Unverified Voracity Finally Posts It

I knew before I posted my comment that a common response would be to bring up all the songs in popular music over the years referencing some sort of asocial or criminal behavior, and use it to explain away the sort of stuff that Jarboe was spouting, as though that stuff existed in some sort of cultural isolation divorced from reality. It always kills me when white middle-class kids from relatively stable homes in communities with reasonably well-funded schools, a viable business environment, and a decent availability of jobs who listen to Johnny Cash or Queensryche or Van Halen and aren't induced to mimic what is sung about simply assume that their experience is universal. The fact is that the vast majority of us here at MGoBlog all have had multiple influences on our lives—parents, schools, teachers, friends, neighbors, employers–who collectively are a giant counterweight to whatever negative influences we encounter. That's what a community does, or should. The problem is that other kids may not have those advantages, because the communities they live in are ridden with joblessness, unstable family situations, absent fathers, chaotic schools, endemic violent crime, rampant drug use, and all the other social ills that make the papers every day. When you then create an entertainment subculture that glorifies violence, rhapsodizes about drug use, sexualizes young women, and dismisses education, all against the backdrop of a crumbling outer culture, the nice comfortable notion that music and words have no real effect on young people isn't so plausible. Tens of billions of dollars are spent worldwide on the premise that intentionally composed images of people, still or in motion, in combination with words and music, can influence the thoughts and ultimately the behavior of individuals. This is exactly what underlies advertising, and companies and organizations and politicians devote huge amounts of energy and money to creating it because endless amounts of research over the years has proven that people in fact ARE influenced by what they watch on a TV screen. The influence may be subtle, and it won't automatically induce them to do something that's completely at odds with their culture or values. That's the rub: if the culture they're in is as dominated by negative forces as positive, then dismissing the potential effect of what is seen in a video is naive. Looking at it another way, if you'd shown "Triumph of the Will" to American audiences in 1938, the universal reaction would likely have been a mixture of puzzlement, distaste, fear, and perhaps some loathing, since the cultural context of that film had little to do with ours. Show it to the German audiences of the day, soaked as it was with anti-Semitism, fervent paranoid nationalism, and veneration of all things military, and it was an extremely potent form of visual propaganda. Or another way: I grew up in Grosse Pointe, and so all of my friends came from stable two-parent homes, plenty of money, great schools, clean and well-maintained neighborhoods, and most importantly, a complex network of personal, business, and professional relationships that mutually benefited everybody. So when the late 60s and 70s rolled around and all of us started smoking dope and dropping acid and snorting god knows what all, on top of drinking our brains out, we had all kinds of familial and societal structures and relationships to moderate the worst of our inclinations and bail our asses out if we got in trouble. Yeah, there were some kids who got too deep into it and never came out the other side, but the vast majority of us came out relatively unscathed precisely because of all the positive things in our comfortable, stable lives. For the kids in other communities who didn't have those things to fall back on and support them, it's a different story. There's an old expression: "when the rich catch cold, the poor catch pneumonia" and it applies in all kinds of ways. 

And no, Electron, even though I'm 55 and therefore a certifiable cranky old fart, I'm not Old Fan.