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!
I think one of the big issues with popular culture is that it became big and became part of a mass-distributed industry. It was no longer really popular then, in the sense of "of the people".
ReplyDeleteThree things in particular, music, sports, and film/television have come to be associated with making lots of money and a hedonistic lifestyle rather than the thing itself. And it's a shame, because I think a lot of people are so used to it that they have a hard time disassociating the two and realizing that they don't have to go together.
This has had a bad effect on the performers and on the audience, because both end up being encouraged to do things better avoided.
It should be primarily about the music or about the sport or about telling a story to communicate something good.
All very true. I used to wonder how rockstars could be so clichéd as to become drug addicts after having so many cautionary tales going before them. But then you read about the pressure that comes with their success, and it becomes more understandable. And of course the stories of motorbikes in hotel corridors etc. become part of the band's folklore in themselves.
DeleteWhat Bloom is getting at is the total absence of any knowldege of or love for music in its concert-hall guise. I disdain the word classical which is 1. inaccurate (the only classical composers in any definable sense we still listen to are Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Bach is not classical, and neither is Chopin) and 2. annoying, because it precludes living composers, of whom there are thousands. In other words, there is no room whatever for the art-from that Roger Scruton considers the greatest single achievement of western culture, so that discussions of music become like discussions of literature where the whole point is decide if Pam Ayers or Rod McKuen is the better. Forgive the tetchiness of this response, but I have experienced decades of this from the musician's side!
ReplyDeleteThat's very interesting. What does "classical" actually mean, then?
DeleteI don't know anything about music theory, really. But it seems obvious to me that orchestral music is more subtle and complex than most pop music or folk music and therefore, probably, of a higher nature.
In the McKuen-Ayers debate, I would definitely come down on the McKuen side. I've always been haunted by these lines that he wrote:
What does it matter what's done in the day
After the day is done?