Re: that David Brooks teach-your-children-well business, this reader makes some good points:

I think Brooks and Van Zandt are actually staking out a conservative position here: the importance of common culture, defining it and promoting it. I bet Van Zandt would be willing to place his rock and roll canon within the context of American musical heritage in general which would include Duke Ellington, Aaron Copeland, JP Sousa and Irving Berlin. What teenager wouldn’t benefit from being fluent in all that great music and all the ancilary stuff in American cultural history it touches on? Van Zandt just happens to be a Rock & Roll expert so that’s the corner he’s pushing on… The problem is that America’s cultural and political elites don’t have the will, popular capital or sense of need to identify or promote any kind of Americal cultural canon in any area of liberal arts whatsoever. Doing so might step on toes or heaven forbid sugest that one thing is better than another thing. The Great Western literary canon is mostly taught to be ridiculed these days, Harvard doesn’t even have a history department and everyone wants their team/tribe/hero in the Parthenon and no one can agree on anything. Van Zandt may not realize how much the cultural curriculum has changed since he was last in a classroom. I’m giving Brooks the benefit of the doubt in that he’s looking for an angle to get people concerned about the imoprtance of a common american culture and not trying to push “Crosby, Stills & Nash: conflict and healing during the Vietnam War” into American high school curriculums… People of various political persuasions will tell you that permanant mass fragmentation IS viable in a universally socialized or libertarian live-and-let-live, post-nationstate world. BUT I would argue that an organized and aggressive (and possibly nasty) people who do share a common culture and who do have common beliefs and aspirations will eventually come along and take your goodies away from you in rather unpleasant ways.

A common culture is important to any society, and Van Zandt’s line is better than Brooks’, which for a start is historically absurd. The idea that the Stones and Dylan represent a universally beloved pop culture would be news to Sixties suburban couples with their Ray Conniff eight-tracks. Boomer rockers explicitly sold themselves as oppositional to mainstream culture: that was their appeal – “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

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. But a social analyst (which is the Brooks shtick) ought to be able to get beyond his generational blinkers: Nostalgia isn’t an argument, especially when ”White Christmas” in the Forties or “In The Good Old Summertime” in the Oughts or Stephen Foster in the 19th century can all stake more convincing claims to being exemplars of broad, mass, popular pop culture.