Music: The Uncertain Sound
Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 3:45 am
This is an old essay I wrote some years ago for Meridian Magazine, but which I never submitted. Just putting it up here for consideration.
Music: The Uncertain Sound
Does music tame the savage beast or midwife the creation of such beasts where there were none before? Well might we ask questions like this of such a prevalent and powerful medium such as music. Especially since the 1950s and the rise of youth culture as a separate and idiosyncratic sub-culture within the mainstream of American cultural life, music has taken on preeminent importance as a transmitter of ideas, concepts, values, and, perhaps even more importantly in our day, raw emotions, passions, and deeply sensed feelings.
Detached by the enveloping catharsis of much modern music and its performance from consideration of its moral, social, and spiritual content, and cloaked in the ever present and holy mantle of “art” and “artistic freedom”, the music of the popular culture has become, to an overwhelming extent, the music of Babylon. It has become the music of opposition to Zion. But here of course music in the Latter Days follows the same course taken by many other institutions of our culture, from film, television, and news media to public education and the style and content of modern politics. As Satan's power grows and encompasses the world to an ever increasing degree, much of what our society does, creates, and values ultimately begins to reflect his values.
So much of modern culture has come to reflect a confrontational, oppositional position with regard to Gospel values – whether they be called “traditional values”, “conservatism”, “family values” or whatever popular term is attached to the concepts in question at a particular time -- that discriminations between what will be knowingly allowed within one's home and within one's mind becomes both more difficult and more fundamental to the living of a life in Christ.
The two problems here are the permeation of our culture by concepts hostile to the Gospel and the subtlety and casuistry involved in their promotion and justification. As with other aspects of culture, we must use the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as all the useful knowledge available to us in other areas, to sift the wheat from the chaff; to make the judgments of value and principle necessary in protecting ourselves and our families from the influence of such material beyond what invades our peripheral awareness on a continual basis and from which there is little chance of total immunity.
Modern popular music, the kind of music parents, Bishops, and General Authorities have spoken about and inveighed against for several generations, is an artifact, for the most part, of my generation; the Baby Boom generation. Two important things, for the purposes of this discussion, have happened, relative to music and its place in our society, over the last forty to fifty years. The first is that with the birth of Rock music and other genres allied to it, modern music began a fast and perhaps inexorable development toward an ever more extreme, ever more intoxicating mixture of the emotional and psychological power of music with the themes of unbridled, promiscuous sexuality, rebellion, and a position of confrontation and disdain for authority, tradition, and standard norms of behavior.
Coextensive with this was the rise of a concept of youth – and especially teenage youth – that conceived of adolescence not as a phase of life which one passes through on the way to adulthood, but as a tribal subculture set apart by its values, interests, manner of dress, language, and even moral philosophy, from the adult world. This gave rise to a culture of perennial, adversarial adolescence, which has evolved into the modern phenomena of “prolonged adolescence”, which is one of the salient features of our age. Rock music became the music of this generation and perhaps the central organizing principle of youth culture over the last forty years.
Coming along for the ride in these years was the “sexual revolution” and the rise of the drug culture, all parts of a larger cultural upheaval within which modern music was both a catalyst and a recipient of developments in other areas. In the end, we are faced with a vast variety of music, from the beautiful and uplifting to the obscene or simply banal. But few would disagree that the overwhelming tendency of popular music; the music that is the primary if not sole fare of almost all music radio stations, popular films and television shows, video games, and the average college student's Sony Walkman, tends toward the lowest common musical, intellectual, and moral denominator, and that such trends are, for all intents and purposes, a permanent part of our cultural landscape.
In the first instance I should be clear that this is not an attack on teenagers or youth. The primary reason modern youth feel so abused by adult recriminations against much of the entertainment media that forms so central a part of their lives is precisely the insular clan-like nature of the youth culture that developed over the last several generations and came to dominate the thinking of many youth about their place in the larger society. Hollywood and the music industry have been preeminent in the aggressive promulgation and celebration of these attitudes in countless songs and as many films, from the sugary innocence of the Beach Party films of the 60s to the unleashed hormones and statutory rapes of the Porky's films in the 80s to the increasingly brazen sexualization of children in modern entertainment media.
But whatever youth have come to believe about themselves and their relations to the adult world, this is not a denunciation of them. It is, however, a direct and unflinching criticism of the overwhelming prevalence of messages, attitudes, imagery, and symbolism in a vast amount of modern music that cannot be reconciled with the principles and standards of the Lord's church and which will ultimately effect our ability to fully live the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it effects our ability to discriminate, sift, and discern intelligence, light, and truth from their opposites.
From this viewpoint, much of modern music, following trends in the broader culture over the last several decades, carves a totem out of the experiences, attitudes, challenges and unique perspectives of adolescence and creates a sense of reverence for such perspectives and a disdain or even hostility to anything outside or beyond them. The media driven youth culture, of which music is probably the most important component, trap youth in youth in its incessant attempt to prolong adolescent attitudes and feelings well beyond the time then they should have been abandoned. This is not just a problem for young people, as much of what a couple of generations ago would have been clearly understood to have been a part of “youth culture” properly speaking, is now aimed at adults in their twenties and thirties. MTV's audience approaches middle age, and is not the narrow pre-teen to late teen core audience of the Heavy Metal culture of twenty years ago. Yet even then, the rebellious antinominaism of this genre and its cultural accompaniments was popular among young adults well out of the teenage years; Boomers who had grown up listening to a steady and influential diet of very similar music as children.
Many aspects of today's pop music, whether aimed at youth specifically or not, glorify and amplify the worst excesses of youthful recklessness and immaturity and associates these with being young, and especially with being “teen”. This is part of a broader trend within our society over the past several decades to both project an image of youth as a kind of sacred, hedonistic rite of passage whose primary emphasis is the satiation of physiological and psychological desires, primarily through experimentation with drugs and incessant sexual adventures, and to create a sense that such attitudes are a standard, not only for “youth” but for society as a whole. The end of this is what I will here term the adolescentization of our culture; the extension of adolescent mannerisms, speech, dress, attitudes, and perspectives well into the adult years.
This of course, does not define the fundamental problems of popular music with which this chapter deals, these problems, from a Gospel frame of reference, are common to the entire popular media and entertainment culture broadly speaking. The emphasis on youth occurs precisely because of the popular music culture's emphasis on youth, and the emphasis by contemporary youth upon popular music as a central feature of their identities and lives. Yet the specific challenges to youth represented by modern genres of music are not specific to youth alone. Unlike the Depression era generation, all generations since have grown up listening to essentially the same music. Modern interpretations and styles may indeed be appreciably more extreme and intemperate in form, but the substance of such music remains substantially unchanged from themes and attitudes already prominent by the late 60s. Several generations have been affected in similar ways by the changes that have occurred in society over the last several decades and which have been both promoted by and reflected in various popular media. This means that, unlike the WWII generation, when we as parents, teachers, Bishops, Stake Presidents, and adult role models broadly speaking, counsel youth as to the appropriate course to take when choosing which music is appropriate within the context of Gospel standards, most of us have ourselves had experience in this area and have had to negotiate very much the same set of spiritual, intellectual, and personal tasks associated with making choices as to what will constitute the life of our minds.
Yet youth, as has been indicated already, are not by any means the sole focus of this chapter, nor are the principles involved in the discernment of what is and is not appropriate
Music: The Uncertain Sound
Does music tame the savage beast or midwife the creation of such beasts where there were none before? Well might we ask questions like this of such a prevalent and powerful medium such as music. Especially since the 1950s and the rise of youth culture as a separate and idiosyncratic sub-culture within the mainstream of American cultural life, music has taken on preeminent importance as a transmitter of ideas, concepts, values, and, perhaps even more importantly in our day, raw emotions, passions, and deeply sensed feelings.
Detached by the enveloping catharsis of much modern music and its performance from consideration of its moral, social, and spiritual content, and cloaked in the ever present and holy mantle of “art” and “artistic freedom”, the music of the popular culture has become, to an overwhelming extent, the music of Babylon. It has become the music of opposition to Zion. But here of course music in the Latter Days follows the same course taken by many other institutions of our culture, from film, television, and news media to public education and the style and content of modern politics. As Satan's power grows and encompasses the world to an ever increasing degree, much of what our society does, creates, and values ultimately begins to reflect his values.
So much of modern culture has come to reflect a confrontational, oppositional position with regard to Gospel values – whether they be called “traditional values”, “conservatism”, “family values” or whatever popular term is attached to the concepts in question at a particular time -- that discriminations between what will be knowingly allowed within one's home and within one's mind becomes both more difficult and more fundamental to the living of a life in Christ.
The two problems here are the permeation of our culture by concepts hostile to the Gospel and the subtlety and casuistry involved in their promotion and justification. As with other aspects of culture, we must use the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as all the useful knowledge available to us in other areas, to sift the wheat from the chaff; to make the judgments of value and principle necessary in protecting ourselves and our families from the influence of such material beyond what invades our peripheral awareness on a continual basis and from which there is little chance of total immunity.
Modern popular music, the kind of music parents, Bishops, and General Authorities have spoken about and inveighed against for several generations, is an artifact, for the most part, of my generation; the Baby Boom generation. Two important things, for the purposes of this discussion, have happened, relative to music and its place in our society, over the last forty to fifty years. The first is that with the birth of Rock music and other genres allied to it, modern music began a fast and perhaps inexorable development toward an ever more extreme, ever more intoxicating mixture of the emotional and psychological power of music with the themes of unbridled, promiscuous sexuality, rebellion, and a position of confrontation and disdain for authority, tradition, and standard norms of behavior.
Coextensive with this was the rise of a concept of youth – and especially teenage youth – that conceived of adolescence not as a phase of life which one passes through on the way to adulthood, but as a tribal subculture set apart by its values, interests, manner of dress, language, and even moral philosophy, from the adult world. This gave rise to a culture of perennial, adversarial adolescence, which has evolved into the modern phenomena of “prolonged adolescence”, which is one of the salient features of our age. Rock music became the music of this generation and perhaps the central organizing principle of youth culture over the last forty years.
Coming along for the ride in these years was the “sexual revolution” and the rise of the drug culture, all parts of a larger cultural upheaval within which modern music was both a catalyst and a recipient of developments in other areas. In the end, we are faced with a vast variety of music, from the beautiful and uplifting to the obscene or simply banal. But few would disagree that the overwhelming tendency of popular music; the music that is the primary if not sole fare of almost all music radio stations, popular films and television shows, video games, and the average college student's Sony Walkman, tends toward the lowest common musical, intellectual, and moral denominator, and that such trends are, for all intents and purposes, a permanent part of our cultural landscape.
In the first instance I should be clear that this is not an attack on teenagers or youth. The primary reason modern youth feel so abused by adult recriminations against much of the entertainment media that forms so central a part of their lives is precisely the insular clan-like nature of the youth culture that developed over the last several generations and came to dominate the thinking of many youth about their place in the larger society. Hollywood and the music industry have been preeminent in the aggressive promulgation and celebration of these attitudes in countless songs and as many films, from the sugary innocence of the Beach Party films of the 60s to the unleashed hormones and statutory rapes of the Porky's films in the 80s to the increasingly brazen sexualization of children in modern entertainment media.
But whatever youth have come to believe about themselves and their relations to the adult world, this is not a denunciation of them. It is, however, a direct and unflinching criticism of the overwhelming prevalence of messages, attitudes, imagery, and symbolism in a vast amount of modern music that cannot be reconciled with the principles and standards of the Lord's church and which will ultimately effect our ability to fully live the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it effects our ability to discriminate, sift, and discern intelligence, light, and truth from their opposites.
From this viewpoint, much of modern music, following trends in the broader culture over the last several decades, carves a totem out of the experiences, attitudes, challenges and unique perspectives of adolescence and creates a sense of reverence for such perspectives and a disdain or even hostility to anything outside or beyond them. The media driven youth culture, of which music is probably the most important component, trap youth in youth in its incessant attempt to prolong adolescent attitudes and feelings well beyond the time then they should have been abandoned. This is not just a problem for young people, as much of what a couple of generations ago would have been clearly understood to have been a part of “youth culture” properly speaking, is now aimed at adults in their twenties and thirties. MTV's audience approaches middle age, and is not the narrow pre-teen to late teen core audience of the Heavy Metal culture of twenty years ago. Yet even then, the rebellious antinominaism of this genre and its cultural accompaniments was popular among young adults well out of the teenage years; Boomers who had grown up listening to a steady and influential diet of very similar music as children.
Many aspects of today's pop music, whether aimed at youth specifically or not, glorify and amplify the worst excesses of youthful recklessness and immaturity and associates these with being young, and especially with being “teen”. This is part of a broader trend within our society over the past several decades to both project an image of youth as a kind of sacred, hedonistic rite of passage whose primary emphasis is the satiation of physiological and psychological desires, primarily through experimentation with drugs and incessant sexual adventures, and to create a sense that such attitudes are a standard, not only for “youth” but for society as a whole. The end of this is what I will here term the adolescentization of our culture; the extension of adolescent mannerisms, speech, dress, attitudes, and perspectives well into the adult years.
This of course, does not define the fundamental problems of popular music with which this chapter deals, these problems, from a Gospel frame of reference, are common to the entire popular media and entertainment culture broadly speaking. The emphasis on youth occurs precisely because of the popular music culture's emphasis on youth, and the emphasis by contemporary youth upon popular music as a central feature of their identities and lives. Yet the specific challenges to youth represented by modern genres of music are not specific to youth alone. Unlike the Depression era generation, all generations since have grown up listening to essentially the same music. Modern interpretations and styles may indeed be appreciably more extreme and intemperate in form, but the substance of such music remains substantially unchanged from themes and attitudes already prominent by the late 60s. Several generations have been affected in similar ways by the changes that have occurred in society over the last several decades and which have been both promoted by and reflected in various popular media. This means that, unlike the WWII generation, when we as parents, teachers, Bishops, Stake Presidents, and adult role models broadly speaking, counsel youth as to the appropriate course to take when choosing which music is appropriate within the context of Gospel standards, most of us have ourselves had experience in this area and have had to negotiate very much the same set of spiritual, intellectual, and personal tasks associated with making choices as to what will constitute the life of our minds.
Yet youth, as has been indicated already, are not by any means the sole focus of this chapter, nor are the principles involved in the discernment of what is and is not appropriate