Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I read it last September, but I found myself thinking of it just now for a particular reason. It's a history of communist East Germany, with an emphasis on culture and social history.
One section of the book describes the mania for blue jeans that swept over East Germany in the 1960s. Blue jeans were a symbol of youth, freedom, pop culture, etc. etc.
The communist authorities frowned on blue jeans and rock music, and condemned them as decadent.
Here's the thing...although communism was (and is) evil all the way through, and the fall of the Soviet Union was a great victory for humanity, I can't help thinking the communist authorities were right in this instance.
Blue jeans did indeed symbolize everything rubbishy and decadent about the West, and still do. (I can never join in the celebration of "Western values"-- they're a very mixed bag, if you ask me. It was the West that spawned political correctness.)
It's a wonderful thing that the Soviet Union fall, but rather embarrassing that blue jeans, rock and roll, and Dallas had quite a lot to do with its fall.
But then again, Western governments also tried to severely restrict the radio airtime given to pop and rock music. In retrospect, this seems an entirely reasonable sort of paternalism. Pirate radio stations weren't doing anything noble.
It's notable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, surely one of Soviet communism's most determined enemies, also lambasted the West for its "intolerable music" (among other things).
To my boundless shame, I have had a lifelong addiction to this intolerable music-- pop, rock, and all the rest. I've spent endless hours listening to it. Now and again, I've been overcome with remorse for this, and I can even remember throwing out all my rock music CDs on more than one occasion. However, I always drifted back to listening to it.
I read The Closing of the American MInd by Allan Bloom in my twenties, and was greatly affected (and brought to shame) by its chapter on music, especially this much-quoted passage: "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 nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy." (The book was published in 1987.)
I felt shame, and yet...I came back to listening to rock and pop music, again and again and again. Mea maxima culpa, indeed!
I’ve heard that The Science has proven that you will “like” music you heard as a teen whether you like it or not. I can certainly attest. I worked in a restaurant and the music I listened to while there I actively hated, inwardly rejected…and I know every word and even the kids notice I sway and tap my toes and *look* for all the world like it’s my favorite stuff when it comes on. At least I can solemnly swear I never play it on purpose!
ReplyDeleteIt’s totally different from television interestingly, despite the addictiveness of screens. We quit movies and TV (and infotainment, videos of all kinds, really) cold turkey and completely when we had kids, and after a few years I stopped having even occasional “cravings.” And this was true as a “movie buff” with a very high appreciation for the both the art and entertainment value of cinema.
That's an interesting fact about music we heard in our teens. It's true I like some of it. Mostly I like seventies music, though.
DeleteCongratulations on quitting movies and TV. I'm a great movie lover myself, and I think I love the cinema too much to ever give it up. But I certainly find myself treading much more carefully now with all the wokery out there!
I do think though that like the hailing of pteChristian Greece and Rome during the Renaissance or the humanism of Hugo or products of the Jazz Era or even modern art, some parts of rock and pop will endure amuddier beautiful. Not every modern artiste is trying to break down society but obviously there needs to be a past to be a present; the pioneers of pop would certainly have grown up with and drawn from the art of the past, Benny Anderson playing Oskar Lindberg 's folk hymn on the accordion (Sweden for all it's progressive reputation played mostly classical, sacred and folk music on it's government stations up to the early 70s apparently) during ABBA's heyday is one indicator that the muddier waters can be traced to a source.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you! I didn't mean to suggest that rock and pop music lacks artistic merit. I actually think there's a lot of good rock and pop. And obviously not all of the artists have subversive intentions; there are even plenty of pop and rock songs with wholesome and uplifting messages.
DeleteOn the whole, though, I think the genres tend to be a decadent influence by their very nature-- the pounding rhythms which I personally find so addictive, and also the cultural ideas which they carried along with them.
That horse has long since bolted, though!