Musing No. 5 - Music & Morality

So you hear alot about these people who think that musicians make too much about sex, violence, drugs, cursing, and other such things they don't like to hear about. It's corrupting our youth, yada yada yada.

Old People

I suppose the youth are very impressionable. I will give you that argument to a degree. So I recently started to think about this. Two things occurred to me that apparently don't occur to any of these people who complain.

Young People

Point 1 - All you older folk turned out pretty well. Yet, weren't Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Eagles, and many many others from your day pretty open and explicit about alot of these things? Songs like 'Hey Joe,' talked about a guy going to blow away his cheating lover. Pretty much every other Jimi song had something to do with drugs.

Hey Joe, where ya goin with that gun in your hand?

AC/DC was violent and pretty explicitly graphic on the topic of sex. By the way - that song that you all love to dance to at the 46 year old's third wedding - 'Shook me all night long' by AC/DC is about nothing but sex. And yet you still dance to it. 'Brick House' by the Commodores is a all about how a lady has perfect dimensions - and is not missed at any older dance party. Pink Floyd concerts had more drugs than a pharmacy - in the lyrics & in the live shows - especially in the live shows. And yet you all turned out ok...interesting.

Led Zeppelin not promoting sex

So it brings to bear the question: Do you just think this generation is not capable of what you did - that is, being able to listen to songs with such 'awful' content and yet still turn out ok? Half the people who were at Woodstock are now running many areas of society. This generation is not able to do that? Is the fact that a good amount of this violence in music is in rap now a factor? I don't want to bring up the race card, but it seems like it would fit nicely here as well.

The board of ING on an executive trip

I think you don't give us enough credit. You would like us to think that when you listened to the music in your time you were somehow a whole lot more innocent and didn't know what the songs were about. I don't buy that for a second - unless you're too stupid to know what the lyrics meant, and that stupidity might explain some of the economic problems at the moment in our nation.

Or maybe you would like us to think that you were a whole lot more grown-up and were thereby able to withstand the 'horrifying' nature of the songs. That may or may not be true, as we have no way of knowing, but let's face it, older people always talk about how the current young people are awful and have no respect or morals or whatever. I'm sure when I'm old I'll be saying the same thing, lol. The point is, give us some credit, or at least let us make more mistakes than you did before you judge us.

Hi, My name is Wilbur, and it's been 60 days since I've listened to sexy music...

Point 2 - Why would the music business stop making something that people keep buying? I do happen to be a small business owner, and I know that if I have something that is selling - I'm not going to stop selling it. Not unless you want to pay me more not to sell it. It's really a simple situation. As long as people keep buying it, people are going to keep making it. That's Capitalism, which ironically enough many of these hot selling songs seem to be against it. I guess Anti-Capitalist music and movies can make Anti-Capitalists some major capital (or major hypocrisy), but that's another blog altogether.

I'm Michael Moore and I hate capitalism. Pay $12 to see my movie and I will tell you why.

There's all sorts of genres people can pick from, there's plenty of Christian bands out there too, so the people who don't want to hear it - don't have to. So it's not like they are forced to buy the 'bad' stuff, they just like it. But the very idea of telling people what they are and are not allowed to buy is very much not an American ideal in the first place, that's the kind of stuff we shipped over here to avoid.


So I guess the point is, that unless you can prove to me that your music hampered your ability to own companies or lead a productive life, and ruined you as a person - or pay all the musicians more than they are making doing the 'bad' music, then you should probably shut the hell up. Put your money where your mouth is.

End of Musing No. 5
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