Some dare call it music - modern rock music as exemplified by MTV's awards show spectacular in early September 1994 - On The Right

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The New York Times, making the case for permitting TV satellite dishes in China, observes that America,s most potent export is, was, and will always be its popular culture., And our biggest export isn't movies, it is rock music.

Concerning what young people do, it isn't a bad rule to draw the curtain, because the pains of pubescence are better unobserved. But anything that leaves scars demands scrutiny. And the MTV spectacular last week establishes that grown people are still in the coils of rock music.

Mostly the audience was young and very young people, but their elders were sprinkled about the audience. And what was arresting was the general numbness of the American cultural monitors. Their helplessness is testimony not to what the children have done to themselves, but to what they have done to us. Ifs one thing for a 16-year-old girl to weep and sob and swear she will never speak to her mother again because Mom told her to say good-night to Dick at midnight and go to bed. Another if that girl, ten years later, has not developed emotional control beyond where it was when she was an adolescent.

Now the master of ceremonies of the MTV feature wasn't herself an adolescent, at least not biologically. Indeed "Roseanne" announced herself as the oldest host ever to serve at the annual celebration. Her appearance was in itself in the nature of an affront. If you have two teeth missing and you are in show business, either you get two false teeth or else you maneuver to keep your mouth closed. Ms. Roseanne did the opposite. Her upper legs would support an elephant. She might easily have shadowed them by wearing a skirt that extended down to a normal level, but no. Her skirt was that of a collegiate cheerleader. Her voice was perfectly harmonious with the evenings program, i.e., lacking in music. Her lines, one has to hope, were designed as barracks teenage. Yet the camera caught men and women of middle age guffawing. For instance, at . . . Which one of you b-----s" - directed at the chorus line - "is sleeping with my ex?" The trained chorus replies, "Who isn't?" Or if you insist on a funnier line, "I have had so much plastic surgery if I have one more thing done they're going to throw in a free a--." When what is needed is another tongue.

But the house had yet to come down in convulsive laughter, which was evoked by, "People ask me, am I upset by my divorce? I am only upset that I am not a widow." But she checked the roars because she had a concluding line in her roll. "I'll never marry again. Why buy the bull when you can sit on the horns for free?"

If you can parse that, you are fluent in rock literature. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard pronounced rock music intolerable. Allan Bloom wouldnt have disagreed, but suggested the futility of protesting it on the grounds that it is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breathe." Professor Bloom was even fatalistic about the failure of a countermovement." ... rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire - not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, ... everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.,

What are the permanent scars? A life-long toleration for such as Roseanne, who doesn't even sing? Mr. Bloom observed that those of his students who were once on drugs and have liberated themselves are nevertheless encumbered by sobriety. They "find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. It is as though the color has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white."

In quiet corners of civilization one dares express ccncern for what MTV is, but there is scant attention to what it does. This is what liberal education is meant to show [the students]. But as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf." It required a singular deafness, visual and moral, to find entertainment in the MTV spectacular. (Universal Press Syndicate)