(Apologies for the light posting this week. I find that the lingering effects of that stomach virus make me want to do little more than sleep. Unfortunately, the energizing effect of the Christmas season counteracts any run-down feeling that the kids have, so Julie and I have to chase them.)
A friend passes this along this morning:
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk--real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.-Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was in the kitchen cooking, and pulled out old discs from Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and a New Orleans soul collection. I hadn't listened to them in a long time, and was taken aback by how sweet they were. "Sweet" not as in sugary, but as in something exceptionally tender, that speaks of the sweetness of love and of life.
Of course they sing about love and sex, because that's part of life -- and if art doesn't speak of life, it can hardly be art. But compare the way the old school soul singers sang about love and sex with the way contemporary hip-hop artists do. More broadly, compare the way songwriters of other pop genres did as recently as the Fifties and early Sixties, as opposed to now. Gone is the sense of tenderness, of sweetness, of beauty. Sex in popular song is now often no more than an animalistic act, one that debases the humanity of both the singer and his audience.
It's usually at this point when someone pipes up and says, "But our parents (or grandparents) thought that Elvis and the Beatles were risque'!" That is assumed to be an argument-ender, because we are supposed to assume the relativity in tastes across time -- which plainly exists -- is absolute, which it plainly is not. The Elvis-Beatles Relativity Fallacy lets parents today off the hook far too easily; I don't know whether it's invoked out of moral cowardice, moral laziness or genuine confusion, but it's a serious error, and one with consequences for shaping the character of individuals and cultures.
Is Marvin Gaye singing "Let's Get It On," or Van Morrison singing about getting jiggy with his "Brown-Eyed Girl" in the sweet summer sun more crude, relatively, than Cole Porter or even Shakespeare? Of course. But there is still a generous humanity present, a real artistry, in the sense that art concentrate, refines and beautifies the raw material of life. It's a humanity about sex that you just don't see in popular songs today (hip-hop is the most egregious genre, but by no means the only one). And if you don't think it matters, imagine that the female object of the singer's attentions is your daughter. Imagine that the young man courting your daughter has had his moral imagination shaped by that singer's debased art. Imagine that the culture we live in has absorbed that artist's barbaric worldview, and acculturates the next generation according to its values.
Because I'm talking about sex, and sex -- even more than economics -- is the great dividing line in American culture, no small number of you will roll your eyes at this. But consider race.
In the past, American popular culture, including film and song, trafficked far more in what we today recognize as racist images and stereotypes. Previous generations -- the ones that were so strict about sexual morality in popular culture -- were far more accepting of casual racism in popular culture.
How would you feel if your teenagers started listening to music that openly and crudely posited blacks as subhuman? You would be worried, and rightly so, and you'd do what you could to put a stop to it, because you wouldn't want your children to grow up with that kind of moral poison suffusing their conscience. No matter how musically inventive the racist songs were, it couldn't redeem the moral message, certainly not for young people who are still developing their consciences (this, as opposed to adults, who are presumably better able to discern between aesthetic form and moral content; I wouldn't want my boys watching Riefenstahl's demonic masterpiece "The Triumph of the Will" until they were older -- but I would want them to see it, as an example of how aesthetic beauty can be put in the service of raw evil, and how one cannot use mere beauty as a reliable guide to morality).
Anyway, how would you feel if you caught your children listening to white supremacist rock (which exists in the neo-Nazi underground), and when you challenged them about it, they said, "Hey, your parents thought Elvis and the Beatles were offensive, so get off my back!"? How would you respond? If you respond from a position of objective morality, do you not concede that relativism is not absolute? And if you concede it in terms of racial morality, why should sexual morality draw an exemption?
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Singalaris: I too appreciate your tolerance and charitable attitude towards those of us whom you might disagree with, and I also appreciate your attitude towards the gentlemen who made that uncalled for racial slur. I don't think I would've been able to control my anger as well as you did. I enjoy reading and thinking about your input. Keep posting.
"No, it doesn't. It simply means we no longer know what the slang means. That doesn't change what people were talking about."
Unless you are saying that there were no explicitly crude words in Shakespearean English, and slang metaphor was as raw as it got, (and I don't believe that's correct), there IS a difference. Slang metaphor is not the same as the explicit, raw crudity that's being objected to here.
Z,
I'm on the Christian Left for the most part, and I agree with your general point about the hypocrisy of 1950s and neo-Victorian sexual morality, absolutely. (I'm not a fan of the other extreme pursued by too many people today, but let that pass.) However, _please_ don't use Kinsey's name as anything other than the punchline to a bad joke. It just discredits your case (and mine); you'd be better off using lists of brothels published in Victorian England or something like that. Kinsey's statistical methodology was abysmal, and bordering on plain and simple fraud- they were roundly condemned and mocked by the great scientists of the day, including by the great statistician John Tukey. His conclusions are less than worthless.
Since people 2000 years ago decorated their walls with what we'd think of as pornography render this whole conversation moot? Do you really want your 6 year old singing the latest Solja Boy hit that she's heard blaring from car radios? Do you really want our middle schools filled with kids who have memorized every violent and mysogenistic lyric that's been put out in the last 15 years and try to comport themselves accordingly?
If you really wish to help kids be virtuous we need only expose them to the truth. We shouldn't expect anyone to respect our views on the present if we're lying about the past.
Shakespeare was as crude as many modern rappers. (The crudeness is usually obscured by the antiquated language.) He belongs with them rather than Cole Porter.
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