Mark – I largely agree with your larger critique of Brooks, but I would like to object to one thought in your last post. You say:

Well, now the times have a-changed again, and this time David Brooks is on the receiving end and doesn’t care for it anymore than Pop did back when the hippies mocked his Singalongamitch albums. Big deal. That’s life.

I agree that’s life, but I’m not sure I share your dismissiveness when you say “big deal.” I think it is a big deal. There is a rhetorical trick many defenders of pop culture employ that seems to have ended up in your kit bag. It goes something like this: My grandparents hated it when their kids listened to jazz. My parents hated it when I listened to rock and roll. I hate it when my kids listen to gangster rap. Therefore hip hop is no worse than jazz.

And here is where I think you and I both would throw a flag on the field. Let me just assert for the sake of argument (and expressing my firmly held position): Gangster rap is crap. Yes, there are some interesting bits and pieces. Yes, there is buried amidst the steaming piles of rationalized b.s. a few trace elements of sociologically interesting ore. Sure, it takes some technical savvy to do it. Uh huh, right, right, right.

It’s still crap. Here’s how I put it last year in a column about Kanye West:

When people tell me, “Oh, but it’s technically very complicated,” or “You don’t understand how much work goes into it,” I’m reminded of a scene from Don Quixote: A man walks to the center of town and gathers a crowd for the show he’s about to put on. The man picks up a dog and inserts a tube into its rump. He begins to inflate the canine. The crowd watches, fascinated. The dog grows larger and rounder. Eventually, the man pulls the tube out and the air escapes loudly from the poor pooch’s rear as it runs away. The man turns to the crowd and asks: “You think it’s easy to inflate a dog with a tube?” Moral: Just because someone works hard at something doesn’t mean it’s great art.

While I am the first to admit that I am not a huge music lover, I feel perfectly comfortable saying that Jazz is a more serious art form than gangster rap or hip hop. But even if you disagree, which I doubt but someone surely does, it simply doesn’t follow that the rebellion music of every generation is equally worthwhile simply because it’s rebellion music. In other words, just because David Brooks’ parents may have been wrong about their distaste for their sons’ music, doesn’t mean David Brooks is necessarily wrong with his distate for his kids’ taste in music.

Or take dance. Apparently high schools around the country are having a devil of time keeping kids at the prom and junior prom from “freaking” or “grinding.” Some of the moves involve the girl getting on all fours or near to it while the boy plows his crotch against her behind. Other moves are borrowed directly from pole dancing (and I don’t mean the Polka). Say what you will, this is quite different than the tailfeather shaking of yore. And defending it on the grounds that every generation parents will disapprove of their kids’ taste in music and dance is not a very strong defense.

However, I think a lot of parents are seduced by the twin desires to seem cool and not to be hypocritical and they use this “it was ever thus” argument as a cop out to draw lines that need to be drawn.

The cultural gatekeepers have decided to wash their hands by saying, the medium is the message. But that doesn’t make all messages equal.