Carl’s Rock Songbook No. 101: Common Sense for Conservatives about Popular Music

Somewhere between thinking about how to introduce my Rock Songbook series to NRO readers, and noting the negative reactions some of them had to my daring to only half-praise The Ramones, I’ve had a few thoughts about healthy and unhealthy attitudes towards popular music in our day, particularly on the part of conservatives.  

Here’s several common conservative attitudes that aren’t adequate for engaging with or learning from the musical situation of our times:

1. Ignore and generally look down upon popular music, because classical music is so superior.


2. Ham-handedly apply the age-old teaching that music impacts morality, say, in a way that condemns nearly all dancing, or all rock or hip-hop.
3. Find, celebrate, and encourage instances of popular music that have conservative lyrical messages.  (For a classic NRO instance, see this post by John Miller)

I do have a certain respect for the old-fashioned sturdiness of the first, although it is becoming a rarer stance.  Here’s some more common conservative stances, although these ones are also held by many liberals.

4. Judge artistic accomplishment in popular music solely by its own suggested rubrics.
5. Judge the value of any cultural product simply based on what pleases one.
6. Expand this to everyone:  “different strokes for different folks.”
7. Adopt a commercialist “market can’t be wrong” attitude:  whatever sells the most is usually the best.
8. Adopt a bohemian “market is always wrong” attitude:  whatever sells the most is usually the worst. 
9. Deny the age-old teaching that music impacts morality, particularly through its elicitation and imitation of emotional dispositions. 
10. Divorce one’s judgment of musical/lyrical accomplishment from one’s judgment of moral, cultural, or political impact. 
11. Deny that genre exists:  “You shouldn’t try to categorize music!”
12. Deny that any but arbitrary status-game boundaries exist between popular music and fine arts music (by the latter I generally mean classical music—of all cultures–, and quite a bit of jazz). 

None of these attitudes, these pat theories, help you grapple with the importance that popular music has had in our culture, or with the place it will likely have in your own life.  Obviously, I won’t be able to deal with each of them in the body of this post, but I will say that becoming skeptical about them is the “101” of my Songbook’s overall teaching. 

My approach here will mainly be to show why 9, 2, and 4 are incorrect, but first, let me say that I don’t think much of the apparently insouciant stance towards rock music that a lot of conservatives, especially the Gen-X and Millennial ones, have adopted, in which we say “Yes, I’m a conservative, but of course I still fully dig the awesomeness of ________ (insert name of some rock group here).”  That particular stance combines attitudes 4, 5, and perhaps 10.

For unless one’s “conservatism” is of a very libertarian sort regarding personal morality, one cannot avoid some measure of discomfort with rock’s largely unavoidable reputation for aggressive hedonism and general rebelliousness.  “I really love The Ramones,” you’ll say to yourself, or perhaps for you its Jimi Hendrix, Aerosmith, Mazzy Star, Ty Segal, or to choose a non-rock example, James Brown, “but I sense that as a conservative, I can’t love _______  all the way—that I would be a fraud to act as if I’m fully on board with the whole Ramones (or Hendrix, etc.) vibe.”  All I mean to say here is that many conservatives often feel odd or conflicted about their tastes for rock and pop music, and to suggest that some of what I do in the Songbook can help them think more clearly about that.   

That is, the thing to do with the odd feeling is to explore it.  If you just ignore it, accepting it as yet another absurdity of modern life, well, you might wind up looking as culturally daft as Paul Ryan did when he shared his love for Rage against the Machine.  

What will be initially most helpful is to spell out why attitudes 9 and 4 are wrong.   Again, 9 refuses to consider the classical argument that music affects morals (an argument which, do note, is not necessarily in favor of much of the music we call classical).   

The classical argument, found in Plato and Aristotle, and in our day best summarized by Carson Holloway’s All Shook Up, holds that music which indiscriminately stirs our passions or which deliberately fosters our lower ones should be usually avoided.  Musical forms, apart from any lyrics, influence emotional disposition, and particularly when they are heard repeatedly and by the young.  Whatever we might say about temporary emotions, one’s overall emotional disposition is a key part of one’s character.  Those who are drawn to vice even if they do not usually act upon this love have a lesser emotional disposition, one more prone to vice.  What you want is to want virtuously.  Thus, the styles of music that imitate measured, noble, and logos-friendly emotional states are better for your overall character. In addition to laying this out, Holloway reviews the findings from social science and anthropological studies on the question of music’s effect, and these largely confirm the insights of the classical teaching. 

Since this argument is focused upon musical form, the moral significance of lyrics is not front and center.  It’s not that they don’t matter—all the arguments that we might apply to reading poems or literature which teach bad morals, or which simply have moments where they imitate bad characters, still apply.  And the obvious qualification that a good person cannot become a bad one simply by reading an argument in favor of bad morals also still applies.   But the classical argument does significantly qualify conservative booster-ism of those songs or bands whose lyrics convey ideas conservatives can endorse.  A Christian speed metal band, for example, remains a moral problem by this measure.

Moreover, by the classical teaching, all simplistic arguments about causality—I listened to some gun-happy gangsta rap yesterday, and look, I haven’t murdered anyone yet!—are out of place, and are shown to be juvenile.   The teaching is that music heard repeatedly shapes the emotional disposition.  One learns, typically half-mindedly or even subconsciously, to imitate the emotional states the music does, and to approve and disapprove of what persons in such states do.  A steady diet of gangsta rap, of punk, of lust-emphasizing disco or roots rock, or even of grandiose romance-drenched opera, is a kind of musical inculcation of disposition and thus is undeniably an education of the soul.  The free will to choose what is right remains, but the soul continually exposed to such music must struggle more to exercise its will. 

And no, the (never fully convincing) claim that one can learn to not emotionally respond to such music, so that it just become so much sonic wall-paper in the background, is no counter-argument, but simply reveals another sort of psychic malady.  Who is this man who has an abiding taste for, say, punk’s muse of despairing anger, but has trained his soul through sheer surfeit to no longer register this music’s fundamental power?   And why does he bother with music at all?  Or what is the use of a man who can listen to Nine Inch Nails one moment, plain-chant the next, and remain basically unaffected by either?  

Thus, to oppose the main insights of the classical teaching is to say either that music doesn’t matter, or that virtue doesn’t.  However, we can legitimately oppose a ham-handed application of the classical teaching. This demands a recognition of certain facts of life—three in particular:

a) Musicians seek out complexity in music, and there are a number of established forms and practices that we will find it difficult to avoid which reflect this. 

A strict application of the classical teaching would ban or discourage this complexity(see Plato, Laws 669-670).  This simply isn’t practical in our time, particularly given the widespread availability of recordings.  We might picture the parents wishing to strictly apply the classical teaching, trying to keep their child away from all elevators, gas-stations, and stores, lest they hear some Ella Fitzgerald, Franz Listz, or ELO.  Plato and Aristotle would likely not want their teaching, which applies most of all to the music directly used in education, to be applied in this way anyhow.  Pushed a bit, I think even Plato would concede the inevitability of musicians, and especially composing and improvising musicians, pursuing the types of dynamic, metrical, harmonic, and tonal complexities that are the hallmark of most classical music, and would be fine with them doing this so long as the modes most emphasized were of the virtue-educating tendencies.  Consider Songbook No.  43 “Roll Over Beethoven?” for how classical music might figure in here. Plato would of course advise his serious students to beware getting caught up in music and poetry generally as opposed to the discipline of logos (see the Phaedrus passages about the cicadas) but our virtue-education questions today are not caught up in the question of what additional virtue-education might be needed for philosophers.

b) Just as there is a time for a music that worships, another that laments, another that is employed in theatre to represent distress, confusion, silliness, and even perhaps vice and villainy, and another that aides us when we march or exercise, there is a time for good-time dancing music.  When a good harvest is gathered or a battle is won, for example, the people of any culture will want to dance for joy, and they will develop forms of music to facilitate this.  Good-time dance music is a healthy part of life even when we recognize the 20th-century’s overdose upon it.

Wedding feasts, and in every modern democratic culture, balls or parties for the young to court one another at, are going to occur.  Given where our culture is, the need at present is not go back to some imagined Aristotelian purity, but rather to take our over-indulgence of partying and give it forms that will improve it, moderate it, bring it back more in line with pre-1960s practices.  My posts have shown I am in 100% sympathy with the desire present in all four films of Whit Stillman for young people to have couple-oriented dancing available, which to some extent requires dance-crazes and to some extent requires more deliberate organization of social life.  I would also add that during the entire 20th century, the night-club became an important institution of democratic society, and while it would be futile and ugly task to try to ban these, it is a worthy task to try to encourage their best features, to keep them from becoming mindlessly throbbing pleasure discos, which serve more to discourage musicianship, conversation, and courtship than to encourage these.

c) We are not in a situation of simply putting down our Plato and saying, “okay, what sort of music should we have?”  We have inherited a tradition of European classical music, various strains of Europe-originated folk music, and our own musical traditions, most of which, country music included, have been heavily influenced by or are simply slight adjustments of the family of Afro-American music. 

So what do we do with such inheritances once we’re convinced by the classical teaching?  Well, overall, we try to guide them closer to what it would hold, but without doing violence to what is best in them.

The key aspect of this question, pop/rock-wise, has to do with the Afro-American tradition.  If Ralph Ellison is correct, most of us Americans are Afro-American in the musical and linguistic sense even we have not a drop of black blood in our genetic ancestry.  My Songbook has tried to sketch, picking up a set ideas laid out by Ellison, and especially by Albert Murray and Martha Bayles, why we have should want the most dance-oriented, blues-oriented, and gospel-oriented features of that heritage to remain alive.  They really are endangered, by key aspects of Rock (see No. 12) and Disco (see No. 67), in our time.  The threat to that heritage is a complicated story, but a big part of the problem comes from reductive attitudes (often ones of racist origin) that so many adopted towards Afro-American music in its 20s-70s prime.  It was said to be all about sex and hedonistic release, both by its “conservative” detractors, and worse yet, by many of its “liberal” celebrants, white and black.  So if we apply the classical teaching in a way that simply rejects blues-swingin’ music, we are joining in that tasteless, reductive, and racist judgment.  And if we celebrate that music’s supposed inherent hostility towards the classical teaching’s concern with virtue, we are joining in it also.  More on this later, but for now you could read Songbook numbers 39 and 42, both of which explore Bayles’s criticism.  (BTW, use the first link here if you wish to navigate the Songbook as a whole–the links within the original FT posts don’t function.)

So, returning to the list of unhelpful stances I began this post with, I’ve explained why attitudes 9 and 2 fail, and in passing why the lyrics-only focus of 3 is incorrect. 

I think I’ve also shown in passing why 4, the attitude that simply judges music according to its own standards, doesn’t work either.  Let’s wrap things up by applying this to the dear ol’ Ramones.  The fact is, they didn’t come out of nowhere.  If we pretend that they did, and just ask ourselves, “Who gives us the best punkety fun high-energy music?”, or “Who gives us the best minimalism-ized rock n’ roll?,” well, the Ramones take the palms.  But those questions simply measure their music by the rubrics they themselves, or more likely their publicists, supplied.  Measuring the Ramones against the whole 1946-1966 tradition of rock n’ roll and rhythm and blues is another story.  And when we measure their music against the classical teaching that would warn against fostering anger (if you doubt that such was a basic element of their music, read my longer post on them, No. 99), particularly when we consider to what degree they bear responsibility for the far more anger-addicted punk that followed in their wake, the question changes entirely.  

Again, I have some real love for The Ramones.  And I understand that whenever one is getting really lost in the vibe of a particular musical artist, all questions of what is fitting or not just fade out of consideration.  When we’re speeding on the way to the beach with “Oh, Oh, I Love Her So” blastin’ through the speakers, all is right with the world, and I don’t wanna hear nuthin’ about classical music, conservatism, or What Aristotle Said.  Similarly, twenty-four hours earlier when I was floating away with Chopin or Berlioz, I sure didn’t want anyone to recall the existence of The Ramones to my mind.  Such experiences encourage a kind of compartmentalization of our tastes, which to some degree is perfectly natural, but we hyper-democratic and hyper-diverse-in-spirit 21^st century folk often risk taking such compartmentalization too far, so that again, we verge upon saying that music just doesn’t matter. 

Does all this raise questions? Objections?  Well, as this is but an incomplete tour through the 101 of the matter, and as it points to perennial human dilemmas that no-one has a slam-dunk, God’s-law-for-all, answer to, it sure should.  More soon at the 200 and 300 levels, but for now, let me know what’s puzzling you.