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Popular Culture Review
give equal value to everything in their lives. It’s not that they don’t care; neither
are they particularly immoral or amoral.
They simply don’t have the
wherewithal—or the inclination—to prioritize their feelings. Caught on the horns
of the crudest of dilemmas, they're suspicious and afraid o f the very emotions
they desperately crave.
Consider, too, the hideous “music” that kids bom in the seventies and
eighties grew up with—rap, heavy metal, speed metal, death metal, grunge.
When cultural critics point to the amorality and/or obscenity of contemporary
song lyrics, they miss the point that words are redundant to the real “meaning(s)”
of postmodern popular music. What really matters is in the mind- and bodynumbing sound, which, like the drugs millions of kids take while listening to their
favorite groups, is meant to anesthetize emotions, not enrich or enlarge them. For
the most part, today’s mass-marketed music converts young people into passive
serveomechanisms: extensions of high-tech aural engineering without which the
vast majority of rock groups would vanish overnight.
Over the most recent lunch with my cadre, I asked them if young people
still slow danced on social occasions, as my generation did. They looked at each
other, then at me, with puzzled expressions. “I don’t know how to slow dance,”
the beautiful one said. “Neither do I,” two others said in unison. The fourth
merely shrugged disinterestedly and took a bite of Cobb salad.
I was flabbergasted and saddened: How hard can it be to learn how to
slow dance? Then I realized the real question wasn’t how but why. During the
early sixties, social psychologists had begun to take note of a significant sea
change in the way young people fast danced. As the bop and the lindy gave way
to the twist, the mashed potatoes, the funky chicken, the pony, the swim and other
dances, kids stopped touching each other. By the early seventies, dance-genres
themselves had disappeared: everybody simply did his or her own thing. But this
was only the beginning of the transformation of dancing into an anarchic antigenre in American youth culture, particularly in urban areas, where lifestyles of
the young are traditionally more freewheeling and liberal, of course, than those of
their rural counterparts.
No longer a (relatively) innocent parable, dancing has now become an
obscene parody of sexual relations. By any (vestigial) standard of civilized
behavior, what often goes on during the teenage parties and dances of today is
shocking: butt-waving, crotch-grabbing, and the kind of pelvis-thrusting—not
sideways but frontways—that would’ve put the early Elvis Presley to shame. In
some cases, dancing is sex, as I learned the other day online. On a tip from one of
my students, I pulled up a video of an eighth-grade dance in the East where a
male student buried his hand in the pants of his partner as they gyrated up and
down the dance floor. As I witnessed this gross tableau, I couldn’t help thinking
that these kids were ridiculing raw sexuality, perhaps because to them it
represents, along with drugs and televisual technologies, a blind alley in their