![]() And yet, almost every time we go to see an action movie, we cheer people who violate these rules … We enter the movie theater a citizen of this world, but when we sit down, we become denizens of the spiritual jungle, where our morality becomes tribal the moment the lights go out.” These rules … form the bedrock of virtually every halfway decent civilization. The people we are at work, at the grocery store, play by one set of largely artificial rules: the rules of civilization … Our primal self isn’t a noble savage, but he does feel like a more authentic person than the one who works hard and plays by the rules of modern society … For instance, we are rightly taught not to hit, steal, or torture. What intrigues Jonah “is how our moral expectations in the world of art differ from our expectations in the real world around us. The glorification of violence, he says, is also a huge problem – “From Rebel Without a Cause to cooking shows, the man – or occasionally woman – who plays by his own code, even if that code is evil, has become the stock character of American popular culture.” Movies such as The Exorcist, The Godfather, The Stepford Wives, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all had this in common – “The idea that contemporary life was out of balance and off-kilter, inauthentic, or oppressive, and that elites and the system were broken, corrupt, or inadequate to the task of making life right.” Jonah then goes on to consider hit movies. ![]() The comfort of prosperity leads, in Schumpeterian fashion, to a cultural backlash against the established order and bourgeois values.” Similarly, the peace and prosperity of the post-Cold War world created the adolescent forty-year-old. The buttoned-down 1950s gave adolescents something to rebel against. “It is also no coincidence that the post-World War II era of peace, prosperity, and conformity largely created the idea of the teenager. Your teenage years are the time when the civilized order and your inner primitive are most at war.” “Rock and roll fancies itself as outside ‘the system.’ It claims a higher or truer authority based on feelings that, like the poets of earlier generations, defy the tyranny of the slide rule and the calculator … Nowhere is the romantic mixture of pantheism, primitivism, and the primacy of feelings more evident than in rock’s appeal to inner authority and authenticity … Nor is it a coincidence that rock appeals most directly to adolescents. He gives a list of the key themes of rock and roll and other popular music – “defy authority and throw off the chains, true love, damn the consequences, nostalgia for an imagined better past, the superiority of youth, contempt for selling out, alienation, paganism and pantheism, and, like an umbrella over it all, the supremacy of personal feelings above all else.” “My claim,” he goes on, “is not so much that there are elements of romanticism in rock and roll, but that rock and roll is romanticism” – which for Jonah is a bad thing. “Popular culture,” Jonah says, “gives us the clearest widow into the romantic dimension that we all live in.” This is not a compliment. ![]() For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling the most fundamental political and social conventions.” He quotes Victor Hugo, who said “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words, and that which cannot remain silent.” He could well have also quoted Plato – “A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard to all our fortunes. In one chapter of this book – Pop Culture Politics – he says some truly intriguing things. One man who believes it might do is the admirable Jonah Goldberg, whose Suicide of the West I have already reviewed favorably. Does pop music – and popular culture generally – herald the end of Western civilization? And now for something completely different. ![]()
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