From Fox News: Rock musicians are upset that the military is using their music to break terrorists. I'm going to suspend my attempt at making what I write in this blog less opinionated and abrasive than what I write at RWST, only because these lame musicians are proving a few points for me all while showing just how self-absorbed they are. For your information, rock-dudes, the reasons the military blast terrorists with rock and roll and teenagers listen to rock and roll are the same:
"It sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you're in an environment like that."
Kids blast their eardrums out to rock and roll in order to disengage from reality and immerse themselves in a world utterly different from and indifferent to the workaday parents-teachers-homework-rules-clique life they feel forced to live. Rock and roll separates the kids from everything they feel oppresses them. That's the fun and rebellious side of it that fools like Tom Morello want everyone to focus on. They don't want people to realize that what they produce is well suited to oppression itself, and their unwillingness to accept the strong correlation between ripping kids away from reality and breaking the wills of prisoners of war just betrays their cataclysmic self-absorption. Don't they know that all kids want to do is crowd their heads with Tom Morello's ideas about reality? Can he be so self-righteous as to pretend he isn't taking advantage of that desire?
Rock musicians live inside a fantasy world of their own creation from which they perpetually curl their forefingers towards the young and uninitiated. I'm okay with that; let them. Like anything else in life, it is the individual's job to gird himself against cloying worldly influences. Parents have to understand this and give their children the intellectual and spiritual tools to pick through reality's trash heap. Morello doesn’t believe those tools should exist; or rather, he believes his trash is the same as Brahms’, Mozart’s, or Frank Sinatra’s, and should be guarded from enterprising military interrogators.
Levels of ignorance and self-regard like this are the result of a life lived within the amplified, overdriven world of popular rock culture. It amazes me to no end that a guy who made his living standing in front of twenty-foot high walls of amplifiers, blasting thousands of people into deafness with emissions from his inflamed ego, would never consider those emissions liable to be used for torture. Does it upset him artistically? Is that it?
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