Music is Mother's Milk for Today's Youth
Published in Marietta Daily Journal Aug. 2, 2015
“I
am Music, I Write the Songs.” So crooned singer Barry Manilow
throughout the seventies and well into the present decade. Manilow’s #1 hit and Grammy Song of the Year
for 1975 was written by Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys. When Manilow expressed fear that the word “I”
would make both writer and singer appear
to be egomaniacs, Johnston explained that “I” referred to God and/or the
creative spirit that indwells all of us.
Johnston’s thinking about music
wasn’t too far from that of British essayist Thomas Carlyle: “Let me have the
nation’s music and I care not who makes her laws.” That strong statement was written long before
i-tunes, i-pods and free music websites.
In fact Carlyle wrote it in the late 19th century.
Was Carlyle right? Is music that powerful? I don’t doubt that it
is. Even if our national anthem is virtually un-singable, we still know how
“God Bless America” can make us feel. Even
if we don’t particularly like music, there is still probably a song of some
stripe somewhere that speaks to us no matter how deeply in our past it may be
buried.
If Carlyle’s assessment of music’s
power in the late 19th century is correct, how much more pronounced
and ever present is music today? Whether
blaring from the car sitting beside us at a red light or grating our ears while
we are on hold on the telephone, music is inescapable.
The moral relativism in which the
western world is now wallowing has certainly reached our music. Decades ago Johnny Cash sang the words, “The
lonely voice of youth cries, “What is truth?’ ” Today adults as well seem to have doubts
about even the existence of truth. Why
else are we hearing the expressions, “my truth” and “your truth”? Those who use such expressions apparently
believe in no truth. Music is now
reflecting this loss of meaning. Tune in
to your local hard rock radio station or head to Phillips Arena if you want to
check out musical nihilism.
One who doesn’t think music
collectively shapes us should consider the following questions. Why do we have military bands? What is it about the very nature of music
that bolstered plantation slaves through their misery? How effective were the mournful but musical
words “We Shall Overcome” to the civil rights movement or the plaintive song
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone” to the war protest movement of the
sixties? Why, for decades, was the Grand
Ole Opry the weekly refuge of so many poor, Southern people? How is it that highly poetic hymns from 18th
century England could cradle and buoy evangelical Christianity across an ocean
and sustain it in North America for several centuries?
If nothing else, these questions
confirm Plato’s claim that music is far more than pleasure and recreation. It is a tool that can inspire a revolution,
encourage an individual and re-ignite a loveless marriage. It is also a drug
that can induce peacefulness or throw off restraint and self-control.
Everything has a history and music
has a rich one. Elvis Presley may have revolutionized
rhythm and added stage antics, but at least we could still understand his
words. Not so after rock ‘n’ roll became
electrified. 50 years ago on July 25th
it was folk singer Bob Dylan who started all the noise that drove many a parent
crazy. This past week most of the
nation’s newspapers have chronicled how Dylan “went electric” by forsaking his
Peter, Paul and Mary folk sound and strapping on a Fender Stratocaster electric
guitar.
The place was Newport, Rhode
Island. The event was the Newport Folk
Festival. But what Dylan gave his
audience wasn’t folk music or even the current rock ‘n’ roll. Instead he birthed the deafening volume and
the distorted sounds that characterize rock music today.
Schools and many churches long ago
adopted the distorted sounds that Dylan birthed. Schools pipe it in while students eat in the
cafeteria and while basketball teams are taking a time out. Cafeteria workers
and parents in the gymnasium can only cringe because after all, “it’s for the
kids.”
As for the churches, their
abandonment of hymns for the distorted sounds of post-Dylan rock is the
greatest sin of the church since the Inquisition. Electrification has just about choked out
“the still small voice.” At church,
Martin Luther and Charles Wesley are so yesterday. At school, the same is true of Mendelssohn,
Handel and Tchaikovsky. Instead of
cultivating and forming our youth’s tastes we have adopted their tastes. Now all of us are forever young.
Carlyle got it right. And Barry Manilow is probably more correct
than he realizes. Music is the mother’s
milk of youth today. Its power far
outstrips parental influence.
Roger
Hines
7/29/15
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