Rock & Roll - the Dangerous Music!

As hard as it is to believe in these modern times,
rock and roll music was once thought to be
a very dangerous thing!

another lost generation...oh my!

Just as the blues was known to many as "the Devil's music",
so too its' bastard child rock and roll was seen as the soundtrack
of a generation racing down the highway to Hell.

i would love to be in a band called "the Goofers"

Those "jungle" rhythms and the caterwauling vocalizations
of hormonally-challenged, anti-social "singers" were widely
believed to have the power to make good girls go bad
and bad boys go crazy.

Fifty years later, the idea that music might have that kind
of power over the hearts and minds of any given "lost generation"
seems quaint... naive.
Silly, even.

Nonetheless, this notion of dangerous music would last
for decades - from rock'n'roll in the fifties all the way
to punk and rap in the early eighties - before fading
further and further away.

Nowadays, of course, we know better.

Nowadays, we know that rock'n'roll is actually
about as dangerous as ...

But there are a few people still clinging to the belief
that the songs of those "dangerous decades"
are still charged with a mystical power.

Hard-core music consumers and advertising executives.

For hard-core music consumers, there are songs
that do have a mystical power because they are
charged with memories of times and places and
most especially people that were important to them.

The same can be said for all of the other genres
of music created for the young,
and the young at heart.

If rap or metal or dub-step or any of the many
other modern genres of music have any power at all now,
it is to wrap (YOUR PRODUCT HERE)
in a thin veneer of cool.

For fifteen or even thirty seconds, (YOUR PRODUCT HERE)
can bask in the reflected glory of a popular song... 

Thus it is that these days, Canned Heat is selling lunch meat.
Jimi Hendrix' version of the Star Spangled Banner pimps
for cel phones and Alice Cooper's School's Out
is whoring for Staple's "Back to School" sale.

Fuck meaning.

Fuck art.

Let's pay to watch other people dance.

But at the same time, let's consider this le carte blanche
to download whatever, whenever as far as popular tunes go...

Because if these greasy pimps can take anything
that might have had some meaning, maybe even
some claim to Art and wrap it around a baby's ass,
or a groovy new floor mopping system or a cel phone
or whatever cheap cheesy bauble they're flogging
this week, then any and all discussions about the "value"
of this music are now rendered nul and void.

Off the table.

Over.

Kaput.



































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