WHY YOU SHOULD GO SEE CHARLIE'S ANGELS!

Amidst the oedipal sex bunkum and the barbaric ascription of meaning to dreams, Sigmund Freud did manage to get one thing right. Young people all need heroes: to look up to, to identify with and to emulate. A hundred years ago, sports stars were those heroes. In the USA this was limited to baseball as basketball had only recently been invented, and ice hockey was limited to the far northern latitudes.

Baseball was so popular and important to young people that trading cards, each with a portrait of a player, were introduced. Boys often skipped school to try and sneak into the ball park where they could witness their heroes. Women too, were attracted to ball players. Joe DiMaggio got to marry Marilyn Monroe, and I can recall that my own mother thought highly of Ted Williams. It was terrible when ball players failed as heroes; in the Black Sox scandal, a boy, tears streaming down his cheeks, came up to Shoeless Joe Jackson, accused of accepting a bribe to throw the 1919 World Series, and said, "Say it ain't so, Joe!"

Sports stars were held as heroes for much of the century, but they were gradually eclipsed by a rival form of entertainment, motion pictures. It was said that every woman in the land was in love with Rudolph Valentino, and even during the great depression people mustered enough for the price of admission to the local cinema.

Young people were not attracted to the movies because of their artistic value, which was pretty low, but because they admired the movie stars. When Clark Gable appeared in a movie wearing no undershirt, sales of men's undershirts plummeted. A whole generation of men and women began smoking cigarettes after watching Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on the screen. The National Rifle Association is now the powerful lobby it is because of boys who took John Wayne's movies as reality. Every adolescent boy who was the class clown memorized the jokes read by Bob Hope, because there was a fellow wisenheimer whose minimal talent had brought him fame and fortune. A boy might be failing algebra, but it didn't matter to him as Bob Hope showed that you didn't need algebra as long as you could widen your eyes in a comical manner.

But then, after World War II, the movies lost much of their popularity. This was due to a number of factors, one of which was that the movie industry, complacent in its success, failed to develop a new generation of stars. Adolescents stopped going to the movies because they simply didn't identify with older stars like Bettie Davis, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper or Edward G. Robinson. After the one star who teens could relate to, James Dean, was killed in 1955, young people lost all interest in movies.

Human nature abhors a vacuum, and into this void stepped the tiny independent labels of the record industry—companies like Sun, Atlantic, Stax and Motown. They gave young people simple music and young stars who symbolized independence and rebellion. The major record labels were slow to pick up on this trend at first, but when RCA bought Elvis Presley's contract from Sun records astounding sums of money were made, and soon other labels were offering scores of imitation Elvii—Bobby Rydell, Fabian, Dion, et al.

As the economy grew and the children of the post-war baby boom entered adolescence, the music industry grew exponentially. Young people no longer identified with athletes or movie stars—by 1970, Bob Hope was being booed by troops—and when the Beatles overwhelmed all forms of entertainment, girls began wearing Beatles hats and boots, and boys all grew their hair long.

This has been the state of music for the last thirty years or so, and it explains why it is that young people now need a radio blasting-out pop music wherever they go. A young person likewise needs bumper stickers of his favorite radio station or rock groups on his first car because that is his identity. The kid you hire to paint your garage shows up at 8 a.m. with his radio blaring would no more think of being without his "tunes" than he would consider hanging-out at the mall with his friends wearing a dinner jacket; to do either would be a serious loss of identity.

Human nature abhors a vacuum, and in a secular society music stars perform the same function that the late Ayatollah Khomeini provided for Islamic fundamentalists in Iran or Billy Sunday or Billy Graham supplied to an earlier era in American society. If you are not a devout Christian or not of the party of Allah, then what are you? Pearl Jam, man—that's where I'm at! Because rock & roll grew out of the Southern Gospel tradition, rock audiences rush the stage in the manner of a revival, and it is common for performers to get the audience to wave their arms in the air like Pentecostalists. Whether it's mass worship, sitting in a theater cheering Bob Hope or John Wayne, or screaming at Eddie Vedder or Kid Lout, the mass experience offers comfort and self-affirmation.

It is also no coincidence that two of today's biggest rock acts skyrocketed into prominence by singing songs that insecure adolescent boys can identify with. In both "I'm A Loser" by Beck and "I'm a Creep" by Radiohead, the singer assumes the role of Christ in suffering humiliation for the listener, but then is triumphantly resurrected by his divine status as a rock star. Add expressions of rebellion and sexuality, and the result appeals to every adolescent.

This is thus a phenomenon that transcends mere taste in music. It is no longer a case of old people frowning at new music in the manner of the reactions against bebop or Stravinsky or Wagner or Beethoven. Old people are supposed to shout THAT'S NOT MUSIC, THAT'S NOISE! The problem now is that it's not noise. If it were noise, it might be interesting. Nor is it music. It's neither fish nor fowl. Pop music today does not serve the same function that music in all previous generations did, because the music itself is only incidental to the star as a cultural hero with whom youth can identify. Music stars may be utterly inept as performers—and this is typically the case, as music is now reduced to one or two chords banged on a guitar in the simplest rhythm possible—but that is insignificant or perhaps even desirable. What matters, and the only thing that matters, is how well the performer represents the cultural aspirations of young people.

Female pop stars appeal to girls and male stars appeal mainly to boys because of this phenomenon of identity. Stars such as Britney [sic]Spears represent the quality of being a desirable-though-chaste sex object that young women naturally aspire to be. Adolescent boys are driven by testosterone to rebellion in a sort of musth, so they identify with stars like Marilyn Manson who assume a sociopathic role. The actual music has no more to do with the spectacle presented than the fact that John Wayne's westerns were all made inside a Hollywood studio with painted backdrops. Reality never blunted any hero's appeal. As long as it's loud, and as long as the performer represents the social aspirations of youth, as long as they're seen as being "cool," the actual quality of the music is of no consequence.

It must not be assumed that I am mocking youth music. It performs an essential function for young people, and I was young and rebellious myself once (this was last month), and wouldn't have had it any other way. God help this society the day boys stop being rebellious and girls voluntarily don the chador, and I would be worried about an adolescent who had covered the walls of his or her room with posters of Arthur Rubinstein or Birgit Nilsson.

The problem, for those of us who are no longer adolescents, is that teen music is so lucrative that all other music has been abandoned—forced off the airwaves and from record shops by a greedy music industry eagerly catering to young people who are willing and able to spend their entire disposable income on CDs. We have become the only society in the history of civilization in which music is strictly the province of adolescents. In all generations past, music was handed down from the elders, and the youth of the society would emulate their example. But now there is no such thing as grown-up music made by grownups for grownups. Everyone listens only to youth music, and a person now in his or her 50s listens only to what was popular when they were 18. An older person may be a fan of the Rolling Stones, but he doesn't listen to the music the Stones are currently producing; he listens to the Stones doing "Satisfaction" or "Honky Tonk Woman"—i.e., what they performed as adolescents. The Public Broadcasting station here appeals to the affluent older crowd by featuring do-wop artists performing their hits of the '50s, when the donors were adolescents.

No one likes performers substantially older or younger than he is. Those of the baby-boom generation despise their parents' big-band music, and Johnny Rotten famously wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the motto, "I HATE PINK FLOYD." This is because performers of a different generation are impossible for one to identify with. No one wants to think of himself as being past his prime; everyone wants to maintain the illusion that they are the same person that they were back when they were young and daring and virile. We all want to be the Pepsi generation, not the Metamucil generation.

With music transformed and debased into a symbol of one's youth, there will cease to be any creation of serious music by accomplished artists. There will be only successive generations of simple pop tunes for each new wave of adolescents. Or has this already happened? Has the tradition of musical excellence and sophistication ended? This was originally a uniquely American problem, but as the murrain of American pop culture engulfs the world, music is no longer an art any more than a Popsicle is cuisine.

Thus far, a statement of the problem, but what (to avoid too depressing a bill) of the solution? Can music be resurrected as an art form for mature adults? It's unlikely, but I offer two hopeful signs.

One, is the present hardship of the record industry. CD sales continue to decline, for which music piracy is generally blamed. I for one find it difficult to sympathize with an industry that has marketed strictly to youth and who now bewail the fact that their target audience has the ethics of adolescents, but as sales plummet, the smart money will go elsewhere. Where? The obvious place would be back to the movies. I see by the financial pages that young people dominate the movie audience which is more lucrative than ever. (Regal Entertainment Group, a theater chain, recently paid a $5.05-per-share dividend—a return of 30%.)

The movies are the logical medium for teen idols, as music only seems to get in the way of what the young audience really wants to see—the performer's antics. And given the paucity of talent, it matters little. When Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo, in case you've just returned from another galaxy) was first discovered, it was realized that she was a hot [pudendum] and thus a marketable commodity. But how to market her? There was some attempt to outfit her with back-up singers and choreographers and thus make her another music diva, but the cinema is waxing profitable, so her handlers wisely chose to instead make her a movie star.

The more this happens, the better it will be for music. (I shudder to imagine the ghastly results had Cameron Diaz been given a music career instead of acting.) As more money rolls in from trash movies, there will be that much less incentive to run classical music stations off the public airwaves to provide yet another outlet for teen music.

And that's where you come in.

Classical music needs your support to lure the greedy promoters of youth culture away from music to the cinema. If you purchase a ticket to see Charlie's Angels or Gigli or some other dreck, it will give the cretins of the music industry that much more incentive to instead focus on movies because, in the words of the late Willie "the Actor" Sutton, "That's where the money is!" . You don't actually have to watch the movie (I, for one, would rather have myself blinded), just support it. Each dollar you spend will help induce youth trash culture away from music.

Isn't that worth something?