And The Cradle Will Rock - Teens and Music

Great Debates
1

I feel this is the best place for this. This is a story I did for a local publication about the influence of music on teenagers, specifically in the Raleigh, NC area. So, please don’t debate my writing style (I have none), but instead, maybe dialogue can come from the vieews represented here, and I wonder how different some of these are to some of yours…

It’s nothing new. Since the dawning of jazz and so-called “black music,” concerned parents wondered about the influence of the music their kids listened to. Upon the birth of rock and roll in the '50s, these concerns ranged from simple head-shaking at the inability to decipher the words, to accusations that those same words were going to send the youth straight down the path to Sodom and Gomorrah.

As the decades changed, the music changed with them. The same kids who watched Elvis shake his pelvis worried when their kids started listening to a band that they “knew” stood for “Kids In Satan’s Service,” nihilistic punk rockers who wore spiky hair and named their band after the male genitalia, and a guy (named after a girl) who enjoyed being decapitated every night.

Throughout it all, leaders of state and the Church went to great pains to condemn whatever new music was brought out for mass consumption, by litigation (from the “Louie Louie” hearings to the PMRC) and reprobation (from album burnings to picketing Marilyn Manson concerts). All to protect the future of our country from the influence that music and pop culture exerts on impressionable minds.

As we flash to the present, things are even murkier. The music of youth culture has gotten more and more explicit. Songs about wanting to “fuck you like an animal” are mainstream fare. Albums called Antichrist Superstar go platinum. Rappers die living a lifestyle they preach is all they know. And kids spend millions of dollars a year buying their wares, or downloading it for free right off the Internet.

But probably the event that will go down in history as an apocryphal epiphany was the shootings at Columbine. It wasn’t the first time that someone shot up a school and it won’t be the last. But even if the mass numbers alone made this different, the main thrust of the media coverage was how the music of Marilyn Manson, KMFDM and Rammstein caused a couple of trench coat-wearing kids to kill classmates, teachers, and then turn the guns on themselves.

Columbine, unlike any other event this decade, will be a defining moment for anyone who was a teenager at the time. Fact is, you won’t find a teenager who doesn’t remember where they were when they heard about it, or the subsequent reactions in schools across the country to prevent it from happening in their school.

Curious about the influence of music on teenagers, I decided to talk to some Triangle-area teens and find out what they were thinking. In doing so, I thought getting several different viewpoints would be best, so I went to the Ritz one Sunday night when Godsmack was in town, and also attended the youth service at Raleigh Christian Community Church.

Laura Arpin, a 16 year-old based out of Raleigh, was at the Godsmack show. Laura recently left public school to be home schooled. It’s a hotbed issue amongst religious folks, but her decision had nothing to do with the science evolution, but her own personal evolution.

“I was always made to feel like an outcast in High School,” she remembers. “People were always giving me a hard time because of the bands I liked and the clothes I wore. It’s not the only reason I opted for home schooling, though. I think there are a lot of problems with public schools, and I didn’t think I was getting the right education for me. But the treatment of my peers was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The attack at Columbine also made things worse for her personally. "I had a teacher question me afterwards and ask me if I was on drugs. She tried to be tactful, but it was pretty obvious her intention was based upon what happened at Columbine. At first, I was exasperated, but when the mushroom cloud of accusations came up afterwards, that’s when I started to take it more seriously, because it was affecting me and people I know. I have a friend who is in a Goth-industrial band in DC, and because it came out that the boys who did the shootings were Goth, he actually had to issue a statement to a newspaper that the Goth community was not responsible for the shootings.

“I thought my peers were a bit more critical (than the faculty),” she recalls. “I always felt like people were looking at me and wondering if I would do something similar…”

Columbine also had at least one local parent take their kids out of public school and put them in a local Catholic institution. Kris Henderson, a 34-year old Fayetteville resident who chaperoned her 12 year old son Kris and his friend Leza Philson (age 13) to the Godsmack show, did just that.

“My child’s school turned into a virtual prison zone after that,” she remembered, “with metal detectors, police, and locker checks. They couldn’t even go to the bathroom without an escort, and all of this led me to put him in Catholic School.”

As evidenced by her taking the kids out to see a rock show, Henderson is fairly liberal. But at the same time, she monitors what her kids listen to and will forbid them from listening to certain songs in the house. According to Leza, “My parents don’t let me listen to CDs with parental advisory stickers. I get them anyway, but they don’t know.”

Both Laura and the Fayetteville three have their doubts about music’s ability to change the way a teenager thinks. Tyler goes so far as to say that Marilyn Manson, a frequent target (and fave of his) isn’t “is really different (from us). He admits that it’s just a gimmick for attention.”

Brandon Paul, however, has a different thought. A very active member for five years in RCC and its private school, the 17-year-old makes no bones about the influence of music upon kids like him.

“I think whatever you listen to will get into your mind,” he says. “The spirit of the singer and songwriter is going to be played into your soul, and you will begin to think as they think if you listen to it enough.”

And if Brandon had a friend who enjoyed, say, Marilyn Manson? “I would be concerned,” he says. “If you allow yourself to listen to things like Marilyn Manson, it can cause you to think certain ways and lead you down the wrong road. The spirit that it puts on you is a negative spirit.”

Andre Owens, who is the same age as Brandon and has attended RCC School and church for the same amount of time, is a good friend of his. But they are on very opposite sides of the fence when it comes to music. After all, Andre immediately talks of his love for Rage Against The Machine.

“On a personal level, I don’t care if the music is secular or Christian. If they’re a good band, I will like them. Lyrics are very important, but only in the sense of profanity and a certain vulgarity. If it’s too vulgar, or if they curse for the sake of cursing and they have no real meaning for it, then I don’t want to waste my time listening to it.”

So how does Andre rationalize a band that proudly says, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you told me?” With refreshing candor, he explains, “If you listen to the entire song, its building up to a certain feeling, a certain emphasis. We won’t do what we’re told, because we need a reason. We won’t do what we’re told just because you tell me to do something. We won’t be pulled along like mindless drones. But we will do what you say if there’s a clear and intelligent reason for it.”

He feels that, while some teens may be influenced by lyrics, the main problem is a lack of “a moral upbringing. When it comes to killing other people, or doing things that are humanly considered morally wrong that’s where the parental upbringing should come into play. Our parents should teach us that these things are wrong.”

Interestingly enough, Andre dismisses music as a problem in the Columbine shootings. Spoken

2

Great OP, Brian. Let me see if I can help start off a dialogue that will do it some justice.

How much of who and what we are is due to heredity, and how much is due to environment, has been debated for a long time. But there’s no doubt that our environment has a significant effect on who we are.

The various media influences (TV, radio, movies, video games, the Web, etc.) are part of everyone’s environment, these days. The question is what sort of an effect the various forms of consumer entertainment have, and that’s where things get considerably murkier.

I grew up in an era famed for its music. Did CSN&Y, the Doors, and Jethro Tull affect who I am? Absolutely. How, exactly? That’s an extremely tough question; the links between music and the soul are - for me, at least - deep, but they’re subtle as well. I’d certainly argue that I’m better off for having listened to the music I heard.

That said, I must admit that I am genuinely disturbed by the level of violence in the images that the media culture throws at us. This isn’t All in the Family anymore. But a few points about that in more or less random order:

  1. Someone’s probably done some cross-cultural studies on what kids are exposed to in Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan, etc., compared to what they see here. (Would be an obvious topic for a sociology dissertation, I’d think.)

If anyone’s done that bit of research, the results would certainly be relevant to a discussion of the influence of the media on teenagers. If, say, Japanese kids are hearing and seeing the same stuff as American kids, then we’d have to ask why they don’t go around shooting up high schools. And if they’re not, we might ask why not - and does our system, or theirs, for deciding what gets into the media make more sense?

The world’s a big social laboratory; we can look at other countries and see what they’re doing differently, and what the results are. But America never does that. That increasingly strikes me as bizarre and stupid.

  1. One of the obvious differences between America and the other developed countries is the easy availability of guns. The other industrialized nations have a few dozen gun murders here, a couple hundred there. We have tens of thousands. To talk about the causes of violence while overlooking guns is like going to a Bulls game a few years back and being oblivious to Michael Jordan.

  2. The quote about the value of parental influence is well taken, but many parents these days feel themselves overwhelmed by the abundance of media influences they have to respond to. And, compared to my parents, they have every reason to. There are far more media now, and they’re all much less regulated than they were in 1970. (For a more detailed discussion of this issue, I recommend The War Against Parents by Cornel West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett.)

  3. The media aren’t us. A handful of big corporations decide what will be on the radio; what will be on broadcast, cable, and satellite television; design, build, and distribute the bulk of video games. Oftimes, media content is portrayed as a free-speech issue, but free speech is a funny phrase to describe a situation where a small handful of giant corporations control the microphone, and the rest of us merely get to choose which one to listen to - over the airwaves that we theoretically own.

And those corporations, unlike the citizenry, have exactly zero interest in the effect of their programming on the well-being of families or the character development of young people. They exist to make money; everything else is irrelevant to them. (Excuse me if my liberal populism is coming through a bit strongly here.) IMO, we’ve collectively excused corporations from the responsibilities of being adults. I don’t think that’s a good thing, really.

I don’t know how you could design a system where we each controlled 1/270,000,000 of the content of the media, but if we did, I bet there would be a lot less in the way of violent images for parents to have to deal with in one way or another. Personally, I’d like to see such a world.

That’s my two cents, at least.

Buses stop at bus stations; trains stop at train stations.
There’s a work station on my desk.

3

Brian, I found some of the references to music and Goth in your article ironic (not contradictory) after reading the link to Salon in the “Klebold and Harris” thread. The Salon article points out that K & H hated Marilyn Manson (along with hating 99% of everything in the world), were not, themselves Goth, and were not even members of the Trenchcoat Mafia.

I don’t think that music shapes anyone, but that music is one of the strongest reinforcing aspects of society. Kids listen to music that supports what they already want to believe. The anti-war songs of the 1960’s did not bring anyone to oppose the war, they were written to support the growing anti-war sentiment. The nihilism in much of today’s music does not lead to nihilistic teens; nihilistic teens choose to listen to nihilistic music.

Tom~

4

“The younger generation is going straight to Hell”
– Eve, to Adam, about 3980 BC

5

I think people choose the music they listen too. We choose Bowie, Eno, etc., because of the (anti-) valuse this music espoused. It was not overly violent and I would not have been attracted to it if it was.

Violent music of the type discussed has been around for about 20 years (Ozzie, J. Priest etc.). It is always an option. Others include glam and it’s progeny, alternative, etc.

We need to ask WHY TEENS CHOOSE TO LISTEN TO THIS. THey are actively choosing this, it is not being forced on them.

6

Personally, when I started buying my own CDs (being a teenager, I’m a bit closer to the age under discussion :slight_smile: ), I was disaffected and seeking music to express my desire to overthrow the institution of Christianity. That is, I bought techno that had messages like “Even if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him!” I’ve since gotten over that kick and now just like the sound of techno and laugh at friends that are still vehemently anti-religion.

I think what has been said is true: people will seek music to express their beliefs, they don’t listen to music and get transformed by it.

I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.

7

Indeed, ironic. The media concentrated on those things when it happened - obviously, this shows how WRONG it was. The point isn’t necessarily that the two were influenced by these things, but people THOUGHT they were, the media painted that imagery, and people bought it.

I do appreciate you bringing some “facts” into this, however. Had this been available when I wrote the article, they would have been in there, at least in passing for clarity sake, I assure you.

Yer pal,
Satan