1.- This was my first "real" paper that I ever wrote. I never had to write anything in highschool (shh), so be merciful please!
2.- I don't think that all rock music nessecarily harms the soul. Yes, there are Christian rock groups that bring many people closer (or even just) to Christ. BUT this is taking the original intent of rock music out of it. It's adding stuff to it that wasn't there. I don't really think anyone can argue that the point of rock music was to train the soul to leash its passions; in fact, I think you have to argue the quite the opposite is true: its original intent was to convince people that they needed to unleash those passions. Putting a Christian message to rock music does- as the person I was talking to (I think) said, though talking about something else- take those passions and show that they need to be ordered and that they are there. But that was not the original intent of rock music and I don't really know if it's 100% true rock at that point.
3.-Even though it was a kind of debate format, I'm really not interested in a debate. I'll read something from the other side, but I'm not putting this out here to start a debate, because I seriously doubt that I could handle that. I've got way too much other stuff to deal with right now.
Like class work which I should be doing doing right now.
I noticed the other day whileI was reading Orthodoxy that I write a lot like Chesterton (and by that, I only mean that I use a lot of parentheticals...) :P
That said, enjoy. Here ya go.
In the chapter of The Closing of the American Mind entitled “Music,” Allan Bloom describes the relationship between music (especially rock music) and the human soul. Bloom suggests that music is what cultivates the soul and either allows it to grow or hampers its growth. Music and the lyrics that accompany it affect a person more than just temporarily and outwardly; its affects can be lasting and deeply imprinted on a soul. Rock music does not allow the soul to grow like it is supposed to; rock music ‘stunts’ the soul’s growth or deforms it.
Music is more than just sound that makes a person feel better; “[m]usic is the medium of the human soul” (Bloom 71). When Thomas Jefferson could not come up with the right words for parts of the Declaration of Independence, he played his violin and was able to express his thoughts (O’Donnell, musicpower.com). Music even affects non-humans. Plants have been shown to respond to music. The same types of seeds were grown in identical environments but in one, classical music was played and in the other, rock music was played. The plants that were exposed to classical music grew and flourished but the ones exposed to rock music withered and died. This reaction can be compared to what happens when a person constantly listens to rock music.
Music does not need lyrics to make an impression upon a person. The rhythm of the music is enough for the meaning to be conveyed. The lyrics of songs are influenced by the beat and rhythm of the music. “Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and passions it expresses” (Bloom 71). If someone hears a sad song, he can tell it is a sad song without having heard the lyrics.
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman statesman in the fifth century said “Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired.” This statement is especially true today but with an entirely new significance. Anywhere at anytime music is accessible: in houses, in cars, airplanes, and on the street (Bloom 68). One can access any music that he wants to hear from a computer and even a mobile telephone. This is why Allan Bloom says: “[t]his is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it” (68).
Since music is linked so closely to the soul, it is one of the things that most affect a person’s education. Education is defined as “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life” (dictionary.com). Bloom says: “Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions- not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy- but forming and informing them as an art” (71). No other music has formed the souls of so many young people as rock music has. Children naturally imitate what they are told is good. If children listen to rock music, it is only natural that they would imitate what the lyrics praise as good: sex, drugs, rebellion, selfishness, and violence. One would not give an elementary school child a college level test. Why would anyone present to children something that they are not mature enough to understand? Rock music does exactly that:
It acknowledges the first emanations of children’s emerging
sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and
legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully
tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real
thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the
public authority of the entertainment industry, everything
that their parents always used to tell them they had to wait
for until they grew up and would understand later. (Bloom 73)
Just as a baby will get sick if it is fed solid food too soon, the soul will be perverted if it is fed the “solid food” that rock music is. A ten year old is not mature enough to constantly listen to songs like Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” or Green Day’s “86” without being affected by the messages of sex and violence. “This is the significance of rock music….it has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions” (Bloom 73). Lots of young people think that what was considered moral and right fifty years ago (no pre-marital sex, non-violence, man and woman marriages) is now old just fashioned and backward because no one has taught them otherwise.
Bloom says “The first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life” (79). Rock music deprives the young of naturally discovering the world and all its beauty. It shows it to them in an almost mutilated fashion and tells them that it is the best, most beautiful, and most fulfilling thing before they are ready to know completely. If an athlete is not physically ready for an activity and tries to accomplish it too early, his energy is going to be spent and he could possibly hurt himself. The same thing happens to the soul. If a person is too premature for something and is exposed to or experiences it anyway, his energy will be spent and he will very possibly be emotionally hurt, sometimes without ever knowing that he is hurt or at least not knowing why he is hurting. Because it exposes the soul too early to things that should withheld from it, rock exhausts the energy of young people and does not allow the soul to grow; rock corrupts the soul. (80)
The mass perversion of a society by music can be seen even more clearly today than when Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind. The generation that Bloom talks about are now adults. Bloom said that “the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath.…But this life is as empty and as false as the one they left behind,” (Bloom 81). This is evident in the increase of divorces, sexual chaos, and general decline of society since rock music became the music of the people, especially young people.
Children are now being indoctrinated by rock music instead of being educated by parents and teachers and now they do not know how to think. Rock singers tell children and teenagers things about the world that aren’t necessarily true or they portray one way of looking at something as the only way to look at it and teenagers and children accept this without ever even questioning why they should believe such ideas are true. Young people no longer want to search to find the right answers; they have the answers handed to them through their music.
Plato argues that if you listen to decent music, then your soul will train your body to do decent things. It would seem that the opposite is also true. If you only listen to music that is not decent, then your soul will not, indeed, cannot train your body to do decent things. Most rock music does not exemplify decent things. It is no surprise, then that younger people, who are almost constantly immersed in rock music (and other genres like it) do not know decent things. Rock music does not supply the soul with the means to know decency; it denies decency and things that are good and replaces them with sex, drugs, and violence. Children need to be taught by someone who can explain without harming, express without violence, and love without selfishness. Rock music is not this teacher.
