From tonysounds@yahoo.com Tue Feb 10 05:12:52 2004
Subject:OT was Grammys...change of direction? now "sign o the times"

I hear what you're saying Jake, but the bottom line is art is a reflection of life. And whether you like the art or not, or pop culture as it were, it is an indicator of our times. Sex is used to sell everything from toothpaste to motor oil. We rate movies not on their quality, or their depth, but on how much skin is shown. Sex has become cheap, or at least out in the open; for all we know, our children may have a better grip on sexuality and morals than we did...repression never did anything positive for anyone; the Prohibition proved that.

And really, all this hooplah about Janet's breast or nipple, or whatever: please, we need to reign it back in. Since when is a momentary glimpse of a beautiful woman's anatomy more damaging to our children than watching 3 hours of big, steroided grown men bashing the living shit out of each other intentionally for the sole purpose of pushing a dead pig's skin to one end of a field or another??? Get a grip. The fact that everyone is so up in arms about it betrays our values. Violence is ok, but sex is not??? I'd rather my kids get a 2 minute glimpse of a naked Janet Jackson then 2 minutes of slo-mo replay. We can shoot people on television, have cop shows about child abuse, spousal abuse, sexual predators and miscreants, violent crime and murder, but let's filter the sex out of it. (shaking head)

And don't forget, rock and roll...hell all music for that matter, is meant to shock and distance itself from its previous generation. Actually, I think the same could be said of all art, literature, painting, architecture....Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Lenny Bruce, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon...all were thought to be too sexual or too out there for our children, and every one of them is looked at as an icon at this point, as a milestone in their chosen field. If this stuff didn't piss us off, it wouldnt be serving its purpose....as much as I don't like rap in general, like punk music, I still have found some of it to be quite valid and very musical (Ice Cube/Dre/Eminem as examples, JayZ as well).

And as long as I've drifted off-topic, and in the middle of one my rants (assuming you're even still reading this!), I look at rap like this: the boundary-pushing genre in music is rap. It reflects what's going on in our society, as well as in music. The trend has been to break things down, pushing back towards minimalism (except as consumers...maybe thats why art has been pushing the other direction). And rap is the extreme end of that. While I'm a huge fan of progressive rock, the post-punk world has pushed to a reversal of all of that....reduction in harmony, and reduction in melody. The 70s were the era of technical prowess....prog rock, jazz ,jazz fusion: the more notes the better, the denser the chord clusters the better, the bigger the bands the better. And to zoom out a bit, since the turn of the century, music had been getting more involved, evolving from dixieland to jazz, field hollers to blues, blues to rock, rock to fusion. And now, things are cycling back, and
while the melodies are being pushed to the back, the rhythms are now what are being focused on. And you won't find a more rhythm-oriented music than rap. Oftentimes featuring little more than the rhythms, rap puts the focus back on the important thing in art: communication. The sad thing is, what's being communicated is little more than garbage, but there are a few artists who do break through with something that is valid, even if it's just a glimpse of their societal repression and oppression (Ice Cube) or the mental states of youth at large -apathy and abandonment (Eminem).
And that is art's job: to act as a mirror and show wha'ts going on around us.

T

If that's just one more
example of where pop music's going - I was pretty open-minded; but not only is this crap
disgusting, it downgrades all the music that goes along for the
ride.

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