I love rock music as much as anyone, and like many I've felt that Allan Bloom did more to reveal himself as a curmudgeon than to offer meaningful analysis when he wrote so scathingly about the cultural erosions caused by rock and roll. Still, it's a real pleasure, and a good provocation, to see Mark Steyn elucidate that aspect of Bloom's book. The whole article is worth reading, in the snowballingly intelligent manner that Steyn's articles are typically worth reading. But here's a good excerpt to get you going:

Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society's incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what's happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. "There is," writes the author, "one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it's not about culture vs. "counter-culture" but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It's all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It's the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally "valid," equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it's proved, most exhaustively, in music.

Recently, I was sent a clipping from Newsweek's 1964 cover story on the arrival in America of the Beatles:

Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.

There was nothing unusual about those sentiments in 1964. As Bryce Zadel of the Instant History website put it, "The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn't just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty." Including some quite cool people over twenty. That same year, in the film of Goldfinger, James Bond compares drinking unchilled champagne to listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.

Nobody at Newsweek would be so confidently dismissive of any pop culture figure on the way up today. Compare and contrast that analysis with this MTV show more or less exactly forty years later--2004. The interviewer asks his guest: "Well, we know that you were into rock and roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?"
And the guest--presidential candidate John Kerry--replied: "Oh sure. I follow and I'm interested. I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important. I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life."

Really? John Kerry is "fascinated" by rap and "listening" to hip-hop? Think if you broke into the Kerry household and riffled through John and Teresa's CD collection you'd find a single rap album? I didn't mind Senator Kerry when he was being mocked as a flip-flopper, but I find him even less plausible as America's first flip-flopper hip-hopper. You can smell the fear in his answer.

And consider his recitation of rap's virtues: theres "a lot of anger, a lot of social energy ... it's a reflection of the street." That's something else that happens in a relativist culture. First, if Tupac Shakur is just as good as Milton, then everybody drops Milton. Then comes the second stage: once Milton's dropped, and Bach and Keats and Mozart, you no longer have a very clear idea of who exactly Tupac Shakur is meant to be as good as. It's not comparative anymore: he's all there is. The argument is that, oh, well, you uptight squares are always objecting to stuff: you thought Sinatra exciting bobbysoxers was dangerous, and the Viennese waltz was the mating dance of a hypersexualized culture. No. Benny Goodman, noted by Bloom, was a huge pop star but he could play the Mozart clarinet concerto. Popular culture used to be very at ease with the inheritance of the past. One of the trends of the last forty years is not just the vanishing of "high culture" but of low-culture jokes about high culture--the variety-show sketches in which Schubert's mates urge him to come down the pub with him and he says "No, I've got to stay in and finish my symphony." It assumes a residual familiarity--from some half-recalled school lesson--with a bloke called Schubert who wrote an "Unfinished Symphony."

Likewise, P. G. Wodehouse is stuffed with literary and classical and Biblical allusions: "He conveyed to young Mr. Rastall-Retford the impression that, in the dear old 'Varsity days, they had shared each other's joys and sorrows, and, generally, had made Damon and Pythias look like a pair of cross-talk knockabouts at one of the rowdier music-halls." Wodehouse assumes you know who Damon and Pythias are: They were best pals back in the fourth century BC. Ran into a spot of bother with Dionysius of Syracuse. You could junk Damon and Pythias and replace them with Damon and Affleck--Matt Damon and Ben Affleck: They're also best pals, they make movies together. But eventually you dwindle down to a present-tense culture unable to refer to anything beyond itself. You can make the argument that, say, Jerome Kern, the first great Broadway composer of the twentieth century, is at his best as harmonically sophisticated as Schubert. But to do that you would first have to know something about Schubert. I think it's harder to make the claim to harmonic sophistication in the Beatles, but William Mann, the music critic of The Times of London, gave it a go in 1963, comparing the Aeolian cadence in "Not A Second Time" with the end of Mahler's "Song of the Earth." But, as I said, to do that you have to know about Mahler.