When nutball fundamentalist preachers called Rock-and-Roll “the devil’s music,” the world laughed at how reactionary they were, and how very unprogressive.  But since those days in the 1950s, study after study has shown that, in many ways, they understood way more about music than the world.  They understood what Plato understood, which is that A) music is powerful, and B) its messages, both in form and content, are transformative in good ways and bad.  I aint saying rock is the devil’s music, however.  I’m just saying you are what you eat, so to speak.  A new report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine says that “kids are receiving about 35 references to substance abuse for every hour of music they listen to.”

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the 279 most popular songs from 2005, based on reports from Billboard magazine, which tracks popular music. Whether a song contained a reference to drugs or alcohol varied by genre. Only 9 percent of pop songs had lyrics relating to drugs or alcohol. The number jumped to 14 percent for rock songs, 20 percent for R&B and hip-hop songs, 36 percent for country songs and 77 percent for rap songs […]

The study authors noted that music represents a pervasive source of exposure to positive images of substance use. The average adolescent is exposed to approximately 84 references to explicit substance use per day and 591 references per week, or 30,732 references per year. The average adolescent listening only to pop would be exposed to 5 references per day, whereas the average adolescent who listens just to rap would be exposed to 251 references per day.

If you listen to poorly made music all your life, you’ll grow up to believe shoddy craftsmanship is okay, and maybe even preferable.  And if you listen to as much music that celebrates depravity, in any form, the same will happen.  Where shall wisdom be found?  I hate to give up my Zeppelin.

And just when you thought it was safe to start destroying the planet, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been commissioned as an opera by La Scala in Milan, to be composed by Giorgio Battistelli.  In this imaginary epistle, Mr. Battistelli writes Mr. Gore to discuss a few ideas for the opera.

Dear Mr. Gore,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my draft of “Verità Inconveniente.” Rest assured that I and the management of La Scala are committed to a serious presentation of your scientific work. I will try to adopt some of your suggestions, but I hope you appreciate the constraints faced by the composer of an opera that is already five hours long.

I agree it would “round out the résumé” of Prince Algorino in the opening scene if he were to sing about his creation of a communications network. But the “Mio magnifico Internet” aria you propose seems to me a distraction - and frankly out of place in an 18th-century Tuscan village. I believe the peasants’ choral celebration of Prince Algorino’s wisdom suffices to establish his virtues.

And on and on.  It may be the funniest and most welcome thing I’ve read at the Times.  More like something from National Review or The Onion.

I’m all for marching bands and pep bands and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch, but do TV networks really need songs written especially for the sporting events they cover? This trend was popularized in 1989 with ABC’s “Monday Night Football” adapting Hank Williams Jr.’s “All My Rowdy Friends Are Comin’ Over Tonight” to “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night” (now on ESPN). But even before that was the late Dan Fogelberg’s “Run for the Roses” for the Kentucky Derby (a bit more subtle and better than most) and David Barrett’s “One Shining Moment,” which was first used by CBS to conclude its coverage of the men’s NCAA basketball tournament in 1987 (OK, that one means more when your team wins; otherwise, it’s just plain sappy). Then there’s, of course, the Super Bowl and its infamous halftime “concert” (though Tom Petty wasn’t half bad this year).

Lately it seems that most every televised sports event has some sort of song or music “event” attached to it. And the quality seems to be getting worse instead of better. Case in point: Fox’s “Let’s Go Racin’, Boys!” with Toby Lightman backed by Fox announcer Darrell Waltrip shouting “Boogity, Boogity, Boogity.” What’s next? “World Series Musical,” with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver “getting their heads in the game” while singing and dancing their way down the first-base line?

It used to be that music had a specific place in televised sports, as an intro or as “bumper music” while the network transitioned into or out of a commercial. One of the best of that genre, in my opinion, was the late Barry White and Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme,” which was used years ago for ABC’s golf coverage. But that was for “atmosphere,” not hype.

Are the TV sports honchos so desperate to broaden their audiences that they feel compelled to force this music on us? Aren’t the games and their players enough to capture our attention? Does TV sports really need a soundtrack? Give us the action on the playing fields, courts, and tracks, and leave the music to the music channels. But … that’s right, the music channels don’t play music any more. Oh, well.

Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Bo Diddley died of heart failure at his home in Florida today. According to his Wikipedia entry, Diddley, whose birth name was Ellas Otha Bates, had in recent years settled in the small farming community of Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he lived close to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, attended church, and prior to suffering a stroke and heart attack last year had been working on some faith-based songs.

This is not a post about country music.  This is not even a post about rap.  It’s not even about the death of the short story.  It’s about the need for authenticity in art, and how the current audiences of just about every art form are craving it.  In other words, rather than fiction, we prefer non-fiction, memoir, and biography in our books.  We want our films to be “Based on a True Story.”  And we want our rappers to actually be real gangsters, and our country music stars to actually be rednecks.

If Huckleberry Finn were released today, it’s easy to imagine the mass-market audience responding with a yawn. “Not even written by a fugitive slave.” Fiction is absent from our general interest magazines, replaced by intensely reported narrative features. The message is simple: We want it to be real.

Of course, this writer says that maybe country music is the one place where we don’t demand authenticity.

Some genres are immune from our weird and novel demands. Country, both in its classic and alternative forms, tops them: “I take the truck on into town/ And buy whatever we can’t seem to grow/ I work these hands to bleed cause I got mouths to feed/ And I got 15 dollars hid above the stove.” You don’t hear that and think: I know Ryan Adams is a wine-guzzling short guy with a lot of money, not a poor farmer.

As a writer of plays and short stories, oh, how I feel the burn of all this.  I’ve written creative nonfiction, too, but I’m afraid that if I start focusing my writing on personal essays, I’ll run out of subject matter and have to start making it up, like David Sedaris does.  What do you think?  Why do we seem to crave authenticity now more than ever?  It’s not an uncommon question.  Postmodernism is supposedly all about authenticity.  I suspect the answer is theological.

While looking through the archives of the NEH’s Humanities Magazine, I came across an interview from 1997 with music writer Richard Crawford.  A lot of confessional Evangelicals like to talk about the sad state of music these days, comparing the current radio acts with Bach, Mozart, et al.  Is that fair?  Yes, and no.  Any Bachs or Mozarts who born into late 20th and 21st century America would have too many possibilities with which to contend. 

If Mozart had been born in 1950s America rather than 1750s Austria, whatever he would be doing, the chances of his work encompassing musical possibilities as it did in his own day would be pretty small. There’s just so much now that one must embrace.

They’d likely want to use more than pianos and conventional orchestras.  They’d want to use any and all musical devices to help them create an original sound.  Crawford says that if American music has a legacy, this is it: the bringing together of so many sounds, and the widening (democratizing, even) of tastes.

We have more and more music in the present that we have to try to come to terms with. Rather than pointing to a work or a composer or a genre, I would turn it back on the listener and say that maybe the widening of musicians’ and listeners’ range will be our age’s legacy. It used to be that, if you like this kind of music, then you obviously don’t like that kind of music. We’ve got more and more people coming into the field of music now who like jazz and rock and roll and are fluent in them and are classical composers and play banjo and on and on. They understand and are intimate with a wide range of different musical types. That kind of musical responsiveness may well be one of the legacies of our age.

Based on what I’ve heard from all of you, the same is true.  Ask anybody today what they like, and they say, “I like it all.  Except _______.”  So let’s try a more interesting question.  Tell us a kind of music you really like, but an artist within that genre or style that you really don’t like.  Here are a couple of mine:

I REALLY like combo and bebop jazz, but I really DON’T like anything by Miles Davis after 1965.

I REALLY like early rock-and-roll, but I really DON’T like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles.

I REALLY like Americana and bluegrass, but I really DON’T like Nancy Griffith or Emmylou Harris.

Now you.

This is a post about movies and music.  The movie is The Singing Revolution, a documentary about how the people of Estonia won their independence by, well, singing.  A press release about the film says it “tells the extraordinary story of the non-violent path Estonia took to free itself from Soviet occupation.”  Watch a trailer for The Singing Revolution here.  Read a review here.

Songs are a tremendous and integral piece of just about every political movement, from Plato’s time (he spoke once about how the man who controls the music is the man who controls the people) to the French Revolution (”The Marseillaise”) to the Civil Rights Movement (”We Shall Overcome”) to the Two-Headed Clinton Monster (”Don’t Stop”).

All this got me to thinking about how powerful and visceral and deep and persuasive music can be, which got me to thinking about worship, and how just about no church in the world can strike a healthy balance between emotional power and theological power.  A church always seems to slide, quite far, one way or the other.  Is there a solution?  Discuss.

Many of you know that, three months ago, the band Radiohead released an album as a digital download, inviting fans to pay for it whatever they wanted to pay.  The online digital release was three months in advance of the hard copy album launch, and everybody said, “Okay, Radiohead, you proved your point and gave the music away.  But nobody’s going to buy your actual album when it comes out in stores and people have to pay for it.  And then you’ll be poor and miserable.”  But people are paying for it.

In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,” the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.

In other words, Radiohead gave the record away online, but people were still willing to buy an actual hard copy of the album in the store, too (and not just people without CD-burning capability).  Interesting.

So, for discussion: I used to be severely against downloading and file-sharing and anything that seemed to be stealing intellectual content, but those were in my heady days of studying philosophy as an undergraduate, when I was a self-righteous moral bandit, trolling the crises of culture to point to how someone was ruining Western Civilization.  Back in the 1990s, the idea of illegal downloading seemed more wrong than it is now.  Why is that?  And I think it’s not just me. 

Michael Jackson’s Thriller is 25 years old this month, and - if you aren’t embarrassed to expose your misguided roots in the popular music of the 1980s - you may appreciate this encomium to what this writer calls “the most significant event in popular-music history in the past quarter-century.”  Actually, whether you love or hate American culture, you will have to reckon Thriller in your inventory of everything that’s gone right/wrong with the world in the last 25 years.

Here’s a real, live ex-Hippie who’s eating her words, and her ideas about music: “I never thought I’d be ranting over the music and youth of today, much less championing the cause of polite society. But I never thought I’d be a parent either.”  It turns out that high school dances aren’t what they used to be.  Maybe this is just another Good-old-days article, and maybe that’s okay.