posting...
Is this ping worthy?
Steyn is automatic. I’ll pick this gem:
To eliminate a century and a halfs tradition of beauty and grace from your identity isnt keepin it real, its keepin it unreal in deeply unhealthy ways.
I’ve written many letters to both Starbuck’s and Barnes & Noble complaining about the constant din of unavoidable music which for me ruins the prospect of sitting and having a moment of peace and quiet to read or think.
I thought there were supposed to be some quiet places where noise was prohibited. I must be naive and out of it.
Sometimes at both Starbuck’s and B&N, you can ask them to please turn down the music if you can find a clerk (yes, a clerk, not an “associate”) who is at least semi literate and knows how to use a knob and they may even comply. They’re not “allowed” to turn it completely off without incurring the wrath of “corporate”. Gotta sell them CD’s!!
Congressman Billybob
“Is this ping worthy?”
Yeah, sure, why not? I think that the issues raised by Allan Bloom were important, and are important to consider for those of us who love classical music.
Classical Music Ping List ping!
If you want on or off this list, let me know via FR e-mail.
Thanks,
sitetest
Really? John Kerry is fascinated by rap and listening to hip-hop? Think if you broke into the Kerry household and riffled through John and Teresas CD collection youd find a single rap album? I didnt mind Senator Kerry when he was being mocked as a flip-flopper, but I find him even less plausible as Americas first flip-flopper hip-hopper. You can smell the fear in his answer.
Bwaahaaahaaa! Steyn is delightful!
There was nothing unusual about those sentiments in 1964. As Bryce Zadel of the Instant History website put it, The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasnt just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty. Including some quite cool people over twenty. That same year, in the film of Goldfinger, James Bond compares drinking unchilled champagne to listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.
Dr Frankenstein~ Goldfinger
As big as the Beatles were in 1964, they were little more than bubblegum pop at that time. They were exactly the sort of band that today would inspire a ferocious backlash against them by “cool” listeners.
Honestly, I love music, almost all music, But I like the right to decide when and where to hear it.
At work, we have the canned stuff piped in.
I will stay late just to turn off the speakers, next morning?, some ahole cranked it up again.
Ever try to write an 800 page report listening to “muscrat love”?
Mike Oldfield~ On My Heart
Ok. So how do we fix it?
To be fair, when they arrived in America, in early 1964, their catalog wasn’t nearly as rich as it would shortly become.
Yeah, but then they tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. That’s when the mystique set in.
Very true.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.