Chris Dahmen's blog 5
Diana West in her book entitled Death of the Grown Up has made the claim that Elivis Presely and other figure heads of the 50's and 60's embodied an antibourgeois culture. And likewise, the bourgeois had an anti-rock ideology. She makes the case that this is the generation that began the death of the grown up as it is defined in her book. I think she, and parents of the day, up to and including me (not a parent yet) would definatley agree with Bloom's claim that "Music can become tantamount to pornography for teenager." She claims that never before had anything been marketed to heavily to teenagers and kids. In fact, as she apty points out, the word "teenager" didn't even appear in our language until shortly before the rock revolution in the 50's. It may be that rock was deliberatley created and perpetuated just to get kids to go crazy over it and get hooked to maximize profits from sales in the same way cigarettes were infamously targeting teenagers for sales with familiar characters like Joe Camel. Bloom makes the claim in his article "The rock business is perfect capitalism, supplying to demand and helping to create it. It has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking, but it was so totally new and unexpected that nobody thought to control it, and now it is too late." He also describes Mick Jagger as "playing the possessed lower class demon and teen aged satyr...with one eye on the mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults who handled the money." This is clearly not a wholesome endeavor by any stretch of the word. From this very predictable perspective of capitalism and vulgarity, it seems as though there is nothing good the rock culture has to offer in social terms literally or figuratively. Parents should have been outraged and not just for obvious reasons. As Bloom points out "I believe it[rock] ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and though that are the substance of liberal education." Clearly the parents who believed that rock or antibourgeois culture of the 50's was not just annoying, but posed a greater threat to their children and their psychology and education were really on to something that Bloom revealed so many years later. Unfortunatley, the parents at the time probably had no way of articulating this as Bloom does, and being so new, they probably also had no idea of how bad it would be for their kids and the culture in general in the long run. The issue is more dangerous for our culture now than many realize. Again Allan Bloom "The inevitable corollary of such sexual interest is rebellion against the parental authority that represses it." But what seems to be dangerous, is the thought of what will happen when the antibourgeois kids become parents themselves. The. Many of them are parents who need parents. THey may have no ability to realize such things as they often have no ability to be scrupulous and think outside of their own perspective and so on, all hallmarks of liberal education. Such an ideology is certainly hard to break. "It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself. And the conclusion is bleak with no grown ups as Diana West points out "Responisibility and restraint are not only bedrock virtues of liberal civilization, they are also hallmarks of the grown-up. Without them, civilization becomes anarchic, and the grown up slips and regresses." When the grrown up regresses, what will their kids be like? The future?