Music, Emotion and Modern Life

I begin my lonely journey by asking indulgence in my choice to address The Closing of the American Mind out of sequence. I will first write about Bloom’s chapter on music. I do this mainly out of sentimentality; my relationships to music as a child and student bear a startling resemblance to the relationships he describes in that chapter. While persuaded by the force of his arguments in the preceding sections, it was not until reading his take on music that I realized I was merely one victim in the tragedy of thousands Bloom describes. Though possessing an abundance of tragic flaws, I was not the hero of my own story as I had previously believed. Indeed, Bloom clearly identifies the forces within music, popular culture and education that willfully abet such self-regard.


Before any who read this begin picking me (unfairly) and Bloom (unwisely) apart with the jagged tools of rock-criticism, let me be perfectly clear: I am not going to present a taxonomy of bands and genres; I am not going to describe bands or songs in terms of the aesthetics they promote or emotions they evoke. My desire is not to discuss the bric-a-brac of rock music; I have absolutely no interest in picking apart rock minutiae or debating the merits of Dinosaur Jr. versus fIREHOSE. As one who blasted his ear drums out of his own skull with headphones, at live concerts and in amateur bands, I know full well that rock neither demands nor deserves a point-by-point refutation of its positive characteristics. The essence of rock music is its appeal to emotion. This appeal comes first from the mystery of the record collection of an older sibling, parent or friend. It is superficial and partially hidden, as an exotic revolutionary might be hidden within the crowded public square. However, the revolutionary’s specialty is not in the subtle exposition of ideas, nor in carefully considered dialectic. His specialty is guerilla assault. I experienced this emotional assault first hand, much as a kidnap victim experiences a burlap sack over the head before being beaten and thrown into a speeding van. Modern culture, as Bloom notes, does not prepare the victim for assault; children do not carry with them coded instructions for escape. Parents and teachers are powerless in negotiating release; in most cases they believe such negotiation a potentially damaging challenge to the child’s self-esteem, and do nothing. The child becomes an adult in captivity. The kidnap victim works through the stages of the Stockholm syndrome with his abductors, until he joins their ranks and joyfully helps take new abductees.


I take this approach because I see the net effect of pop-culture on my life as negative. Rock and roll may help one to cope with modern life, but it cannot tell one how to live it. And that is where I found myself before picking up The Closing: I fashioned a grab-bag philosophy based on the spectrum of emotions evoked by rock and roll. I mistook this for real understanding, when it was simply coping. Dealing with spikes of anger or troughs of sadness through rock music is cathartic, but it promotes a type of introspection incapable of finding answers to the whys of anger or sadness. Catharsis is beneficial in alleviating immediate emotional pain but it has nothing to offer once the pain is gone.