This article helps me understand the new trend in music today, and it speaks to those of us who have experienced family trauma, divorce, and abandonment, physical and emotional ....
http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/eberstadt.html
Eminem Is Right
"If there is one subject on which the parents of America passionately agree, it is that contemporary adolescent popular music, especially the subgenres of heavy metal and hip-hop/rap, is uniquely degraded ? and degrading ? by the standards of previous generations. At first blush this seems slightly ironic. After all, most of today?s baby-boom parents were themselves molded by rock and roll, bumping and grinding their way through adolescence and adulthood with legendary abandon. Even so, the parents are correct: Much of today?s music is darker and coarser than yesterday?s rock. Misogyny, violence, suicide, sexual exploitation, child abuse ? these and other themes, formerly rare and illicit, are now as common as the surfboards, drive-ins, and sock hops of yesteryear.
In a nutshell, the ongoing adult preoccupation with current music goes something like this: What is the overall influence of this deafening, foul, and often vicious-sounding stuff on children and teenagers? This is a genuinely important question, and serious studies and articles, some concerned particularly with current music?s possible link to violence, have lately been devoted to it. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry all weighed in against contemporary lyrics and other forms of violent entertainment before Congress with a first-ever ?Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children.?
Nonetheless, this is not my focus here. Instead, I would like to turn that logic about influence upside down and ask this question: What is it about today?s music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?
As the reader can see, this is a very different way of inquiring about the relationship between today?s teenagers and their music. The first question asks what the music does to adolescents; the second asks what it tells us about them. To answer that second question is necessarily to enter the roiling emotional waters in which that music is created and consumed ? in other words, actually to listen to some of it and read the lyrics.
As it turns out, such an exercise yields a fascinating and little understood fact about today?s adolescent scene. If yesterday?s rock was the music of abandon, today?s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music ? the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before ? is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.
Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem ? these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today ? suicide, misogyny, and drugs ? with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past."
................. see link for full article. Fascinating.
Full article by Mary Eberstadt, from Policy Review
L,
D :shock:
http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/eberstadt.html
Eminem Is Right
"If there is one subject on which the parents of America passionately agree, it is that contemporary adolescent popular music, especially the subgenres of heavy metal and hip-hop/rap, is uniquely degraded ? and degrading ? by the standards of previous generations. At first blush this seems slightly ironic. After all, most of today?s baby-boom parents were themselves molded by rock and roll, bumping and grinding their way through adolescence and adulthood with legendary abandon. Even so, the parents are correct: Much of today?s music is darker and coarser than yesterday?s rock. Misogyny, violence, suicide, sexual exploitation, child abuse ? these and other themes, formerly rare and illicit, are now as common as the surfboards, drive-ins, and sock hops of yesteryear.
In a nutshell, the ongoing adult preoccupation with current music goes something like this: What is the overall influence of this deafening, foul, and often vicious-sounding stuff on children and teenagers? This is a genuinely important question, and serious studies and articles, some concerned particularly with current music?s possible link to violence, have lately been devoted to it. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry all weighed in against contemporary lyrics and other forms of violent entertainment before Congress with a first-ever ?Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children.?
Nonetheless, this is not my focus here. Instead, I would like to turn that logic about influence upside down and ask this question: What is it about today?s music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?
As the reader can see, this is a very different way of inquiring about the relationship between today?s teenagers and their music. The first question asks what the music does to adolescents; the second asks what it tells us about them. To answer that second question is necessarily to enter the roiling emotional waters in which that music is created and consumed ? in other words, actually to listen to some of it and read the lyrics.
As it turns out, such an exercise yields a fascinating and little understood fact about today?s adolescent scene. If yesterday?s rock was the music of abandon, today?s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music ? the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before ? is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.
Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem ? these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today ? suicide, misogyny, and drugs ? with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past."
................. see link for full article. Fascinating.
Full article by Mary Eberstadt, from Policy Review
L,
D :shock:
)
