(BLOG SERIES) Rebel Music: How Modern Pop Subverts Traditional Norms of Beauty, Morality, and Culture [Part 1]

“Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it.”

-          Aristotle

“Bring out the boss, b*tch”

-         Jennie Kim of BLACKPINK, “How You Like That”

I.                 Introduction

“Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience.”

-          Sir Roger Scruton, from A point of View: Why it’s time to turn the Music off, published by the BBC, November 15, 2015

Pop music is all over the place. Many public spaces wherein we gather play it. The internet talks about it. Radio and TV exposes us to it. People, most especially the young, seem to enjoy it. It seems that wherever you go or whatever you do, songs by artists like Ariana Grande or BTS are the background sound, almost always unceasingly by our side, like a stalker in the night.

Interestingly, the time wherein pop is at its peak (which is today, obviously) is also the time wherein most of humanity seems to shun the ideals of the past. This is most evident in morality and religion. People no longer see the sexual act as supposed to be done under the marital context. Language has become increasingly profane. Clothing is commonly immodest. Religious indifferentism is dogma. At the heart of everything is relativism, a “you do you, I do me” attitude, wherein all criticism and judgment, even done logically and fairly, is taboo.

Could there be a connection between the new trends in music with the sudden shift in the moral and religious behavior of people? In this essay, I would answer in the affirmative: that, indeed, pop music and pop culture are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. What one does, the other is always beside it, cheering for it, celebrating its accomplishments. There’s a reason why Lady Gaga is the official creator of the hymn of the homosexual cult, with her song, “Born this Way”.

What’s more, the pop music/pop culture tag team has changed the world for the worse. As pop became less and less real music, modern morality has made human action less and less in accord with human nature. The ugly and the evil work side by side, as we’ll see.

This entails that pop music has shaped (and is still shaping) the culture which we are all exposed to. From the way we talk and walk, sing and dance, love and hate, commit and omit: modern music has something to do with it all. In other words, pop music is not just “background sound” for the ears, it has also become the background sound of life itself.

My aim in this essay is to criticize pop music for what it is and what it has done to the world. Now, for people who know me, this might be an odd thing to do. I am not a music expert nor am I a very talented musician. I sing at times, but that’s all I can do with regards to music. So, talking about pop music and dissecting it might not seem to be a job for me, but for the trained musician. People might then conclude that I ought to shut up on the matter.

Yes, it is true that I am no Beethoven. But there’s one thing that I am and that is I am a student of philosophy, particularly of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. These three branches of philosophy touches most, if not all, of human life (metaphysics is surely a branch of philosophy that touches all of human life!). And music, as we all know, is an integral part of human experience. Philosophy, then, is able to interact with music and can therefore say something about it, even though it is something different from what a musician might say. Just to be clear, we will be looking at history and anthropology as well, but the foundation will always be the philosophical analysis given in this paper.

To start our journey, it is important to give an exposition first as to what exactly is the purpose of music for our forefathers and what this purpose means: beauty.

(To be continued...)