It's Only Soul-Rotting Garbage, But You Like It
On the civilizational catastrophe that is rock and roll.
Yeah, I’m saying it. Rock and roll, pop music, the youth soundtrack that begins with Bill Haley rockin’ around the clock in 1954 and ends with 60-IQ ghetto cretins jabbering about 60-IQ ghetto pastimes over electronically generated bongo beats...all of it, the whole fucking shooting match—the Beatles and Michael Jackson and Nirvana included—was and is a total, absolute, inexcusable waste of human energy. And not just a waste; about as sane and productive as trying to knock down a brick wall with your forehead.
Not that popular music wasn’t idiotic before a youth-targeted industry came into existence. In the early days of recorded sound there were standout pieces of retardation such as “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” or, I don’t know, “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” And there were, of course, the dry-runs for the rock and roll movement—ragtime, jazz, swing, etc. And none of it was a whole lot better, substance-wise, than Black Sabbath or Taylor Swift. But the genres and particular offerings had relatively limited destructive power, because they weren’t specifically engineered to infect the soft cerebrums of adolescents. Prior to the 1950s, that is to say, teenagers didn’t have their own exclusive cultures and soundtracks.
And this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud” situation. Well, it is, but with the qualification that I was there, man. I played in atrocious bands and dressed like a jackass and had a mohawk and shaggy hair and greased-up hair to represent the musical genres I thought were meaningful in various periods. I lived the soundtracks, and for my trouble I got zilch—that is, zilch in the positive column. I got trapped in psychological adolescence, and I got a smokescreen of puerile insights obscuring anything that might have actually nourished my mind and soul. I speak to you as one who happens to have crawled out, more or less intact, from this cultural train wreck.
If you think I exaggerate, test my thesis under extreme conditions. Consider rock and roll at arguably its most innocent and artful—consider the early Beatles. At best you can say the Fab Four were, in that first flush of fame, not obviously toxic. They specialized in the production of commercial jingles...harmonized and sanitized celebrations of teenage horniness. Philosophically speaking, songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” offered about as much to adolescent fans as a sneak-peek at Dad’s stash of Playboys...and for teenage girls the Beatles represented what? Unhinged, hormone-fueled idol worship. And what was this bland boy-band a gateway to? Within a few short years of their arrival on the scene, their fans were smashed on LSD and pot, dressed like gypsies and hobos, dancing like Zulus on mate-selection night.
And then we’ve got dancing...that inevitable corollary to the relentless bongo-thumping of the youth-music revolution. Sorry, but the pissed-off old deacons were right. Shaking your tail feather and boogie-woogie-ing and all that other grotesque buffoonery is both morally corrosive and intellectually stultifying. Yeah, okay, some dancing requires an amount of athleticism, but a fucking parrot can move in time to a beat. There’s zero talent involved in what’s been practiced by the typical teenage partygoer for the past 70 years. It’s an excuse for girls to rhythmically jut out their tits and asses, and for boys to ogle them and sidle up, in time to the bongos, as close as possible. We’re not talking about ballet or ballroom shit or anything formal; we’re talking about a regression to a marginally human state...empty-headed yahoos jolting themselves into trances around a fire to an endless, pulsating beat...a practice civilized peoples left behind about the time the concept of personal dignity was struck upon.
“Elvis the Pelvis,” of course, was the great innovator in this department. And what was Elvis’s shtick—that is, young Elvis, in his first incarnation? Well, in fact, he was doing a minstrel show; imitating the mindless body-convulsing and enraptured shouting and wailing of black performers who, in America, had come to combine their natural spontaneity and overexuberance with civilized musical instruments and recording tech.
Talk about a psyop. I mean, I’m not saying Elvis’s act was deliberately engineered to Africanize the sensibilities of white youth, but if such was the case, it would look exactly like the Elvis phenomenon...flagrantly primitive behavior from a white guy physically designed to provoke hormonal reactions from girls and, hence, imitative behaviors from boys...the same girls and boys who, ten or fifteen years later, were dancing like half-evolved halfwits and fucking each other with about as much discretion and restraint as Chris Christie at a Hometown Buffet.
Lest you think all this is some kind of sour grapes, the framework I’m employing to condemn the whole rock and roll, youth-music shitshow comes from none other than Plato. That guy wanted to outlaw fucking flute music. Why? Specifically, in that instance, because it caused melancholy...discontent disconnected from any rational processes. In a general sense, he advised placing restrictions on music because he understood a certain practical fact: that what music does is front-load raw emotional states, and as anyone who has dealt at length with females knows, raw emotion is a dumb, agitated ox that pulls the cart of reason wherever it wants.
As Plato laid it out, where music is concerned, we have three main elements—the words, the melody, and the rhythm—and if we don’t want people incited to act, for no particular reason, like sullen faggots, deranged children, or premenstrual witches, we have to keep a close watch on each of these elements, and combine and utilize them scientifically.
Thinking in these terms, it’s almost like those in control of the youth-music industry thought long and hard about Plato’s prescriptions and studiously did the precise opposite. The words to rock-and-pop songs, in better than 99 percent of cases, are love poems of the kind a boy who just experienced his first hard-on might write. The melodies are a couple of simplistic bars on an interminable loop—the aforementioned commercial jingles, designed to tattoo themselves on the mind. And the rhythms, of course, are the aforementioned relentless bongo thudding, which by its nature puts humans in primeval trances.
One thing Plato didn’t anticipate, because he had no concept of recorded music, was vocal stylings. Did I say raw emotion? Pop singers, as a rule, deliver songs as if they’re in prolonged states of orgasm…or as if they’re having their eyeballs slowly gnawed out by vultures as they die on a medieval battlefield…or as if they’re in enraged arguments with their dads about coming home drunk again. Shouting, bellowing, barking, simpering, groaning, growling, howling...and about what? Ultimately, practically exclusively, about being horny. Someone is turned on, or someone is rejected by someone who turns them on, and now it’s time to yell, moan, crow, etc. about the situation. There you have, in a nutshell, the entire substance and meaning of rock and roll.
Of course, once the program was established, other subject matter was explored. The metal genre specializes in screaming, as if one is sealed in a rubber room, about killing people in various settings; many hippie songs, conversely, are just musical renditions of bumper-sticker slogans about all-purpose love; chick music, of the Sarah McLachlan variety, is simply period cramps in song form; punk is essentially obnoxious ploys for attention by neglected younger siblings; there are numerous songs, such as “Hotel California” or “Stairway to Heaven,” whose lyrics are nothing but cryptic, art-fag poetry that seems profound due to the mournful strains and emotionally tortured delivery; country, inasmuch as it can be considered pop music, is either drunken elation, or the subsequent hangover, manifested in an array of twangs; and the grunge genre consists of fatherless junkies finding ways to complain about the fact that they were born.
And then we’ve got the conclusion of the whole process, the extracted essence of the rock and roll abomination—rap. While we can’t properly use the term “music” to describe this genre, in rap we nonetheless have an arrangement of repeating sounds—the inevitable relentless thumping, and the regular injection of instrument-noises—all produced by machines. Then, over this, we have what is typically a special-needs person, pretending to tell a story. Except the story is seldom a story. Rap “songs” are shaped by the special-needs people’s fascination with the fact that some words rhyme. The ridiculous popularity of the genre has yielded us multitudes of mentally handicapped Dr. Seusses, creating infinitely looping noise patterns through the mere pushing of buttons, then babbling out barely coherent streams of consciousness, which are held together, again, by the rappers’ discovery that, holy shit, words often end in similar sounds. The bitch gave me an itch. I was so mad I started to twitch. But it was fine, cuz I used my nine, then I did a line and drank some wine...
And the joke is on all of us with this cynical marshaling of music’s crudest elements, because the thing is, rap is infinitely more infectious than actual music. It’s like meth delirium as compared to an honest, post-workout endorphin high. Simply by virtue of its metronomic beat, and the regular cycling in of the same fucking instrument noises over and over, anyone who listens to a rap number for any amount of time winds up in some level of hypnosis. Then the ghetto PhD’s rhythmic, rhyming jabber is layered over the droning sound-patterns, and the hypnotized party, in his highly suggestible state, gets the sense that the cretinous nursery rhymes contain genuine intelligence, and even wisdom.
In fact, rap in particular is proof positive of Plato’s warning. That solemn old Greek would be unnerved by Elvis and the Beatles, but he would set his flame thrower to maximum and resolutely incinerate Snoop Dog and 50 Cent and even—or maybe especially—Eminem...as well as all the execs who selected and promoted these preening, prattling dirtbags and put “thug life” front and center in Western culture.
Plato’s intent, you see, was to mastermind a healthy society. His criterion for music was whether it enhanced or undermined basic sanity in the human herd. Plato wasn’t worried about every stupid asshole in creation having his say, just because the stupid asshole happened to be born with a mouth. Plato knew that if you give stupid assholes enough rope, they may eventually hang themselves, but they’ll do a lot of collateral damage in the meantime.
And if you have the situation we have with rock and roll…stupid assholes who aren’t necessarily stupid; stupid assholes who hate your civilization, and who systematically foster and spread—musically and otherwise—the worst cultural toxins…well, in that case, you’ve got problems of a sort Plato would probably want to solve with methods pioneered in the French Revolution.
As a music fan, I wanted to roll my eyes. But you make flinchingly good points. I won't stop playing the soundtrack I play for my life, but this is a funny, cogent argument...and a fantastic rant. (Big fan of a good rant)
Well spoken. I went to the desert for 40 days, years ago now, to search for something and sat there alone in the Silence. I found nothing, except the almost unendurable agony of the Nothing. When I came back though, among other startling things, the hypnotic effect of the rhythmic noise called music was naked and had lost whatever pleasant affect it used to have. It was unpleasant and grating, pop, country, rap, Mozart. It was obvious that it does exactly what you say, passes programming to the listener, but the fascinating thing to me was, and remains, that the message is not consciously intended by the musician(s) - they are unaware of it. They and their product is simply a vehicle for something, or someone else else, and that something does not have humanities best interest in mind.
But a question. Why is it that there are thousands of songs about “love” but only one welcoming one to the jungle?