What about Din?

by Thomas Howard - July 18, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

About 30 years ago I organized (or found it to be organizing itself) a peculiar Friday afternoon group that came to be called Beer 'n' Bull. Despite its rather rackety sound, it is a surprisingly sober conclave, mostly of my college students and (now) former students. Obviously the (very loose) membership has changed over 38 years, but the flavor is still recognizable: young Christian men coming together over drinks, cheese, and crackers to probe any and all of the questions that present themselves to people who are prepared to reflect seriously on life.

Most of the men come from Protestant Evangelical backgrounds and are hence zealous about fidelity to Sacred Scripture, but are also authentically contemporary types – which distinguishes them dramatically from me, who arrives trailing a great freight of cultural, moral, and religious tradition with him. This gives the group a certain piquancy. There is ultimate agreement on doctrinal and moral issues, but great leeway for vigorous, sometimes shrill, debate.

Periodically the question of rock music crops up. Most of the men are at home with this genre, and most of them are discriminating in the sense of their finding vast differences among the multitudinous sorts of music that can be lumped under the general category "rock." Whereas I cannot always appreciate the frontiers that lie, I am told, between blues, country and western, soft rock, hard rock, heavy metal, and rap, my younger colleagues are loud in their insistence on the stark differences. I am prepared to accept their judgments on such questions.

I do have some general, and persistent, questions on the topic, however. My impressions, to be sure, are formed in a somewhat higgledy-piggledy manner, I am the first to admit, since I form these impressions from what I overhear, really, and not from any sustained and close study of the phenomenon. One hears this music more or less ubiquitously in malls, in the cinema, on TV and radio, and from the headphones of people in trains, buses, and shops, and from those passing one along the sidewalk.

I find myself interested in the entire post-Elvis-Beatles-Rolling Stones direction in which popular music has developed. What particularly interests me is a set of questions that touches on the moral implications of the genre – quite apart, I may urge, from whatever the lyrics may be celebrating, which forms a whole topic to itself. Here again, I am aware that a wide range of human experiences and emotions is extolled in this music, with blues to be sharply distinguished from rap, and country and western from heavy metal.

I say moral implications. By this I refer, not solely to sexual matters, but to the question as to what happens to the nerve endings of one's moral imagination under the sound – I had almost said "assault" – of the genre generally. How much can these delicate filaments sustain without becoming cauterized?

We know that music from the beginning of myth and history has been a powerful influence on the moral imagination of the race. Plucked strings, shepherds' pipes, great drums, brass horns, and eventually, in the West, the orchestra – who will argue that these sounds have not immeasurably influenced us mortals, in coaxing us toward self-control or abandon, sobriety or frenzy, tranquility or fright, joy or sadness? And who will argue that these states of mind are not themselves the bed from which action, moral or immoral, arises?

Obviously the whole responsibility for our actions cannot be laid at the door of music alone. That lies, in the last analysis, with our conscious choices. But these choices are often deeply influenced by the states of mind I mentioned. My impulses are quite different depending on whether I am listening to pan pipes or snare drums, and I may have greater or lesser difficulty in ordering these impulses depending on the ambience created by music. Ask anyone who has heard a lullaby, or anyone who is just emerging from a rock concert.

The questions I tend to pose to the group run along the following lines and represent, I admit, my own curiosity about the general genre "rock":

Is unremitting din salutary? (Witness the hours per day given to listening to music that, as often as not, draws upon the effects of loudness.) What does this do to the interior control assumed by all religions and cultures to be the sine qua non of moral action?

Is an unremitting thunderous beat salutary, for the same reasons? This, I am aware, raises almost unanswerable anthropological questions, but I would urge that heavy beat does, in fact, create an ambience that is distinct and powerful. Again, we may consult the "body language" of anyone under the spell of heavy beat. What sector of the body tends to be brought into play in these precincts? If blithe post-Freudians remark here, "What could be more natural, more liberating, and more authentic?" we may remark that the head, the chest, and the loins have been regarded from antiquity as constituting the very map, so to speak, of moral action.

Is unremitting hype good? Again, one is aware that there are many nuances in the music in question here, and that there are no doubt whole categories that may invite us to sobriety of mind and to recollection – premises upon which all moral action is grounded. But one's impression is that a frequent effect of the music that occupies the attention of the populace may often be the arousing of responses that cannot be said to follow upon well-judged moral thinking.

I have other questions: How much of the music (and lyrics) dwells upon my own identity as unfortunate, victimized, or as standing over against "them" (tradition; the rules; the Establishment; an older generation)? Does the music encourage the chastening and schooling of impulse and emotion? If such questions are dismissed as irrelevant, or as unfairly fetched in from Victorian, Puritan, or other fastidious quarters, we may consult, again, the universal concerns of all religions, tribal customs, and indeed mythology.

My questions are, I am keenly aware, easily shot down by rejoinders from all sides. Nevertheless I find myself pressing them, at least in our Beer 'n Bull afternoons.

Thomas Howard is retired from 40 years of teaching English in private schools, college, and seminary in England and America.