Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s performance during the MTV-produced Super Bowl halftime show has reignited America’s musical culture war. This moral conflict had been dormant since issues of terror and security, war and peace, drove it from the forefront of public concerns; but its reemergence required only the conjunction of some sense of a return to normalcy and a sufficiently asinine action by a sufficiently successful performer–which is to say that its reemergence was inevitable. We are therefore confronted again with the question whether some pop music degrades our culture by deforming the character of the young people who consume it. Those interested in this important question owe Jackson and Timberlake some thanks for reopening the subject.
The musical culture war involves not just disagreement but mutual suspicions of bad motives. Entertainment elites and cultural liberals think that moral traditionalists, while claiming to care about the character of the young, are animated in fact by a small-minded desire to impose their tastes on others. Traditionalists, for their part, think that pop entertainers, while claiming to stand for the liberation of the young from repressive social authority, really seek only to exploit the most powerful–and dangerous–desires of youth for the sake of their own fame and wealth.
The Jackson-Timberlake incident seems to clarify this dispute in a way that is not particularly helpful to such entertainers and their defenders. For can anyone doubt that the breast-baring finale was anything but a vulgar publicity stunt, even if–as the perpetrators claim, citing a “wardrobe malfunction”–their aim was not complete exposure? Of course, these “artists” might respond that their publicity seeking did not, by their own standards, violate any moral norms. After all, it is evident that the entertainment industry does not hold to the same canons of sexual propriety as its traditionalist critics. The act is undeniably unprincipled, however, from the standpoint of the morality to which many members of the entertainment elite parade their adherence–a morality of sensitivity to America’s regrettable history of inequality and exploitation. In their lust to make headlines, it apparently never occurred to these people to wonder, or perhaps to care, how it would look, in light of that history and the still-sensitive wounds arising from it, to depict a white man forcibly tearing the clothes off a black woman.
The incident also clarifies the nature of what the entertainment industry has to offer our culture–and, again, in a way that is disadvantageous to its apologists. For the stunt, as well as the whole song and indeed the entire halftime show, is perfectly emblematic of what such performers are selling: sex, understood exclusively as a source of bodily pleasure, and therefore devoid of any limiting responsibilities, like permanent commitment, or ennobling aspirations, like procreation. Stated more generally, they are selling an understanding of human life according to which happiness is achieved through the gratification of the most ordinary and powerful passions, and reason is impotent to identify any moral ends in the service of which our desires should be channeled. They are, moreover, selling this animalistic vision to the young and impressionable.
One need not be a Fundamentalist, or any kind of Christian, or even a believer in any revealed religion at all to regard all this as a disaster. One need only think, along with such non-religious philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, that reason should rule the passions, and that any decent society owes it to its young to foster, and not subvert, this ordering of the soul. Indeed, it requires no more than common sense to see that no individual could flourish and no society could prosper on the basis of MTV’s account of human nature.
The FCC is launching an investigation to determine whether the halftime show violated its decency rules and hence whether those responsible will face fines. There is also a question–as yet unmentioned in the media–of possible criminal liability. The halftime show was performed in Houston, and the Texas Penal Code makes it a Class A misdemeanor (punishable by a fine of up to $4000, up to a year in jail, or both) to sell, display, or distribute “material” that is “harmful” to a “minor.” The Code defines as “harmful” that material “whose dominant theme taken as a whole” “appeals to the prurient interest of a minor” in “sex” or “nudity,” is “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for minors,” and “is utterly without redeeming social value for minors.” Moreover, a “person commits an offense if, knowing that the material is harmful,” he or she displays it “and is reckless about whether a minor is present who will be offended or alarmed by the display.”
Is the pursuit of such charges, in light of limited state resources and the concurrent FCC investigation, worthwhile? That is a prudential question for Texas authorities. Nevertheless, such charges would certainly be fitting, for, as the MTV Super Bowl show demonstrates, the “dissemination of material harmful to minors”–and to society itself– is exactly what these people are about.
–Carson Holloway teaches political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is the author of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics.