What’s contemporary Top 40 music like? It isn’t a question I would have been inclined to ask were I not forced by my cable company to go initially to that Sirius channel before tuning to soft rock, country, or classical offerings. What caught my ear, however, during those brief exposure episodes was the sameness of the bland sounds emitted before I switched to more familiar styles. Eventually I decided to endure several consecutive Top 40 Sirius songs to see if my random encounters were representative, and lo and behold, they were!
Typically the artist’s voice is only slightly more prominent than
background synthesizer music. To employ
a visual analogy, that background sound would be captured by a palette of undifferentiated
yellowish browns. Rarely does one hear
distinctive musical instruments that were integral components of most musical
offerings just a few decades ago. Occasionally
uninspiring piano and drum accompaniments are discernible, but there’s nothing
like Mick Fleetwood’s drums or the brassy excellence of Chicago.
The musical scores in Top 40 are also hugely repetitive and generally
possess all the range and complexity of bad elevator music—characteristics
shared by the vocalists who thankfully rush through their lyrics a la Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl
halftime fiasco. This defect is occasionally
remedied for teenage fans and maturity-stunted adults by videos that supply the often inaudible
wording. Failing that musical patch,
lyrics are always accessible on the net.
Even the songs of Taylor Swift are, at best, incremental improvements
on the above descriptions. A columnist
for the UK Times, Rod Liddle, had
the courage to label Swift a “caterwauling blonde moppet” who produces “banal
and life-sapping sub-Kardashian electropop drivel,” and for his literary
trouble received a restraining order from the popstress’s lawyers. Readers can judge for themselves the accuracy
of Liddle’s review based on this hit romantically titled “Slut.”
The moral tenor of contemporary Top 40 offerings, not surprisingly,
coincides with the songs’ lack of acoustical virtuosity. A piece that accurately reflects that
congruence is innocently titled “Diet Pepsi” by a singer named Addison Rue. The video consists of a series of bra and
panties erotic poses in the front and back seat of a ’65 Mustang driven by a
James Dean type. A somewhat rappish
singer named Lola Young who climbed to number one on several Euro-charts takes
care of the narcissistic, f-bomb, parent-trashing spectrum with “Messy.”
The moral vacuity, of course, isn’t limited to hetero-normatives as
this headline explains: “Lesbian
viral sensation Gigi Perez has admitted that her queer anthem ‘Sailor Song’
changed her life.” The full lyrics are
linked here and include these
lines addressed to her same-sex object of desire: “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that
you’re my savior” plus “And when we’re getting dirty, I forget all that is
wrong.”
I’m well aware that pop and rap songs largely aimed at kids from 9 to
19 aren’t a space to consult for uplifting moral sentiment, but nowadays the
degrading, self-centered undertow has become a lyrical and visual squalor that’s
even reflected in a poverty of musical excellence. Whereas post-WWI Dadaism was a self-conscious
mocking of established standards, today’s pop music represents, I think, a
largely unconscious assumption of the id-generated desires promulgated
preeminently in Hollywood. Although these
themes have been present in pop music for decades (most revoltingly in Madonna’s
sacrilegious video “Like a Prayer”) today’s pop music, with MTV-spawned visuals, is
saturated with the basest lyrics that seldom reach beyond the singer’s primal
desires--no more tying ribbons around old oak trees or occasionally teaching
the world to sing in perfect harmony.
Does all this attention to Top 40 music really matter? I’m afraid it does. Recently Douglas Murray at an Alliance for Responsible Citizenship meeting
mentioned a politician who proudly noted how the extraordinary events of
October 7 brought forth extraordinary young people ready to meet that crisis. Murray
observed that her statement needed an important adjustment, namely that it
isn’t just extraordinary events that throw up extraordinary youths, instead “it’s
extraordinary events when they come up against people who have been
extraordinarily well cultured” (minute 7).
Is it possible that a society that countenances, praises, or ignores Top
40 garbage like the aforementioned can produce a sufficient number of
extraordinary youths to meet future crises? Combine those toxic sounds and images with
their cinematic cousins and Americans face a Herculean stable clean-up task. It is encouraging that military recruitment
spiked significantly following President Trump’s election, but the power of the
“resistance” baked deep in our culture is akin to a cancer slowly spreading its
tentacles into a body’s vital organs. It’s
a disease that won’t be eliminated by four years of political therapy. A more radical intervention will be required,
the prerequisite to which is acknowledging the mortal danger itself.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living
in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to
Say?" is also available on Kindle
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