The Rock and Roll Morality

I am writing in great humility with regard to the writing of a great thinker of our past half-century in such a way as to render this text as a commentary more so than an actual personal production of real creative ingenuity. In fact, so humbled am I by the profundity of what I would like to discuss here that I feel a greater temptation to adulate the author rather than to dare comment at all. I will simply leave the commentary to the reader’s own spiritual turnings and disturbances.

At present I am reading a book which I have longed to read for quite some time called The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. It is, as stated on the back cover, an argument that “the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.” Thus far he has touched on a multitude of topics and approaches, from relativism to religion to music, the great works of literature, etc. The list is already endless.

Anyways, today I read the chapter titled, “Music”, and was stunned by the fluidity and coherence of Bloom’s argument and observation on our current moral state and how it pertains to our obsession with music. He states that the entire nature of music, as well as its purpose, has changed. If I may sum it up in my own (potentially incorrect) terms, where music was once a means of conveying meaning, a message, and only acutely a form of expression, music as it is manifest in its most popular form today- rock- is now mostly a means of expression with the end of creating an effect, a feeling, and a predominantly physical sense of pleasure.

Before I quote Bloom, I will ask, “Why does this matter?” It matters because music and our relationship to it are intimately tied, as Bloom argues, to our spiritual condition. This should come as no surprise to a Catholic, who knows the centrality of music to the liturgy. And yet, the flux which our musical and, consequently, moral expression has undergone has been virtually overlooked and its effect and reflection of our moral state for the most part ignored. What does all this have to do with “sex, drugs, and rock and roll?”

“Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.” (73)

“In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.” (73-4)

This fosters a sense of rebellion against authority, that rebellion so emblematic of the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll that was the 1960’s.

“The inevitable corollary of such sexual interest is rebellion against the parental authority that represses it. Selfishness thus becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality. 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,” a pubescent version of Alle Menschen werden Brüder, the fulfillment of which has been inhibited by the political equivalents of Mom and Dad. These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a swarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. A glance at the videos that project images on the wall of Plato’s cave since MTV took it over suffices to prove this. Hitler’s image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause. Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art, combined with a pervasiveness, importance and content beyond Tocqueville’s wildest imagination.

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.

This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such…” (74-75)

Bloom introduces a moral sociopolitical aspect to his critique of the new musical phenomenon a few pages later:

“It is interesting to note that the Left, which prides itself on its critical approach to ‘late capitalism’ and is unrelenting and unsparing in its analysis of our other cultural phenomena, has in general given rock music a free ride. Abstracting from the capitalist element in which it flourishes, they regard it as a people’s art, coming from beneath the bourgeoisie’s layers of cultural repression. Its antinomianism and its longing for a world without constraint might seem to be the clarion of the proletarian revolution, and Marxists certainly do see that rock music dissolves the beliefs and morals necessary for liberal society and would approve of it for that alone. But the harmony between the young intellectual Left and rock is probably profounder than that. Herbert Marcuse appealed to university students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, a sort that the bourgeois moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile. Rock music touches the same chord in the young. Free sexual expression, anarchism, mining of the irrational unconscious and giving it free rein are what they have in common. The high intellectual life…and the low rock world are partners in the same entertainment enterprise. They must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois’ need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have undangerous experiments with the unlimited. He is willing to pay dearly for them. The Left is better interpreted by Nietzsche than by Marx. The critical theory of late capitalism is at once late capitalism’s subtlest and crudest expression. Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.” (77-8)