You can't avoid the stuff

My morning surf led me to a Mark Steyn New Criterion piece from 2007 that I had lost track of and always wanted to find again.  (Link actually takes you to a Free Republic reprint.  Original article didn't seem to want to come up.) The whole thing is well worth your time, but I want to draw your attention to a section in which he talks about the ubiquity of rock music in our postmodern daily life.  A few sentences after discussing what Allan Bloom had to say about pop music in The Closing of the American Mind, he says this (my emphasis added):

But Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

This is what makes the way I teach rock history so difficult.  Aside from the occasional student who is in my age range, the classes have no point of reference by which to relate to a phenomenon such as the Ed Sullivan show, the Sunday night ritual from 1948 to 1971 in which the American family - mom, dad, kids and Fido - would do the supper dishes and then gather in front of the Zenith or the Sylvania and collectively fix their eyes on an hour of true variety - acrobats, stand-up comics, Broadway show casts, magicians, and, yes, a weekly rock and roll act.  Every aspect of the entire scenario - a family collectively availing itself of an hour of entertainment, the entertainment being devoid of anything lewd or violent, the breadth of the variety being presented - has disappeared as even a faint vestige of the way we have lived for decades.

One example of what Steyn is talking about that I have found noteworthy is the way loud, harsh rock music is used to sell classy automobiles.  There was a time when conveying status meant showing a tall, well-groomed man in a tuxedo taking the keys to his Cadillac from a valet and opening the door for his evening-gown-clad date, while lush strings provided the background music.

I'm really glad I found this article.  I may try to find a way to work it into my course material toward the end of the semester, when I invite the class to take a big-picture look at the music's cultural impact.