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Is Rock Music "Evil"?
There was a time when rock music was classified as "evil" by the older folks of the day. Now, the older folks are the Boomers, a generation raised on rock. (I don't mean the true older folks, the one's who still hate rock music, like my parents' generation.) How can any music be deemed to be evil, dark, negative, chaotic, etc., in and of itself? The fact is that music does not exist in a void. There was only a relatively short period of time in the world's history that music was able to be heard, but the performers not seen. Records, radio, tapes, cds and mp3s. Maybe 100 years? TV changed things some, MTV changed it more. Today it's still possible to hear a song and have no idea what the artist looks like or how they behave on stage, but not for long. Because music has been used for centuries to augment live performance of one kind or another, we've developed ideas as to what types of music are appropriate for certain situations. Would Disney's "It's A Small World" fit with the shower scene in Psycho? Would Hulst's Mars movement be appropriate for the humorous depiction of laughing and playing children? Can't most all of us tell what's happening on the screen, more or less, by the background music? Perhaps it's the combination of sight and sound that creates in our head an impression of what mood is intended by the performers, based on our experiences to that point. Does a child, hearing the Jaws theme music for the first time, connect it with getting out of the ocean? They might understand the mood that was intended if they had had exposure to similar music and some patterning to help categorize it. Add lyrics to the overall experience, and put one in the context of sharing the experience with others, and it becomes hard to be truly objective about what one is hearing and seeing. Should the Mormon Tabernacle Choir perform Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody it just might take on a different feel. That's the principle behind elevator music. Take popular songs, eliminate the lyrics so as not to offend or distract, and soften them for mass consumption. How many people have had their impression of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" change due to a recent Cadillac marketing campaign? Does the younger generation even know who Led Zeppelin was? Would they have had the same impression of the Brit group today if they had seen them in concert 34 years ago? Honestly, it didn't occur to me until this morning that our determination of the "goodness" of music isn't based solely on the music itself. I've had the discussion about rock music with my mother-in-law, who has a Doctorate of Musical Arts, several times over the years. I even wrote this entry yesterday, with a different angle on it, only to have the computer freeze and end up losing it all. (Yes, I'm saving this one as a draft as I go.) But it was this morning, as I woke up, that I realized that perhaps the reason that some people view music as good or evil is because of what they are seeing, not hearing. (I'm not forgetting that lyrics play a large role, too. Handel's "Messiah" uses a different text than does "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd.) We're programmed to a large extent. Ozzy up on stage being crude and disgusting? Welcome to Black Sabbath. Donny Osmond singing about Puppy Love? Bring on the Mormon missionaries. Some music is easy to categorize, as it is intended to create a mood. Sometimes the most melodic, "nice" sounding music can disguise a message that the lyrics convey, like in the oft-parodied "Afternoon Delight." And what about Christian rockers? They look and sound just like their supposedly satanic (or at least agnostic) fellow rockers, only they're "rocking for Jesus!" It can get really confusing. Honestly, music is not a big part of my life, although it is part of my family’s life. I do not play a musical instrument, although my wife and our five oldest children do. I've wanted to be in a rock band since I was a teen, but didn't everybody? Now, I get to do the next best thing. My oldest boys are in a rock band. They practice at our house. The neighbors? Yeah, they probably hate us. I did do quite a bit of sound insulation, but you can still tell that something is going on. Not loud...just kinda there. The band plays at the local venues and is pretty well-known in local circles. I guess this topic is important to me because I can see both sides of it. Some performers are potty mouths and sing about crude, lewd and disgusting things, with their on-stage demeanor and actions supporting those themes. My boys’ band opened for a nationally touring act and my then 15 year old daughter went to the show to help sell the band's cds and t-shirts. (My wife and I were there, too, but we left after our boys' band played.) My daughter said that she had never heard the F word used so many times in such a short period of time as she did when the touring bands were on stage. Great. No wonder parents end up broad-brushing all rock music as evil. And it's too bad that they do. Music, like most forms of art, finds its beauty in the senses of the beholder. We are programmed by our life experiences to think that some music is "good" and other music is "evil", just as we are about people in general. While I happen to think that good and evil do exist in this world of ours, I believe that we are far too quick to tag those labels onto what we see and hear and don't really give things (or people) an objective review. Rock on!
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May, 2012
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