Parents: Are you worried about the music and lyrics listened to by your children? You should be.
Rock and punk rock music, rapping, hip-hop, etc. can have a pernicious impact on the thinking and behavior of impressionable young people. Loaded with lewd lyrics, these songs tend more to entice and debauch than to entertain and inspire.
Columnist Bob Kerr notes, "There's a pop culture conditioning going on. The message is aimed straight at raging teenage hormones."
The songs popular with today's youth are designed to stimulate the x-rated fantasies of a moiling adolescent mind. Ethical values – chastity, responsibility, dependability, sacrifice, maturity, etc. – are made to seem stale and musty by comparison with the joys of unbridled sex trumpeted in rock "leerics."
Only old timers pine for a return to the melodic rhythms of "swing and sway with Danny Kaye." Still, the straight-laced are not all stuffed shirts. Naughty and risque ditties of the music hall can tickle their funny bone. Yet, they abominate the sleaze and outright filth of today's rock.
St. Thomas Aquinas observes: "The human soul is moved in various ways according to various melodies of sound." (II-II, Q, 91, a.2).
Music rates high with youth. It is a significant element in the growing-up process. If parents really want to love their kids, they should show interest in what their kids listen to. The spirit of rock music is diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christ. It is the devil's music.
Titles and lyrics of best-selling songs should convince the skeptical. "This is Why I'm Hot" – the message is obvious. "My Humps" – a slutty, strutting ode to one's own body parts. "Buy U a Drank" – all about getting someone drunk enough so that you can have your way with them. "Candy Shop" – treating sex as a purchasable sweet. But why go on? These songs exalt lubricity and exhibit a contempt for, and an insidious attack on, religious and family values.
Indeed, the vulgar and salacious lyrics belted out by second-rate vocalists betray a growing ethical disarray in American society. The moral health of the nation is jeopardized; barbarism creeps in.
Crudeness, obscenity, unrefinement, irresponsibility, etc. are all symptoms of barbarism – a return to our body-painted, torso-tattooed, nose-pierced, ear-notched, unwashed, and unkempt ancestors whose banshee musical skills were expressed in howling, wailing, and ululating success or defeat in combat or hunting.
Current songs, which wallow in a mire of lust and extol out-of-control desires, provide a telling token that western civilization is on the wane.
Rock music can also provoke division, hostility, and anger in the home. Arguments erupt and tempers flare when teenagers accuse fathers and mothers of being fuddy-duddy in judging popular music.
In their book Don't Touch That Dial, social critics Barbara Hattener and Robert Showers warn parents, "The music your teenager listens to should tell you something about the state of his mind. If you disagree with the words of the songs, discuss how they differ from your family values. Explain how the ideas in the songs can distort his views about himself, the girls he is or will be dating, and his future attitudes toward marriage and family life."
Rock music is propaganda, and propaganda succeeds only by repetition. When day after day, time after time, youth are subjected to a musical broadcast that sex-abstinence is a lot of bunkum, a religious ruse foisted upon nerds, kooks, and squares by spoil-sport adults, then teenagers gradually become persuaded that sex outside of marriage is okay.
Since 1972, the percent of teenagers who believe that premarital sex is always wrong has fallen from 34% to 25%.
Parents should not be Mickey Mouse in demanding that their children desist from overloading their ears with music that feeds depression, anxiety, and despair; that glamorizes violence, brutality, promiscuous and deviant sex; that encourages carousing, drug and alcohol abuse, and satanic involvement.
Indeed, without adequate precaution, today's scrofulous music becomes a third-column weaseling its way into the home, undermining parental guidance, and posing a dire threat to the health and well-being of adolescents.
If what we read, see, and hear affects our thinking, and thinking influences conduct, then parents need not fear being twitted as "alarmist" when they point out the baneful effects of the obnoxious songs bombarding their children.
Common sense affirms that just as Gregorian chant lifts our thoughts heavenward and just as the classical music of Bach, Vivaldi, Haydn, Handel, Beethoven, and Mozart educates, enlightens, and inspires, so also the content of ribald songs can corrupt and debase.
A skull and crossbones emblem labels a bottle containing poison; caveat emptor – a red flag tag should be affixed to albums of scurrilous popular music.
Father Lennon is a resident of St. Thomas Aquinas Priory, Providence College
