I learned of the following article by Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times at Professor Malloy's HealthLawProf Blog: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/healthlawprof_blog/
Parker-Pope discusses a recent study concerning the subject matter or references found in the songs teenagers are listening to via (largely) their MP3 or compact disc players. She explains:
"One in three popular songs contains explicit references to drug or alcohol use, according to a new report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. That means kids are receiving about 35 references to substance abuse for every hour of music they listen to, the authors determined. While songs about drugs and excess are nothing new, the issue is getting more attention because so many children now have regular access to music out of the earshot of parents. Nearly 9 out of 10 adolescents and teens have an MP3 player or a compact disc player in their bedrooms."
So why might we be concerned about this?
"Studies have long shown that media messages have a pronounced impact on childhood risk behaviors. Exposure to images of smoking in movies influences a child's risk for picking up the habit. Alcohol use in movies and promotions is also linked to actual alcohol use. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the 279 most popular songs from 2005, based on reports from Billboard magazine, which tracks popular music. Whether a song contained a reference to drugs or alcohol varied by genre. Only 9 percent of pop songs had lyrics relating to drugs or alcohol. The number jumped to 14 percent for rock songs, 20 percent for R&B and hip-hop songs, 36 percent for country songs and 77 percent for rap songs."
"The study authors noted that music represents a pervasive source of exposure to positive images of substance use. The average adolescent is exposed to approximately 84 references to explicit substance use per day and 591 references per week, or 30,732 references per year. The average adolescent listening only to pop would be exposed to 5 references per day."
"Whether any of this matters remains an open question. While the impact of exposure to images of smoking and alcohol in film has been well documented, less is know about the effect of music on childhood risk behaviors."
I happen to think it does matter, and very much at that, if only because, as the conclusion to the article states, "'Music is well-known to connect deeply with adolescents and to influence identity development, perhaps more than any other entertainment medium,' said the study authors."
Let's look beyond contemporary social science and back to ancient philosophy for another take on why we might have reason for concern about the music young people listen to. Classical Chinese worldviews (in particular Confucianism) and the classical Greek conception of paideia alike accorded an important role, to put it rather feebly, to the arts in moral education and education generally, with music (or poetry, which was chanted or sung, as the Confucian Odes) and dance playing an especially prominent part. This was so if only because the Chinese and Greeks understood, in the words of the late philosopher Iris Murdoch, that "we see and love beauty more readily than we love good, it is a spiritual thing to which we are most immediately and instinctively attracted." This explains why for both Plato (in the Laws) and Confucius (in the Analects), training in the arts (wen in Confucianism) is absolutely indispensable for moral development and spiritual growth as well as the corresponding increase in self-knowledge. Indeed, it is because the arts naturally have such a powerful effect on young hearts and minds (and bodies!) that they are (or should be) the principal form of early moral education, and (should) continue to play a prominent role in ethical and spiritual development throughout our lifetimes. By whatever means we come to know "the Good" in Plato or what is termed jen by Confucius, this knowledge, however dim or partial in the beginning, allows us to discriminate the good from what is substantially less-than-the-good or even "the bad" in art, for not all art is equally conducive to awakening in us a love of the good, a disposition to virtuous behavior, a fondness for something greater than an egoistically oriented awareness.
Intriguingly, Steven J. Lonsdale writes in his Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (1993) that "the word nomos (law, custom; it is similar to the notion of li in the Analects, but Confucius clearly distinguished custom, social norms and etiquette, that is, forms of li when practiced with the requisite reverential bearing by those--like the junzi or the Sage--possessed of jen, from law proper, owing to the latter's ultimate reliance on external sanctions that require physical coercion and punishment) in the Greek title [of Plato's Laws] also has a musical meaning (melody), and Plato puns on the legal and musical senses of the word on several occasions in reference to the so-called kitharodic nomos, a genre associated early on with Terpander and Dorian Sparta, whose conservative musical traditions served as models for Plato's own polis."
In her remarkable book, The Five "Confucian" Classics (2001), Michael Nylan discusses the use of the (book of) Odes as "tools for learning" in Chinese traditions, its "vital importance as a cultural repository of eminent utility and a teaching tool for the social graces." The Odes were fundamental to the cultivation of the social graces which are thought to be indissolubly connected to habituation to virtue:
"As a textbook of style and the language of diplomacy (in both senses of the word), the Odes could hardly be outdone. A storehouse of elegant language and refined formulae, preferably intoned with special pronunciation in set keys, it served as a kind of early thesaurus and book of etiquette rolled into one, whose limited format was of limitless applicability. The social graces in turn were what made for an impressive character: the 'sound of virtue' capable of influencing others for the good. Good students of the Odes, according to tradition, could 'incite [others'] emotions, observe their feelings carefully, keep company with others, or express grievances, either in the service of their fathers at home or their princes abroad.' [....] Adherents and opponents of Confucius alike had the followers of the Sage continually 'reciting the three hundred odes, playing them on strings, singing them, and dancing to them.'"
As Nylan notes, the Analects help us see the important role that the Odes played in ethical training and Confucian self-cultivation:
"Confucius taught three important lessons: that mastery of the polite arts is valuable only to the extent that it is predicated on an acute moral sense [keeping in mind that li performance and training in wen are what awaken a moral sense in children], whose ultimate worth is greater than conventional beauties of form; that the Odes' literary figures nonetheless supply apt metaphors for the process of moral cultivation; and that the cultivation of one's humanity would have undeniable attractions for those who witnessed it."
I recall the snickering and snide comments in Left and Liberal circles (and from some well-known musicians as well) when Tipper (Mary Elizabeth Acheson) Gore co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) with Susan Baker (wife of then U.S. Sec'y of the Treasury James Baker), because Tipper heard her then 11-year old daughter playing "Darling Nikki" by Prince. Gore sought warning labels for some of the records marketed to children, although she was carelessly and inaccurately accused of advocating or being on a slippery slope toward censorship, despite her avowals to the contrary, including public proclamations of her commitment to the First Amendment. Now whatever we may think of her means and methods, Tipper Gore seems to have been expressing, however awkwardly or inchoately, a Confucian- or Platonic-like perspective on the power, for good and (in this case) ill, of the arts:
"Plato's insistence on music and dance in moral education in the Laws is one of the ways in which his views differ most strikingly from Socrates in the early dialogues, for whom knowledge of the good was sufficient to attain virtue. But Plato, who was acutely aware of the effect of music and dance on the irrational, believed that gymnastic and musical training, as well as philosophical investigations, contributed to civic virtue 'because rhythm and harmony penetrate most easily into the soul and influence it most strongly, bringing with it decorum and making those who are correctly trained well-behaved.'"
While I remain a recalcitrant Marxist in many respects, I confess to being a Confucian or Platonic conservative in the above matters, one reason I find the Times story so troubling.
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