Steven Colbert on the USA as a "Christian Nation"

What Will the 2010 Census Say about New Orleans?

NYT
April 7, 2010
Suspense Builds Over Census for New Orleans
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — Nobody really knows how many people live here.

Ever since this city was full of water and nearly empty of residents in September 2005, the true size of New Orleans has been a matter of wild uncertainty. Even today, population estimates can swing by the tens of thousands.

“There’s a range out there that might be as big as 50,000,” said Ken Hodges, chief demographer for Nielsen Claritas, a market research firm. “There is still a substantial amount of uncertainty.”

By early 2011, however, the city’s population will finally become an official number, if not a hard fact.

This year’s census will be revealing and important in every city, of course, according to the crude math that each citizen equals a certain amount of government money and political clout. But the stakes of the census here, as in other hurricane-battered cities and towns from Moss Point, Miss., to Galveston, Tex., are more profound.

The final numbers, no matter how much people here may challenge them — and challenges are almost a certainty — will go far in determining how New Orleans thinks about itself, whether it is continuing to mount a steady comeback or whether it has sputtered and stalled, how far it has fallen in the ranks of the country’s cities, and how quickly it is likely to rise again.

Determining how many people live here will not be an easy task, given the thousands who are still homeless or living with relatives as they await permanent housing, and the bureau is allowing some unconventional counting practices. The results should show who the city’s residents are, answering one of the most agonizing questions that has lingered after Katrina: What is the true size of the city’s black majority, once as large as two-thirds of the population?

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Read the full story (w/images) HERE.

BBC on Sudanese "Cuban-Jubans"

BBC
Can the 'Cuban-Jubans' rebuild South Sudan?

By Lucy Fleming
BBC News, Juba

With Cuban pork roast on the menu, Salsa classes on a Thursday and animated Spanish competing with the Latin beat, De Havana club in the South Sudanese capital Juba feels as though it is on the wrong continent.

“ I think Cuba is unique; they believe in what you are - not where you belong or which religion you practise or the colour of your skin ”
Dr Okony Simon Mori

It is here that a group of former Sudanese exiles, known as the "Cuban-Jubans", gather most nights to share a bottle of whisky and put the world to rights - in Spanish.

Among them are doctors, pharmacists, accountants, engineers and economists.

All were educated in Cuba during Sudan's 21-year civil war and are now regarded as the intellectual elite of the south - one of the world's poorest and least developed regions.

"In Juba we have more than 100 Cuban graduates from different fields, all part of the 600-plus students sent to Cuba for education," says 38-year-old Dr Okony Simon Mori.

He returned to work at Juba's Teaching Hospital in 2007, two years after a peace deal ended the conflict in which some 1.5 million people died.

'Pencils for Kalashnikovs'

He was just 13 when chosen by the newly launched southern rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), to go to Cuba.

"Our late hero [SPLM leader] Dr John Garang told us: 'Now the elder people will take the AK-47 and you guys will take the pencil and the pencil will be your Kalashnikov,'" he recalls.

Dr Okony left his family in 1985 at one of the refugee camps in Ethiopia where thousands of Sudanese had fled the fighting between the army of the Muslim-dominated north and Arab militia on the one side and the SPLM on the other.

He travelled to Cuba aboard a Russian ship and did not see his mother and father again for 18 years - and it was not until he graduated and moved to Canada a decade later that he had any direct contact with them.

"We stayed in a boarding school in a small island called Isla de la Juventud [Island of Youth]. There were 25,000 students from different countries - most of them from Africa and Latin America," Dr Okony says.

"I think Cuba is unique and is a very special place; they believe in what you are - not where you belong or which religion you practise or the colour of your skin.

"The only thing they care about is your well-being and your aptitude. Really, they treated us as their own children."

>>>>>>>>>>>

Read the entire story HERE.

Universty Courses on "The Wire"

SLATE
culturebox
This Will Be on the Midterm. You Feel Me?
Why so many colleges are teaching The Wire.
By Drake Bennett
Posted Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at 7:08 AM ET

Among the police officers and drug dealers and stickup men and politicians and dockworkers and human smugglers and teachers and students and junkies and lawyers and journalists who populate the late, great HBO series The Wire, there is one academic. His name is David Parenti and he teaches social work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He is not a major character, but he appears throughout the show's fourth season—an earnest, well-meaning man defined in part by his naïveté about the inner-city kids whose lives he wants to improve. As for Johns Hopkins, Baltimore's best-known university, it only comes up as a place where the show's police officers can get cushy campus security jobs after they retire. Academia, in other words, is not a culture that the show's creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, betray much interest in exploring.

Academics, on the other hand, can't seem to get enough of The Wire. Barely two years after the show's final episode aired—and with Simon's new show, Treme, premiering next month on HBO—there have already been academic conferences, essay anthologies, and special issues of journals dedicated to the series. Not content to write about it and discuss it among themselves, academics are starting to teach it, as well. Professors at Harvard, U.C.—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.

Interestingly, the classes aren't just in film studies or media studies departments; they're turning up in social science disciplines as well, places where the preferred method of inquiry is the field study or the survey, not the HBO series, even one that is routinely called the best television show ever. Some sociologists and social anthropologists, it turns out, believe The Wire has something to teach their students about poverty, class, bureaucracy, and the social ramifications of economic change.

The academic love affair with The Wire is not, as it turns out, a totally unrequited one. One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall. Simon has said that Wilson's book When Work Disappears, an exploration of the crippling effects of the loss of blue-collar jobs in American cities, was the inspiration for the show's second season, which focused on Baltimore's struggling dockworkers.

Wilson's class, a seminar, will require students to watch selected episodes of the show, three or more a week, he says. Some seasons, like the fourth, with its portrayal of the way the public school system fails poor children, will get more time than others. Students will also read works of sociology: two books by Wilson, as well as Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, Sandra Susan Smith's Lone Pursuit, Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America, and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's Off the Books, works that explore poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and the underground economy.

Asked why he was teaching a class around a TV drama, Wilson said the show makes the concerns of sociologists immediate in a way no work of sociology he knows of ever has. "Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own," he wrote in an e-mail.

For Wilson, the unique power of the show comes from the way it takes fiction's ability to create fully realized inner lives for its characters and combines that with qualities rare in a piece of entertainment: an acuity about the structural conditions that constrain human choices (whether it's bureaucratic inertia, institutional racism, or economic decay) and an unparalleled scrupulousness about accurately portraying them. Wilson describes the show's characters almost as a set of case studies, remarkable for the vividness with which they embody a set of arguments about the American inner city. "What I'm concentrating on is how this series so brilliantly illustrates theories and processes that social scientists have been writing about for years," he said in an interview.

Anne-Maria Makhulu, a social anthropologist at Duke teaching a course there on The Wire this spring, makes a similar point about the show's power as a social document. She finds that, for many of her largely upper-middle-class students, issues like poverty and urban deindustrialization are remote from their daily lives, and simply reading about them does little to bridge that gap. The Wire puts faces and stories to those forces—Stringer Bell, the gang leader with the heart of a CFO; Bubbles, the wry, entrepreneurial junkie; "Bunny" Colvin, the police major who grows so disenchanted by the war on drugs that he tries legalizing them in his district.

"There's this question of how you appeal to young people who feel—not all of them but many of them—far removed from the type of people who are the major characters in The Wire," Makhulu says.

The media scholars offering courses on The Wire treat the show differently. They're quick to point out the show's impressive verisimilitude, and they're happy, they say, to see the show being studied across academic disciplines. But to these thinkers, treating the show simply as a look into the intricacies of the American inner city is incomplete.

...............

Asked about the academic uses of the show, Simon himself declined to weigh in, writing in an e-mail, "It's gratifying to have the ideas and arguments that we put forward seriously discussed in any forum, including academia." Wilson, for his part, sees questions like Mittell's as interesting but secondary. There are issues that arise from the ways that the show is fictionalized, he concedes; they're just not the ones that interest him. "You want to talk about it being fiction, call it fiction," he says, "but it shows incredible imagination and understanding about the way the world works, and for me that's enough."

Read the full post, including links to the course syllabi HERE.

UPDATE: SLATE has even more courses listed now, including syllabi HERE.

For fellow The Wire fans, here's an earlier post about The Wire's ghetto Goodnight Moon

NPR on a New Kind of Christianity (book)

NPR

Jesus, Reconsidered: Book Sparks Evangelical Debate
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
March 26, 2010

..........
Rethinking Christianity

Who is Brian McLaren, and what has he done to make these people so angry?

It turns out that McLaren is considered one of the country's most influential evangelicals, and his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, takes aim at some core doctrinal beliefs. McLaren is rethinking Jesus' mission on Earth, and even the purpose of the crucifixion.

"The view of the cross that I was given growing up, in a sense, has a God who needs blood in order to be appeased," McLaren says. "If this God doesn't see blood, God can't forgive."

McLaren believes that version of God is a misreading of the Bible.

"God revealed in Christ crucified shows us a vision of God that identifies with the victim rather than the perpetrator, identifies with the one suffering rather than the one inflicting suffering," he says.

McLaren says modern evangelicalism underplays that Jesus — who spent most of his time with the poor, the sick and the sinners — saved his wrath primarily for hard-core religious leaders.

Others, such as Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, say McLaren's view of Jesus and the crucifixion is like a shot to the heart of Christian beliefs.

"Did Jesus go to the cross as a mere victim? If so, then we have no Gospel, we have no hope of everlasting life," Mohler says. "Did Jesus go merely as a political prisoner, executed because he had offended the regime? Well, if so, that's a very interesting chapter of human history, but I'm not going to stake my life on it, much less my hope for eternity."

Discrepancies Between Old And Young Believers

Mohler says McLaren and others like him are trying to rewrite the Christian story. And what alarms Mohler is that young believers are attracted to this message.

That's absolutely right, says McLaren. Consider the core evangelical belief that only Christians are going to heaven and everyone else is doomed. That may have rung true for his grandparents' generation, he says, but not now.

"A young evangelical, Roman Catholic [or] mainline Protestant growing up in America today, if he goes to college, his roommate might be Hindu," he says. "His roommate might be Muslim. His roommate might be Buddhist or atheist. So, suddenly the 'other' is sleeping across the room."

McLaren is onto something here, says David Campbell, a professor at Notre Dame and co-author of American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives. His surveys show that nearly two-thirds of evangelicals under age 35 believe non-Christians can go to heaven, but only 39 percent of those over age 65 believe that. That's because young evangelicals have grown up in a religiously plural society.

"And, it's really hard to condemn someone to eternal damnation on the basis of their religion when you know them well and have come to love them," he says.

Campbell adds that young believers are more flexible about Christian doctrine in general.

"We also know that — particularly within the evangelical community — the younger you are, the less likely you are to take the Bible literally, to believe that the Bible is the inerrant 'word of God,' as compared to a book of moral precepts," he says.

Surveys by Campbell and others show young evangelicals differ from their elders in a lot of ways. They pray less often, read the Bible and go to church less often. And they're more open to culture and social issues, such as evolution and gay rights.

.........

Listen to or read the story or read an book excerpt HERE.

Virginia Postrel on Race and (In)Conspicuous Consumption

This story is a couple of years old but interesting. h/t to TN Coates at the Atlantic.

The Atlantic
July/August 2008
Inconspicuous Consumption

A new theory of the leisure class
By Virginia Postrel

About seven years ago, University of Chicago economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst were researching the “wealth gap” between black and white Americans when they noticed something striking. African Americans not only had less wealth than whites with similar incomes, they also had significantly more of their assets tied up in cars. The statistic fit a stereotype reinforced by countless bling-filled hip-hop videos: that African Americans spend a lot on cars, clothes, and jewelry—highly visible goods that tell the world the owner has money.

But do they really? And, if so, why?

The two economists, along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania, have now attacked those questions. What they found not only provides insight into the economic differences between racial groups, it challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.

On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

Of course, different ethnic groups could simply have different tastes. Maybe blacks just enjoy jewelry more than whites do. Maybe they buy costlier clothes to deter slights from racist salesclerks. Maybe they spend more on cars for historical reasons, because of the freedom auto travel gave African Americans during the days of segregated trains and buses. Maybe they just aren’t that interested in private colleges or big-screen TVs. Or maybe not. Economists hate unfalsifiable tautologies about differing tastes. They want stories that could apply to anyone.

So the researchers went back to Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term conspicuous consumption. Writing in the much poorer world of 1899, Veblen argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous. “The motive is emulation—the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves,” he wrote. Along these lines, the economists hypothesized that visible consumption lets individuals show strangers they aren’t poor. Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.

To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states—say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.

The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households—about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove.

So this research has implications beyond race. It ought to apply to any peer group perceived by strangers. It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today—and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor. Veblen was right.

But he was also wrong. Or at least his theory is out of date. Given that the richer your group, the less flashy spending you’ll do, conspicuous consumption isn’t a universal phenomenon. It’s a development phase. It declines as countries, regions, or distinct groups get richer. “Bling rules in emerging economies still eager to travel the status-through-product consumption road,” the market-research group Euromonitor recently noted, but luxury businesses “are becoming aware that bling isn’t enough for growing numbers of consumers in developed economies.” At some point, luxury becomes less a tool of public status competition and more a means to private pleasure.

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Read the entire original post HERE.

Controversy Over Changing Lyrics of Canadian National Anthem (O Canada)

CBC News

O Canada lyrics to be reviewed
Last Updated: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 | 6:28 PM ET

Get ready to memorize new words to the national anthem.

Parliament is to be asked to review the "original gender-neutral wording of the national anthem," says the throne speech delivered by Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean on Wednesday.

O Canada includes the lyrics "true patriot love in all thy sons command," and there may be interest in changing that line to something more inclusive.

O Canada, with music composed by Calixa Lavallée in 1880, became the national anthem in 1980, replacing God Save the Queen.

Its English lyrics have been adapted several times over the years, but the current version is based on a poem written in 1908 by Stanley Weir.

It begins: "O Canada Our home and native land! True patriot love thou dost in us command. We see thee rising fair, dear land, The True North strong and free."

The official English version now in use incorporates changes recommended in 1968 by a joint committee of MPs and senators that added the lines "from far and wide" and "God keep our land glorious and free!"

The surprise proposal to review the lyrics had parliamentary observers buzzing. The throne speech gave no indication what prompted the plan.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said the initiative to change the lyrics is the kind of "symbolic gesture" the Conservative government makes when it doesn't want to do anything real.

"Anything that makes a national anthem more gender-sensitive is a good thing," he told CBC News.

"But, I mean, no disrespect to those who feel strongly on this issue, but, for heaven's sake, we have some very important challenges and every time the government is asked to do something real, it does something symbolic.

"There's lots of things to do for women that are more important than changing the words of the national anthem, just as there are lots of things to do for pensioners and seniors that are more important than having a Seniors Day."

********
O Canada official lyrics

O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free!

From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee


And here is a story on the pushback.

Archeological Discovery in Turkey Forces Rethinking of Human History

Newsweek

History in the Remaking
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

By Patrick Symmes | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.

Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

Read the entire article HERE.

In Sierra Leone, pop music is a beat that drives politics

LAT

latimes.com
In Sierra Leone, pop music is a beat that drives politics
Political debate in the African nation often takes the form of protest songs; some have even toppled governments. Mostly illiterate, citizens rely heavily on singers for an independent take on events.

By Scott Kraft

January 3, 2010

Reporting from Freetown, Sierra Leone

Everywhere he went in Freetown's ghettos, a dreadlocked young vocalist named Innocent heard the plea. People were fed up with lies, theft and corruption. This government had to go, they said, and they begged Innocent to speak out.

So late one night, Innocent drove to Forensic Studios, a rundown pair of rooms on a clamorous downtown street. The sound engineer was asleep on an old sofa, and Innocent shook him awake.

"Let's do something," Innocent said, "and release it tomorrow."

The single "Injectment Notice" -- "eviction notice" in the lingua franca of Sierra Leone -- helped spark a ballot-box rebellion in 2007. "I told people: If you don't like this government, vote them out," he said. "And it actually happened."

Sierra Leone's engaging blend of hip-hop, Afro-pop and reggae sounds flourished after the end of the brutal, decade-long civil war in 2002, and the number of radio stations playing those tunes swelled from nine to more than 50.

Today, music here is more than simple entertainment. It has become the vehicle for a decibel-busting national political debate. With the sixth-highest rate of illiteracy in the world and a deep suspicion of the ruling elite, Sierra Leone's 6 million people rely heavily on their pop stars -- often educated and well-traveled -- for an independent take on what's going on.

"These songs are the only way the masses have of expressing what they want to say," said Emrys Savage, a record producer and former DJ who wears Che Guevara T-shirts and goes by the name King Fisher. "For us, it's all about bringing social change."

In recent weeks, though, Innocent, a grandson of Nigeria's Afrobeat mega-star Fela Kuti, has been locked in a musical smack-down with one of the country's most famous singers, Emmerson Bockarie, over a question much of the nation is asking: How is the new government doing?

The answer isn't so clear in a fledgling democracy with vast unmet needs and high expectations, a nation where the new government felt compelled to create an Office of Attitudinal Change to inspire patriotism. "Our goal is to remake and rebrand the image of this country" and encourage Sierra Leoneans to change their "bad attitudes," said Allieu Kamara, a former Washington insurance salesman who runs the office.

Both Innocent and Emmerson had helped light the fire that consumed the last government. Even before Innocent released his protest song, Emmerson had recorded "Borbor Bele" ("Pot-Bellied Boy"), which speared corpulent politicians who sold themselves to the highest bidders.

The protest song industry largely fell silent when President Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People's Congress took office in 2007, riding a wave of promises to end corruption, improve healthcare and bring electricity and clean water to the hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leoneans without it.

Emmerson, for one, had high hopes. "I was confident that this government would bring about change, and that's why I kept silent," he said. "I really believed."

But when he returned from a U.S. tour a few months ago, he didn't like what he saw. "It's been more than two years and we're still not seeing any foundation or any road being built to change," he said. "This government is feeling too comfortable and too loved. They need to work harder."

Emmerson went back to the recording studio and laid down the track for "Yesterday Betteh Pass Tiday" -- "Yesterday Was Better Than Today."

"Whenever we think we have a savior," he sings, "we see a government that betrays the people. Maybe tomorrow will be better, but no one knows tomorrow. I don't know about you, but my yesterday was better than today."

That message of discontent touched off a firestorm.

Emmerson is "simply the best lyrical musician in Sierra Leone," said the editor of the New Citizen newspaper, but to argue that yesterday is better than today "is absurd."

.....

The the full story with images HERE.

NYT: Japan's Capsule Hotels Become Homes in Recession

NYT
January 2, 2010
For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.

“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.

The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.

....

Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.

Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.

The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.

Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.

Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.

Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.

“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.

But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.

After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.

Read the full story and view accompanying photo essay HERE.

Japan's Rebellious Cultural "Herbavores" [slate]

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The Herbivore's Dilemma
Japan panics about the rise of "grass-eating men," who shun sex, don't spend money, and like taking walks.
By Alexandra Harney
Posted Monday, June 15, 2009, at 2:04 PM ET

Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He's just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment. Until recently, Igarashi, a 27-year-old Japanese television presenter, would have been considered effeminate, even gay. Japanese men have long been expected to live like characters on Mad Men, chasing secretaries, drinking with the boys, and splurging on watches, golf, and new cars.

Today, Igarashi has a new identity (and plenty of company among young Japanese men) as one of the soushoku danshi—literally translated, "grass-eating boys." Named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives, Japan's "herbivores" are provoking a national debate about how the country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men's behavior.

Newspapers, magazines, and television shows are newly fixated on the herbivores. "Have men gotten weaker?" was one theme of a recent TV talk show. "Herbivores Aren't So Bad" is the title of a regular column on the Japanese Web site NB Online.

In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss? The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy. Media Shakers, a consulting company that is a subsidiary of Dentsu, the country's largest advertising agency, estimates that 60 percent of men in their early 20s and at least 42 percent of men aged 23 to 34 consider themselves grass-eating men. Partner Agent, a Japanese dating agency, found in a survey that 61 percent of unmarried men in their 30s identified themselves as herbivores. Of the 1,000 single men in their 20s and 30s polled by Lifenet, a Japanese life-insurance company, 75 percent described themselves as grass-eating men.

Japanese companies are worried that herbivorous boys aren't the status-conscious consumers their parents once were. They love to putter around the house. According to Media Shakers' research, they are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends, more likely to shop for things to decorate their homes, and more likely to buy little luxuries than big-ticket items. They prefer vacationing in Japan to venturing abroad. They're often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.

Grass-eating boys' commitment phobia is not the only thing that's worrying Japanese women. Unlike earlier generations of Japanese men, they prefer not to make the first move, they like to split the bill, and they're not particularly motivated by sex. "I spent the night at one guy's house, and nothing happened—we just went to sleep!" moaned one incredulous woman on a TV program devoted to herbivores. "It's like something's missing with them," said Yoko Yatsu, a 34-year-old housewife, in an interview. "If they were more normal, they'd be more interested in women. They'd at least want to talk to women."

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked. "Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills," he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)

It may be that Japan's efforts to make the workplace more egalitarian planted the seeds for the grass-eating boys, says Fukasawa. In the wake of Japan's 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, women assumed greater responsibility at work, and the balance of power between the sexes began to shift. Though there are still significant barriers to career advancement for women, a new breed of female executive who could party almost as hard as her male colleagues emerged. Office lechery, which had been socially acceptable, became stigmatized as seku hara, or sexual harassment.

But it was the bursting of Japan's bubble in the early 1990s, coupled with this shift in the social landscape, that made the old model of Japanese manhood unsustainable. Before the bubble collapsed, Japanese companies offered jobs for life. Salarymen who knew exactly where their next paycheck was coming from were more confident buying a Tiffany necklace or an expensive French dinner for their girlfriend. Now, nearly 40 percent of Japanese work in nonstaff positions with much less job security.

"When the economy was good, Japanese men had only one lifestyle choice: They joined a company after they graduated from college, got married, bought a car, and regularly replaced it with a new one," says Fukasawa. "Men today simply can't live that stereotypical 'happy' life."

Yoto Hosho, a 22-year-old college dropout who considers himself and most of his friends herbivores, believes the term describes a diverse group of men who have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else. "We don't care at all what people think about how we live," he says.

Many of Hosho's friends spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing. And the Internet, he says, has helped make alternative lifestyles more acceptable. Hosho believes that the lines between men and women in his generation have blurred. He points to the popularity of "boys love," a genre of manga and novels written for women about romantic relationships between men that has spawned its own line of videos, computer games, magazines, and cafes where women dress as men.

Fukasawa contends that while some grass-eating men may be gay, many are not. Nor are they metrosexuals. Rather, their behavior reflects a rejection of both the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West's "commercialization" of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman's affection. Some Western concepts, like going to dinner parties as a couple, never fit easily into Japanese culture, she says. Others never even made it into the language—the term "ladies first," for instance, is usually said in English in Japan. During Japan's bubble economy, "Japanese people had to live according to both Western standards and Japanese standards," says Fukasawa. "That trend has run its course."

Japanese women are not taking the herbivores' indifference lightly. In response to the herbivorous boys' tepidity, "carnivorous girls" are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing men more aggressively. Also known as "hunters," these women could be seen as Japan's version of America's cougars.

While many Japanese women might disagree, Fukasawa sees grass-eating boys as a positive development for Japanese society. She notes that before World War II, herbivores were more common: Novelists such as Osamu Dazai and Soseki Natsume would have been considered grass-eating boys. But in the postwar economic boom, men became increasingly macho, increasingly hungry for products to mark their personal economic progress. Young Japanese men today are choosing to have less to prove.

Alexandra Harney is the author of The China Price and a regular commentator on Japanese television.

The Porning of America and What's at Stake for Youth

Newsweek

The Pornification Of A Generation

A new book traces the migration of porn culture from adult theaters to the mainstream—and asks what that means for kids.
Jessica Bennett
NEWSWEEK

The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."

In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn't take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.

But it isn't just sex that Scott is worried about. He's more interested in how we, as a culture, often mimic the most raunchy, degrading parts of it—many of which, he says, come directly from pornography. In "The Porning of America" (Beacon), which he has written with colleague Carmine Sarracino, a professor of American literature, the duo argue that, through Bratz dolls and beyond, the influence of porn on mainstream culture is affecting our self perceptions and behavior—in everything from fashion to body image to how we conceptualize our sexuality.

read the rest of the story HERE

Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed

Reuters/MSNBC

Uncontacted Amazon tribe photographed
Images show Indians painted bright red, brandishing bows and arrows
By Stuart Grudgings
Reuters
updated 4:38 p.m. PT, Thurs., May. 29, 2008

RIO DE JANEIRO - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.

The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.

"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.

One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on.

Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.

Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

Turbo-folk music is the sound of Serbia feeling sorry for itself

Diva of nationalism: Svetlana Raznatovic – ‘Ceca’ – is Serbia’s most famous star of turbo-folk. As much aesthetic as sound, the genre drips with the emotional martyrdom of a wounded nation and the commercialism of sex.
Srdjan Ilic/ap

Christian Science Monitor
Turbo-folk music is the sound of Serbia feeling sorry for itself
A product of the criminal Milosevic era, its odd nostalgia is the soundtrack to a new wave of nationalism.
By Nicole Itano | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 5, 2008 edition



BELGRADE, Serbia - The women parade across the stage, stiletto heels clacking as they croon songs of love and loss – ballads of village girls and heroic battles, of unrequited love and faithless men.

"Wherever I go, I always end up in the same place," goes the final medley, sung by a squadron of buxom, scantily-clad women to the accompaniment of accordions and brass. "Who can tear Kosovo away from my soul?"

The crowd cheers, waves heart-shaped balloons, and joins in. "Serbia, Serbia!" they chant.

This is the beat of nationalism in Serbia, the mournful, pumped-up tunes of turbo-folk, a genre born in the dark days of Yugoslavia's disintegration. And as Serbia confronts a resurgent nationalism – fueled by economic troubles and anger over Kosovo's declaration of independence – the rhythms of the Milosevic era are again playing on the political stage.

Turbo-folk is a flippant – oxymoronic – term that stuck to a genre of traditionally inspired folk songs set to a techno-pop beat. Associated with the brutal nationalism of the 1990s when Serbia was under the sway of the late Slobodan Milosevic, it is as much an aesthetic as a sound, one that is aggressive, brazenly sexual, and dripping with patriotic pride and victimhood.

"Turbo-folk," explains Milos Trninic, a local singer who plays in turbo-folk clubs, "sells emotion."

At the Amsterdam, a popular boat-cafe on the Danube River, young women in six-inch heels totter in, with ever-so-short skirts over fishnet stockings. Plunging necklines are de rigueur and platinum-dyed hair glints in the blinking lights. The men are less flashily dressed; in this world of new-money ostentatiousness, it's the thickness of their wallets that matters most.

Turbo-folk, according to Serbian academic Ivana Kronja, who has written a book on the music, glorified a newly emergent criminal class in Serbia – tied to Mr. Milosevic – that rose to power and prominence in the 1990s. Svetlana Raznatovic – the most famous turbo-folk singer, nicknamed Ceca – is the widow of the notorious Serbian paramilitary leader "Arkan," who was indicted on genocide charges by The Hague tribunal for Bosnian war crimes. She herself was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003.

Once again, these are troubled times for Serbia, which is awash with rage over the Feb. 17 declaration of independence by Kosovo. After the traumatic 1990s – when Serbia lost four wars, was bombed by NATO, and faced international condemnation and isolation – the chastened country seemed to be slowly creeping toward a Western orbit.

But western support for Kosovo's independence has strained ties between Serbia and Western Europe and reopened old wounds.The fragile governing coalition collapsed in the wake of Kosovo's independence declaration.

Now, as the country heads into yet another round of elections on May 11, there's a strong possibility that Serbia's next government will be a coalition with a strongly nationalistic flavor, between the center-right Democratic Party of Serbia and the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, which wants closer ties to Russia.

So, licking its wounds again, Serbia is feeling the resurgence of the turbo-folk beat.

Modern politics here has always had a soundtrack. There was the '80s rock embraced by a generation shrugging off the shackles of communism. The turbo-folk of Serbian aggression in the 1990s gave way to more alternative pop fare – hip hop, electronica, indie rock – tied to the revolt against Milosevic, who was toppled by street protests in 2000.

But turbo-folk's popularity never completely waned, even during the years when Milosevic was on trial for crimes against humanity. The genre's younger generation of fans, who can sing along with the turbo-folk anthems of the 1990s, say the music has shed its nationalistic undertones and now worships only commercial success.

"When it appeared in the 1990s, maybe it was political," says Milos Vuksanovic, the handsome guitarist of a band that plays weekly at the Amsterdam. "Now it's more a way of dressing. The girls, especially, they want to be stylish and to dress and be seen in a certain way."

After a decade of cultural isolation, in the years since Milosevic's fall, new musical styles have flooded in, many associated with the youth revolt. There are now Serbian rappers, like Beogradski Sindikat (Belgrade Syndicate) – who have taken on corruption – and punk bands and rockers. The Exit Festival, an annual concert in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, has become one of the great alternative-music festivals in Europe, attracting people from across the continent.

But turbo-folk still outsells them all in Serbia. The most popular clubs in Belgrade play the music on their busiest nights. Street stalls sell bootleg CDs of popular turbo-folk (and little else).

Local media broadcast their political philosophies through music, too. You won't hear turbo-folk on B92, which started as an anti-Milosevic youth radio station with alternative music and independent news and now broadcasts nationally on radio and TV. Pink TV – a shamelessly commercial TV station – plays endless videos of scantily clad singers belting out the folk-inspired tunes. Its most popular show, "Grand Parade," is an American Idol-like program on which viewers vote for their favorite songs, mostly turbo-folk.

But despite turbo-folk's wide popularity, many Serbs are hesitant to admit they like it, perhaps because the taint of nationalism lingers.

"People try to distance themselves from folk," says Mr. Vuksanovic, who confesses he doesn't particularly like the turbo-folk he sings. (He prefers Phil Collins.) "They put on an act and say that they only listen to turbo-folk when they go out. They are ashamed of it."

For Serbia's politicians, though, in these deeply divided times, music remains a powerful way of channeling ideology. Rallies for nationalist political parties play to nostalgic ballads, and, in the presidential election in February, the differences between the two candidates could be heard as much as seen.

Western-oriented liberal Boris Tadic, who was narrowly reelected as president, campaigned to the tunes of 1980s Belgrade rock, associated with the dying days of communism and the country's opening to the West. But his ultranationalist opponent, Tomislav Nikolic, known as "Toma" to his supporters, was backed at rallies by provocatively dressed turbo-folk crooners who sang nationalistic anthems and love songs with his name inserted as the romantic hero: "This life is not worth living if Toma does not win."

For many liberal-leaning Serbs, the right's embrace of turbo-folk is enough to send them running.

"Those of us who are political and socially aware, we would never go listen to that type of music," insisted Maia Todorovic, a beautiful, dreadlocked 19-year-old at a get-out-the-vote concert before the February election.

"It's not even music," scoffed her friend Tamara Antonijevic.

"Besides," laughed Ms. Todorovic, assessing the crowd, among which there was not a stiletto heel in sight. "We don't have the right clothes."

NYT Travel: Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?

New York Times Travel
May 18, 2008
Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?
By DAN BARRY

AN August night in the sea-scented village of Kinvara finds us at Connolly’s, a pub so permanent that if some codger were to tell you it was here before Galway Bay, lapping now just outside the door, you’d nod and buy him a pint. My wife and I are hunched at a small table with friends when a smiling woman in a peasant skirt sits beside us, carrying a perfectly appropriate accessory in this corner of Ireland — a button accordion.

She is Mary Staunton, a musician known throughout the Irish west. When the inevitable call goes out, she obliges, her fingers skipping across the buttons like children playing frantic but sure-footed hopscotch. Then a white-haired man mentions an old song from his childhood. Does she know it? Why yes, she does, and when her fingers finish their dance, leaving the man smiling, there suddenly rises from across the room the hesitant but clear voice of a young woman who has summoned the nerve to sing. (“And I said let grief be a fallen leaf/At the dawning of the day.”) As she sings, all talking stops: an entire pub, transported. And I think to myself, now this would never happen where I’m from.

Was this the real Ireland? Or was it a rare dash of magic, sprinkled into Connolly’s to validate an antiquated sense of Ireland — a sense rooted in the days when economic inequity between two countries allowed American tourists to spend as though Ireland were one sprawling duty-free shop? Though the country is now experiencing some economic uneasiness, you still cannot help but think: How times have changed.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western counties of Galway and Clare, and if nothing else, this is what I have gleaned: Ireland can be that place you missed as you traveled around Ireland, looking for Ireland.

Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.

You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.

There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland.

Well versed by now in the lesson that to search for Ireland is to miss it, my family and I once again settled into a self-catered apartment in Kinvara, a village cleaved to Galway Bay near the Clare-Galway border. A generation ago, even a decade ago, you might have called it an unhurried place; now Kinvara captures the transformation of Ireland in so many ways.

The village has a few narrow streets, some shops and pubs, and a stone-walled pier more than 200 years old, from which the distant lights of Galway City can be seen at night and the inhalations and exhalations of the sea can be measured. Across from the pier there looms Dunguaire Castle, which for nearly five centuries has stood on grounds near the ancient fort of Guaire, seventh-century King of Connaught.

The castle’s topmost open windows offer a panoramic view of a Kinvara in flux. Much of the surrounding farmland is being subdivided for new homes, some of them being offered for the equivalent of $1 million and more; they appeal to young professionals looking for an easy commute into Galway, and to affluent Dubliners seeking a second-home getaway. It all leaves one wondering whether the village’s aesthetics are at risk; whether these new developments, and the taxing of the fragile infrastructure they represent, will make Kinvara less — Kinvara-like.

But for now, Kinvara presents curious juxtapositions of the old and the new. Here, for example, an inviting place called the Burren Beo Café occupies an old stone storefront where wireless access is available and where tombstones from a long-gone churchyard adorn the patio. You can sip your caffè latte and imagine the life led by one Bryan Daly, who departed this life at the age of 33, in 1816, and whose headstone lies flat at your feet.

THOUGH Kinvara is perfectly situated for day trips to other points of the Irish west, I often struggle with whether to stay or to go, lulled as I am by the mundane daily rhythms of a village I have come to know in all seasons.

In the mornings, I watch the same white-bearded fisherman — said to be Kinvara’s last — park his old black bicycle by the pier, row a skiff to his rusty-green vessel, and disappear into the bay. Sometime later I see him rowing back to shore, where he mounts his bicycle and vanishes down a narrow lane, leaving me to wonder whether I had actually seen him or simply imagined him.

In the afternoons, I sometimes see the beer truck pull up to Connolly’s, and I watch the deliveryman throw a seat cushion on the ground, bounce the beer kegs precisely onto the cushion, then spin them like squat and silvery dance partners toward the pub door.

And in the evenings, I take walks with my wife and two young daughters along a worn path that meanders along the shoreline and through pastures where cows, horses and donkeys approach, as if seeking the latest gossip from Connolly’s. At the stony pier we watch the bobbing of moored Galway hookers, traditional wooden sailing boats with single masts and glorious billowing sails. Once used to import turf from rocky Connemara, the hookers are now the star attraction of a mid-August festival called Cruinniu na mBad, or Gathering of the Boats.

The sun drops, and somewhere voices are raised in song, seducing you to stay snug in Kinvara. But other places beckon, places dotted through the west that represent the old, the new, the real Ireland. If you were to climb again up those stone steps of Dunguaire Castle and peer again through one of those narrow windows, you would see beyond the village a limestone moonscape of hills and crevices, of wild goats and wildflowers, that stretches for more than 100 square miles across North Clare. This is the Burren.

Take any crooked Burren road, whether to Kilfenora or to Lisdoonvarna, to Tubber or to Cassidy’s Pub, and something ancient — a solitary Celtic cross, a crumbled farmhouse, one of the megalithic tombs of stone called dolmens — presents itself. One rain-swept afternoon, friends led us to a Burren mountain called Slieve Carron, which stretches across the horizon like a giant in repose. We donned slickers and walked a mile across cow-pocked fields, through some brush, up a muddy hill, to a tree-canopied pocket as lush as any hobbit’s grotto. Here was an altar made of rock slab beside a spring. And here, deeper in, was a cave where St. Colman MacDuagh is said to have lived and meditated. No beeping of backhoes clearing way for another luxury home; just the beating of rain against leaves.

This sense of exposure, even oneness, with sky, rock and water continues through the short, winding drive from Slieve Carron to New Quay. Found there is a semi-secret place called the Flaggy Shore, a stony stretch along Galway Bay that is alive with lime-green seaweed and bruised-purple algae, with tidal pools and breath-catching winds, with — well, best to step aside and let the unmatchable Seamus Heaney describe the Flaggy Shore experience in his poem “Postscript”:

... You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Half a mile away, at the back door of Linnane’s Lobster Bar, fishing boats rock in the impatient tide; at its front door, two rumpled regulars sit on upturned kegs, offering nods and how-are-ye’s. Between these portals, fine fish and chowder are served. But on this day, and on a patch of pasture just outside Linnane’s and beyond a stone wall, there sit two sleek private helicopters, so out of place in these simple surroundings — and yet very much in their proper place in the Ireland of today. The very rich in Ireland think nothing of zipping by helicopter the 130 miles from Dublin to Galway or Clare for a leisurely lunch of oysters and then back again, thus avoiding the off chance of traffic congestion caused by sheep on some secondary road.

In the Ireland of today, even the famous Cliffs of Moher are different. Not long ago the amenities included a small parking lot, a modest cafeteria and a gift shop. But with the completion early last year of a multimillion-dollar renovation, the country’s most popular tourist attraction now includes the Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience, a multimedia center cleverly built into the hillside. It could have been cheesy; instead, it is mesmerizing, with audio-visual presentations that celebrate the intertwined stories of rock, water and humankind.

But the real always trumps the virtual. The cliffs remain a pulse-racing place where a four-mile stretch of improbable green land suddenly stops, and walls of shale and flagstone drop several hundred feet to receive the angry white-foam crashes of the Atlantic.

A change in infrastructure is one thing; a change in culture is quite another. And nowhere is this change more strongly felt than in Gort, about 40 miles northeast of the cliffs and just a dozen miles from Kinvara. My mother grew up on a farm near there, and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-like subdivisions.

The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities — from maracuja to mandioca — in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.

And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.

You will see the Irish at the Quadrilha, some of them wearing the soccer jerseys of Brazil’s national team, just as you will see Brazilians two months later at the Gort Show, an annual agricultural fair, where inside the community center, locals compete for best mince pie and handsomest heads of garden cabbage, while in the fields outside, judges in bowler hats ponder before selecting the best-colored colt, filly or gelding. The new Gort is reflected in the flags of Ireland and Brazil that sometimes hang in shop windows, the green in both nearly blending.

Any day trip through the west of Ireland will lead to some new discovery, some new reflection of the steady departure from a twee past that was never quite as twee as tourists might imagine. Yes, there are still places like Cong, the adorable little village in County Mayo whose economy even now hinges on its serendipitous role as the setting for “The Quiet Man,” a movie from 1952 that starred John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. But a short drive from Cong into the Connemara wildness, where there are often stretches of nothing more than rock, craggy hills and the occasional car, you can find beside an abandoned stone farmhouse a recently built summer getaway, and another backhoe carving into the scenery to make way for another second home. Remote Connemara is no longer remote, and no longer cheap.

There is so much to experience in Connemara, from the ruggedness of its Twelve Bens mountain range to the refined comfort at its old Renvyle House Hotel, that it can seem almost too much at times. And so I return to that place I know a little, Kinvara.

I know that when the evening tide rises at the pier in nearby Parkmore, the sprat-chasing mackerel nearly leap into your pail. I know that on the short ride back to town, in a stamp-size spot called Nogra, there’s a century-old pub and store called Fahy’s Travellers Inn; you drink your pint, hear the murmur of local chatter, then toss your spare change into the can for the African Mission that sits on the bar.

And I know that music tends to break out.

Another August night finds us with 20 others, talking and drinking under an awning outside the Pier Head, a bar and restaurant across the quay from Connolly’s. Those majestic boats called hookers rock gently in the bay. Dunguaire Castle, set aglow by floodlights, watches over Kinvara, as always. It is raining.

Then a man I know starts singing, as is his habit at moments like these. With eyes closed, he sings an old song written by a Kinvara poet long gone, about the cuckoos calling from the woods within, and his love beside him and the tide full in. People fall quiet, many with heads bowed, creating a sense that in all of Ireland there are only these sounds: seawater lapping, rainwater tapping, and one man’s song.

The Death of the Irish Pub: In Affluent New Ireland, Rural Pubs Are So Yesterday

Washington Post

In Affluent New Ireland, Rural Pubs Are So Yesterday

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 25, 2008; A01

CONNOLLY, Ireland -- For generations, Carney's, the only pub in this tiny village in western Ireland, had been the place to strike up a romance, celebrate a birth or mourn a death -- or just sip a pint of Guinness among friends near a warm fire on a damp day.

So when Carney's shut down last year after more than a century in business, Teresa Tuttle, 62, took it hard. "Where can we go after a funeral? After work? Where would we all meet?" she recalled thinking, shaking her head in her kitchen, not far from the pub.

The "closed" sign abruptly posted on Carney's door -- and on the doors of 1,000 rural Irish pubs in the past three years -- was another sign of the profound lifestyle changes that have accompanied the country's dizzying rise to affluence.

"It was like a sudden death in the family," said Anthony Scanlan, 51, a farmer who lives near Carney's. "Everything has changed in Ireland. It's as fast as New York around here."

As recently as the 1980s, young people had to leave Ireland to find work and millionaires were as rare as hen's teeth, as the Irish say. But by 2005, according to the Bank of Ireland, the country of 4 million people had 30,000 residents worth more than a million euros, or about $1.5 million. A year later, the number of millionaires had jumped another 10 percent.

Ireland's per-capita income is now among the highest in the world, surpassing those in the United States, Sweden and Japan, according to the World Bank.

Wealth has given the Irish more options and less time -- a bad combination for the local pub. More people are spending sunny weekends in Spain rather than evenings of "craic," as good times and conversation are known, down at the pub.

Fewer people are farming the valuable rolling green hills around Carney's, about 50 miles south of Galway, and more are commuting long distances to better-paying jobs. And all over the country, when the weary commuters return home, many now prefer to stay in their comfortable homes with a glass of chardonnay in front of their flat-screen TVs.

The Vintners' Federation of Ireland, which represents rural pubs, said the number of pubs outside Dublin has dropped from 6,000 to 5,000 in the past three years. Some estimates suggest the number may soon dwindle to 3,500.

Smoking bans in pubs and stricter drunken-driving laws have also played a role in the decline, said Michael O'Keefe, a spokesman for the Vintners group. He said some pub owners are serving lattes along with beer and whiskey in an attempt to cater to changing tastes. "Twenty years ago, if you asked a barman for a cappuccino, he would have looked at you as if you had two heads," O'Keefe said.

Some shrug off the closures, saying Ireland had too many pubs anyway. Many say they are delighted there are more fine restaurants and upscale coffee shops. But others, particularly older people, lament the decline of a touchstone, a place that linked neighbors, a seat near the fire where their fathers and grandfathers chatted before them.

"There is a certain sense of loss, of the coziness and companionship of the pub life," said Patricia O'Hara, a sociologist and policy manager with the Western Development Commission, which promotes economic and social development in western Ireland. She said some older people feel isolated and alienated in a faster-paced Ireland, where young people's lives seem to revolve around cellphones and social networking Internet sites such as Facebook.

"Be absolutely assured that people don't want to return to the days of poverty," O'Hara said. But, she added, "there is a questioning how much we are losing as result of prosperity . . . a nostalgia for simpler times when people had more time for each other."

Connolly sits at a bend in the road in the middle of County Clare, a little cluster of buildings set around a towering gray stone Catholic church. For generations, village life has revolved around the church, the pub and a small post office that collected mail, cashed checks and dished out news.

But now all three of those institutions are under pressure.

Regular church attendance in this overwhelmingly Catholic country has fallen from 90 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent today.

Ireland had nearly 1,900 post offices a decade ago, compared with 1,255 now. People use bigger urban post offices, ATMs and direct deposit, and fewer families are handing down the job of running the local post office.

"You don't want to see things closing, you want to see them opening," said Pauline Connellan, the postmistress in Connolly for 34 years. She said she is not sure what will become of her job when she retires -- or of many other traditions in this era of "rush, rush, rush."

To Eamon Ó Cuív, the minister in charge of rural affairs and a grandson of Eamon de Valera, one of the founding figures of the Irish Republic, those traditions include the art of conversation that thrived in pubs. But he said: "What are we to do? We can't make going to the pub compulsory."

Still, Ó Cuív said, "Change doesn't mean the death knell for a culture. . . . It will take a lot longer than 20 years to change the basic nature of the Irish people."

The Irish novelist Maeve Binchy said she believed there was "a danger that Ireland might lose its relaxed, easygoing, peaceful lifestyle," given all the changes. "But it's only a danger, not a fact," she said in an e-mail. "I may be Pollyanna, but I think our brush with prosperity made us better rather than destroying us."

Terry Kennedy, 37, a bricklayer, was working one June day when his cellphone rang with the news about the "closed" sign on Carney's. "I had to sit down for an hour," he said.

After Carney's shut, Kennedy said, he sometimes drove to the pub in the next village, but it wasn't the same. At his own pub, he either knew everyone in the place, or soon did: "It's small here, so the seven or eight of us at the bar can all be in the same conversation."

Older people who didn't drive had nowhere to go. Many stayed home. Some called taxi driver Garry Boon, 64, to take them out and about to meet people. "It cut the heart out of the village when it closed," Boon said of the Connolly pub.

Then in November, Liam Moloney, a villager who had moved to London and runs a pub and a construction company there, bought Carney's, fixed it up and reopened it -- a rare example of a shuttered rural pub getting a second life.

"I'm not going to make any money to write home about," Moloney, 33, said from London. "But it was my local pub."

Now Carney's has a fresh coat of white paint and a giant new TV to show sports matches. It opens only in the evenings, but the weekly Tuesday night card game is back.

"Having lost it once, we are trying to keep it," Kennedy said one recent evening, pulling out the euro equivalent of $5.40 for a pint of Guinness.

It was a special night: John and Teresa Tuttle were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Soon, two dozen people piled into the two-room pub, and a trio playing guitar, double bass and accordion filled the place with traditional music.

As the clapping began, John Tuttle, 82, sat smiling in his wheelchair and tapping his foot to an Irish reel. In the 1960s, when he dated Teresa, they had come here.

"If this pub weren't here, we wouldn't have a party," said their daughter Emer Tuttle. "All these people are country people and wouldn't leave the village. That is why these pubs are so important."

The day after the party, which lasted until 3 a.m., Teresa Tuttle sat in her kitchen looking out the window. In the near distance, over the green fields, she could see giant wind turbines, a new feature in an old landscape.

"I loved every bit of last night," she said, looking at flowers, candleholders and her other gifts.

She said she had marked First Communions, birthdays and funerals at Carney's and felt lucky that she had her meeting place back.

"Without it," she said, "the likes of us would have nowhere to go."

The Soundtracking of America (2000)

Andrew Sullivan resurrected this grumpy 2000 article by J. Bottum in The Atlantic:

Music made sense when the world did. Now the sense is gone, but the melody lingers on -- everywhere. We live surrounded by music, from torch songs at Starbucks to the Beatles in the elevator, and the barrage may be turning our minds to mush

by J. Bottum

Part I

A WRITER my wife and I knew in New York would sometimes invite us down for drinks on a late-summer afternoon. There in his apartment off Washington Square he would load into the stereo his latest CD -- with an odd, expectant look of pride, as though by discovering an album he were somehow responsible for making it -- and turn the music up so loud that the windows would rattle in their casements and the neighbors would dive to catch their toppling vases.

"Isn't it lovely?" he'd bellow above the din, and we would nod and smile dutifully before slipping off to the bathroom to cower, like dogs during a thunderstorm, in relative quiet until the terror ended.

The first time anyone openly acknowledged music as a weapon may have been during the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. soldiers bombarded the Vatican envoy's house with rock-and-roll in an attempt to chivy out the fugitive Manuel Noriega. But the truth is that we all are terrorized by music nowadays. It's not so much the high school kids parading down the street with boom boxes, or the college students partying away a Saturday afternoon, or the insomniac in the next apartment pacing up and down to Beethoven at 3:00 a.m. It's, rather, the merciless stream of 1960s golden oldies drenching suburban malls, the disco-revival radio thumping out Donna Summer in the back of a taxi all the way to the airport, the tinny Muzak bleating from storefronts as you walk along the sidewalk, the tastefully muted Andrew Lloyd Webber seeping from recessed speakers above the urinals in the men's room. America is drowning in sanctioned music -- an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space. There's hardly a bar in which to nurse a quiet drink or a café in which you don't have to shout your order above the upbeat swing of 1940s big-band standards.

Perhaps it was Hollywood that taught us to expect life to come with background music, a constant melodic commentary on the movie of our lives. But we are soundtracked nowadays with relentless demands for only the most obvious and officially appropriate emotions. You should be as bright and bubble-gummy as the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" when you shop for a new pair of blue jeans. You ought to be as sophisticatedly ironic as Frank Sinatra's "They've Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil (The Coffee Song)" when you go out to eat. There's something wrong if you aren't as moody and melancholy as the Cowboy Junkies' whispery version of "Sweet Jane" when you sit in a midtown bar. Popular urban chains such as Pottery Barn and Starbucks even sell CDs of the proper ambient melodies for shopping in their stores.

Of course, the movie sort of soundtrack never quite works, because in real life it's delivered entirely in snippets, as we cross from one stereo zone to another -- the radio suddenly blaring out as the car starts up, the jukebox suddenly cut off as the door to the diner closes. In a Washington, D.C., office building I was recently subjected first to a stomach-churning fifteen seconds of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" as the elevator rattled up to my floor, then to five jangly seconds of guitar in the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" from a deliveryman's radio down the hall, and then, as I stood by the receptionist's desk, to a minute and a half of one of those insane seventeenth-century Scottish folk tunes whose purpose was to make the tartan clans seize their two-handed battle swords and wade through English blood, howling like the sea. We've all been damned to a perpetual quarter-final round of Name That Tune.

And it's not just in public spaces. Private life in America is equally littered with dissociated musical fragments, from the moment the clock radio turns on in the morning until the "sleep" function turns it off at night. You can snatch five minutes of Copland's Appalachian Spring while you gulp your first cup of coffee, take in the second act of a Mussorgsky opera during the morning commute, slip a CD into the office computer and squeeze in a little Villa-Lobos between department meetings, recognize a scrap of Holst's The Planets in the theme song for the evening news, and fall asleep after dinner in the middle of Dvorák's New World Symphony.

Children at summer camp, college students in their library carrels, soldiers at war in the desert: Americans seem incapable of going without music. It pours from the open windows of the apartment house across the street and the car in the next lane at the stoplight. "Let us rather spend our time in conversation," the doctor Eryximachus tells Socrates as he dismisses the after-supper flautist in Plato's Symposium -- but when did you last go to a dinner party at which the stereo didn't rumble through the evening? When you add up the radio stations, the local philharmonics, the jazz clubs under the freeway, the dingy used-record stores, the movie studios, the $1.3 billion market for rap music, the $1.9 billion spent on revivified country-western, and all the rest, American music represents an enormous cultural investment.

In 1981 the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published After Virtue, an influential attack on the fragments of Enlightenment philosophy that constitute much of our contemporary moral discourse. Part of his argument is a devastating account of the rise of twentieth-century "emotivism," and nearly the only thing he missed is its curious parallel in the rise of recorded music. People began to imagine that morality was a set of feelings rather than a system of ideas at around the time they began to be able to evoke any mood they wanted by putting a 78 on a phonograph.

The significance of this parallel has gone largely unremarked. In his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Allan Bloom did complain a little. Remembering Plato's warning in the Republic against dangerous art, Bloom suggested that Friedrich Nietzsche had been perfectly right to seek in music an anti-rational weapon with which to savage nineteenth-century Christian culture. "In song and in dance," Nietzsche declared in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, man "feels himself as a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy." This is the power that "freed Prometheus from his vultures," the "fire magic of music." If, Bloom seemed to argue, we want to reject Nietzsche's call for ecstatic irrationality -- if we want to preserve a classically derived, religiously informed, rationally enlightened social order -- then we must swallow Plato's bitter pill and banish music from our lives.

But it turned out to be only rock music -- "a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy" with "all the moral dignity of drug trafficking" -- to which Bloom really objected. He even ended up mildly praising the effect of classical-music recordings on his undergraduates at the University of Chicago.

This faith in the power of music seems universal nowadays. We have come to believe in music's power to shape not only our emotions but our very beings. In 1998 Governor Zell Miller, of Georgia, asked for $105,000 from the state budget for a program to send every newborn child home from the delivery room with a classical CD titled Build Your Baby's Brain -- Through the Power of Music. The idea grew out of a hopeless misinterpretation of a study suggesting that listening to Mozart might improve the grades of college students. But it was in its way a marvelous example of what far too many people, liberal and conservative, seem to imagine we should do: get people to have the right behaviors by inducing the right feelings, rather than by transmitting the right knowledge. Since music is the greatest creator of moods that human beings have ever discovered, why shouldn't we swaddle newborns in the properly chosen music?

Recorded music long ago relieved us of the hard labor of performing what we wanted to hear. It relieved us of the necessity of going to a concert hall. And now it has even relieved us of any need to listen. In the soundtracking of America -- in the constantly segueing fragments that fill our public and private spaces -- music is merely the inescapable background, the relentless mood-setter, the arbiter and signal of proper behavior. Those poor babies down in Georgia may never know an unorchestrated moment in their lives.

Endless Sophistication, Endless Irony

HARDLY anyone seems to remember that music stands fairly low on the traditional list of devices by which we try to understand human experience. Who ever learned anything from music except the emotional power of music? It's a thin rather than an intellectually thick art form, and a people that takes music as the highest expression has cut itself off from narrative, epic, allegory -- from the explanatory arts that could put to any use the emotions music represents.

A handful of the most serious composers may have sought with their music a philosophically complete account of human emotion. For Beethoven the aim may even have been conscious: "Music," he once said, "is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy." But we have no one with such a grand scheme today. Even to attempt one requires that the composer's world contain what we in contemporary America lack -- what our artists and intellectuals have, in fact, spent the past century systematically rejecting as anti-democratic and exclusionary: a culturally shared idea of the goal of human existence.

John Cage, with his 1952 avant-garde adventure in which a concert pianist sits silent at the keyboard for four minutes and thirty-three seconds before bowing and walking off the stage, seemed to aim -- along with his fellow modern American composers -- at breaking down the last vestiges of philosophical coherence that music still reflected. Even Philip Glass -- who, with the mainstream triumph of his minimalist Einstein on the Beach (1976), became perhaps the most successful opera composer since Puccini -- seems never to have entirely escaped the feeling that he was rebelling against some tyrannical remnant of purpose expressed in traditional forms.

Today such acclaimed and prizewinning composers as Lowell Liebermann and Tan Dun have left the Cage generation far behind. The subordination of music to an intelligible account of human purpose is so thoroughly lost that a contemporary composer can even indulge in a little old-fashioned coherence while he constructs a musical pastiche like Appalachia Waltz -- Edgar Meyer's 1996 classical-and-country crossover hit, performed by the symphonic cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the down-home fiddler Mark O'Connor.

Critics of contemporary culture typically imagine that the problem lies in the music. It seems to make little difference whether the critics are the local college radio station's classical-music snobs, or the intellectual journals' wry, nostalgic Irving Berlin and Louis Armstrong fans, or the cultural conservatives and anti-pornography feminists who formed an uneasy alliance to denounce 2 Live Crew lyrics and Marilyn Manson tracks about rape and torture. They all speak as though we merely need different music to clear up our cultural confusions -- as in that almost perfect moment in 1983 when President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, tried to banish what he thought of as the drug-using, 1960s-loving Beach Boys from Washington's annual Fourth of July concert and replace them with Wayne Newton, fresh from a Las Vegas lounge show.

This is an understandable impulse. In a day in which the melodic line of a typical pop song runs fewer than twelve bars, the thirty-two-bar scope of a Broadway number from the 1920s -- to say nothing of the 200 bars of a nineteenth-century symphonic melody -- may seem like the solution to our listening woes. But it isn't, of course, or music would have done nothing but improve since the days of medieval motets, and an elaborate show tune like Cole Porter's 108-bar "Begin the Beguine" would do more than shimmer above the tinkling cutlery down at the local brass-railing-and-blond-wood café. In fact, the sheer accessibility on CD and cassette of things like Porter's cultivated songs is what has created our modern musical problem.

The mechanism by which this happened isn't all that complex. Like every other art, music naturally grows more sophisticated over time, as its creators and audience become more educated about a particular form -- and then it naturally rebels against its sophistication, as musicians become sated and listeners prove unable to follow their technical advances.

You can see this pattern play out in almost any swath of music history. The rise of something like punk rock in the 1970s seems to have been inevitable, given the convoys it took to transport the orchestral stage show of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, whose rock version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition may be the most pretentious performance ever attempted by a chart-topping band. The brief mainstream popularity of folk music in the early 1960s derived at least in part from the mind-numbing complexity that jazz had reached at the end of the 1950s. The enormous European audiences for opera turned to other music when confronted with a work such as Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone Moses und Aron (1932) -- whose uncompleted third act, Schoenberg guilelessly suggested, could simply be read aloud to patient listeners.

This natural and probably healthy pattern of sophistication alternating with primitive rebellion has undergone an odd skew in the twentieth century. The invention of the phonograph may well have been the original cause. For the first time, performances of a successfully rebelled-against music could be preserved unchanged -- vastly increasing the range of music a listener might know.

A second and more important cause was the rise of the music business, made possible by phonographs and by radio stations with hours of airtime to fill. "Concern with the social explication of art has to address the production of art," the twentieth-century philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno claimed in one of his most dated Marxist rants against the West's commercialized culture. In this case Adorno was right. The appearance of a huge industry seeking new products, trying to both predict and create shifts in popular taste, gave rise to a wild acceleration of the cycle of sophistication and rebellion. By now any musical form is overwhelmed by its counterform before professional musicians have made more than a gesture at giving the form real sophistication.

A third and even more important cause of music's skew was the disappearance of the shared, Beethovenesque belief in the intellectual coherence of human beings and the world -- a belief so faded that even much possibility of rebelling against it has disappeared. Music used to have a purpose: to express and, indeed, to perpetuate this shared sense of coherence. What, nowadays, is music for? We have a name for sophistication and complexity to no purpose: decadence. But in an age without a public philosophy about at least the most important things, all sophistication is purposeless and all complexity decadent.

(The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two or http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/bottum3.htm)

Part II

Plato was deeply suspicious of music for much the same reason Nietzsche celebrated it: in its direct appeal to the emotions, music seems to reach behind our rational faculties. "When a man abandons himself to music," Plato declared in the Republic, "he begins to melt and liquefy." Nietzsche wanted to end inhibition. He denounced Richard Wagner for committing a "crime against what is highest and holiest" by composing such moralistic, anti-emotional operas as Tristan und Isolde (1859) and Parsifal (1882).

Both Plato and Nietzsche would have been surprised by how undangerous America's indulgence in music has proved to be. Why music hasn't melted us down into Nietzsche's unconstrained beasts is hard to say. Rock-and-roll certainly sounds as though it has this goal. But even as we recognize that music claims to unleash emotion at its most primitive, we also understand that it never will. "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises," Adorno wrote. "All it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu."

Perhaps this perpetual unfulfillment is what has made sophisticated musical ironists of us all. Certainly Americans are given little credit by their cultural detractors for how knowledgeable they are about the breadth of music. You can see this breadth in Web sites that offer complete discographies of every diva ever recorded, or in the game by which oldies-radio-station listeners can link the countrified 1970s Flying Burrito Brothers to the British Invasion pop harmonies of the 1960s Hollies by tracing the band members through the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

You can see it even more clearly in the expectation that Americans will appreciate the "Hallelujah Chorus" in TV ads for Baskin-Robbins ice cream and Bayer cat and dog flea treatment, will prefer elevators with piped-in snatches of middlebrow classics like "Flight of the Bumblebee" and the William Tell Overture, and will be pleased that shopping malls provide them with musical clues to decorum and the appropriate emotional attitude.

Music's traditional defense against overelaboration has itself created a new kind of overelaboration. In all previous ages of music a new musical form succeeded by replacing its predecessors. But now each new form joins its predecessors in our endlessly expanding library of music. This is what Adorno missed when he claimed, in "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938), that Western pop songs make us "forcibly retarded," because they're so shallow and because we're compelled to hear the same ones over and over again. It's what the long-haired classical-music lovers and the culture warriors overlook, and what the nostalgic bemoaners of popular music's decline fail to grasp. We live in the most elaborate age of music in the history of the world. Ours is an extraordinary kind of musical sophistication that can never be rejected without creating yet more sophistication, shallower but wider, and yet another musical form to know.

Thus Paul Simon can swing from African music to Cajun to Chicano without penalty and get top billing on a concert tour with Bob Dylan after having spent the early portion of his career being dismissed by pop sophisticates as the poor man's Dylan. Cher, like one of those bottom-weighted inflatable dolls that won't stay down, bobs from folk rocker in a shag vest to family-hour TV minstrel to slinky torch singer to chart-topping techno-rocker at age fifty-three, with the success last year of her single "Believe." In the soundtracking of modern America neither musical sophistication nor musical rebellion can make anything go away. Not even Cher.

Ideas, Yes. Ultimate Purpose, No

NEARLY every art seems to have diminished in the second half of the twentieth century. Dance, painting, fiction -- it's not that we lack talent, interest, or financing for them; it's that we seem to lack sufficient reason to employ them. The last thing a shared world view does before it dies is to provide a target for revolt. The lengths to which artists go nowadays to make sure someone notices their revolt may be the best measure of how nearly complete is the decay of our old-fashioned, ultimately classical and Judeo-Christian sense of unified purpose. The handful of notorious works in recent years -- Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi -- mostly prove how desperate artists are to feel like rebels. And the relatively mild reaction to them proves how hopeless this aim is. We have come a long way from Dublin's brawling outrage at John Synge's comic The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and from New York's nativist response to the British actor William Macready's appearance as Macbeth in 1849, which left twenty-two dead outside the Astor Place Theater while a mob howled, "Burn the damned den of the aristocracy."

Yet music has survived the decay of a public metaphysics -- a shared belief in the coherent relations among God and nature and human culture -- because, more than any other art, music produces its effect without demanding a philosophical frame. To appeal to and create an emotion, a piece of music needs to make no particular gesture toward its purpose.

The late-nineteenth-century proponents of art for art's sake were after this when they proclaimed, as the Victorian Walter Pater put it, that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." Susanne Langer was aiming for the same thing when she demanded "expressiveness, not expression" in her book Philosophy in a New Key (1942), which for a time was the most widely discussed philosophy text in America. In the 1920s Ernst Cassirer attempted, in his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, to define an aesthetics for a modernist, post-Kantian age that lacked confidence in metaphysical goals. Langer's brilliance twenty years later lay in recognizing that Cassirer's analysis applied most of all -- perhaps only -- to music. "In music," she argued, taking the situation of her own day as art's universal condition, "we have an unconsummated symbol, a significant form without conventional significance." It exists "probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking," and thus "no assignment of meaning ... is permanent beyond the sound that passes."

Indeed, no matter how serious and elaborate, a musical composition cannot create its own metaphysical frame entirely from within the music. Even those who appreciate music in all its forms must recognize that music is not a rational art and cannot express an actual idea. I once knew an aspiring music reviewer -- in some ways as intelligent a man as I've ever met -- who couldn't stop himself from writing things like "the sunshiney arc of the symphony's second movement" and "the darkling power of the adagio appassionato." (Music critics hate to use an English phrase when there's a perfectly good Italian one.) He knew he wouldn't stomach anything similar in a review of poetry or fiction. But what was he to do? He felt it all so deeply, and there just didn't seem to be a vocabulary for what he felt. "Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?" Thomas Carlyle asked in one of his nineteenth-century lectures on heroes and hero worship. Music is "a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite."

That, of course, is the problem. There aren't any words for it, because there really isn't any it: no intellectual content, no idea in the melody. Even in, say, Vivaldi's Four Seasons -- in, that is, a deliberate effort to make music express something rational -- the ideas it takes forty-five minutes to convey amount to little more than winter is cold and summer hot, in spring things grow and in fall they don't.

There is, anyway, something artificial and incidental about forcing ideas into music. Handel's Messiah, by a long mile the most-often-performed piece of classical music in America, is full of small examples of this effort to slip in some extra rationality, the score drawing little explanatory pictures of the libretto. God has made the "rough places plain," Handel's tenor informs the audience -- and the word "rough" he trills roughly, and the word "plain" he holds plain. "All we like sheep have gone astray," the chorus sings from Isaiah 53 -- and the singing voices go astray, every one to his own way. It comes across as stupendous. It sounds superb. And considered purely as an idea, it's on a par with what might occur to a child asked to illustrate with crayons an uplifting text from a second-grade reader.

Plenty of genuine ideas exist in music, of course; they're just not what we mean by "ideas" in any nonmusical sense. They express musical techniques and music's root mathematical structure, and exactly what they have to do with what we experience while listening is something no one has ever satisfactorily explained. The fascinating elegance of music's mathematical technicalities made a Pulitzer Prize-winner of Douglas Hofstadter's book on formal recursion, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), and a best-selling album of Switched-On Bach (1968), with its synthesized fugues so absurdly accelerated that nothing survived except the underlying geometry of the music.

But these are ideas like the ideas in chess or math. They don't mean anything, and have no purpose in and of themselves. It's no accident that child prodigies -- with the skill of adults and the experience of children -- appear in music, chess, and math but never in poetry or philosophy. One pretentiously highbrow class of music criticism -- George Bernard Shaw said he could teach a poodle to write it in two hours -- involves nothing more than explaining music's underlying technicality.

What we experience in music is something else. Music stands, at last, as "evocative" -- a word whose only other use is in advertisements for expensive perfume. Music is chess drenched with perfume.

The Futility of Musical Poetry

I HAVE a cousin who is a musician, a keyboardist who played in Faith No More, a band that found some real success in the early 1990s. In its start-up days in San Francisco, while the musicians warmed up the audience for a concert headliner or pounded away above the hubbub at a club date, they would sometimes perform a version of the theme song for Nestlé's candy bars: "Chocolate dreams you can't resist, N-E-S-T-L-E-S." It was funny how marvelous they could make that absurd advertising jingle sound. But when you think about it for a moment, the comedy and irony begin to seem much too easy. Where, in fact, does one find any profundity in song?

The problem begins with the general failure of lyrics, the incapacity of sung words to introduce and maintain in music the ideas the music itself lacks. "Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense," gibed the eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison. The most famous poem set to music undoubtedly remains Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" (1785), which -- Freude! Freude! -- Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony made sound as though God himself were speaking, but which as poetry ranks somewhere between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime" and William Ernest Henley's "I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul."

Schiller's "Ode to Joy" is perfectly serviceable parlor verse, but "profound" is not exactly the word for it: "He who has a noble wife, / Let him join our mighty song of rejoicing!" And it doesn't magically become profound when sung by massed choirs backed with roaring timpani and trilling violins. It only sounds that way. What Schiller becomes in Beethoven's hands is not wise but only sensible. We grow confused and imagine that we must be having a deep thought because we feel it so deeply.

You can see the failure of musical poetry even in the short span of rock's dominance. The Canadian poet Leonard Cohen turned to music in the late 1960s after listening to Bob Dylan and Sonny Bono and realizing that an imperfect voice need not be a hindrance to pop success. If Cohen wrote a higher class of lyrics than some other rock-era composers (the song "Suzanne," the lines "God is alive, / Magic is afoot"), it was at the price of writing a lower class of poetry. The Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed studied as an undergraduate with the complex and serious poet Delmore Schwartz, but that didn't stop Reed from making an early recording (as Andy Warhol told the story) by tuning all the strings of his electric guitar to the same note and banging away at it, screaming "Do the Ostrich" over and over again until the studio technicians came in and made him stop.

And the quality of musical verse falls off rapidly from Schiller and Cohen and Reed. Most opera lyrics are second-rate poesy, most musical-theater songs are worse, and most popular tunes are worse yet. Can anyone ever actually have sat down and read Stephen Foster's lyrics without the music? It's interesting to imagine what Edgar Allan Poe, a contemporary critic scribbling devastating newspaper reviews for a pittance, would have said if Foster had published as straight poetry lines like "Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea, / Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie; / Over the streamlet vapors are borne, / Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn." Poe wrote in 1849, "There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit, but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few."

Today's critics are equally skeptical about the profundity of lyrics. The columnist Dave Barry, for instance, has succeeded in making the inanity of 1970s pop lyrics a staple of American humor. From Carl Douglas's "Everybody was Kung Fu fighting. / Those cats were fast as lightning" to Neil Diamond's "I am, I said, to no one there, / And no one heard at all, not even the chair," you can hear, across America, offhand ridicule of the music of the 1970s. Even the brief disco revival in the 1990s was kept afloat with mockery, mostly involving the impossibility of doing anything but howl at lines like "MacArthur Park is melting in the rain. / I don't think that I can take it / 'Cause it took so long to bake it / And I'll never have that recipe again."

The interesting thing is not that millions of Americans can laugh at the bad lyrics they know but that millions of Americans know the bad lyrics. Old pop tunes are our major source of shared knowledge. Not everybody knows literature or politics, but everybody can sing along with "A Hard Day's Night." Not even the heavily recycled 1950s and 1960s television series, movies, and sports heroes of the aging Baby Boomers are anywhere near as recognizable among younger generations.

When E. D. Hirsch published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), he unwittingly exposed the strangeness of our modern predicament. Attacking contemporary education for trying to teach techniques without content, Hirsch told an anecdote about his father's writing in a business letter the tag "There is a tide" with the reasonable expectation that the recipient would catch the reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Hirsch was right that it is hard to imagine a pair of businessmen corresponding this way anymore, just as he was right that such shared tags help to communicate complex thoughts in efficient ways. But he was wrong when he concluded his book with 5,000 references (subsequently expanded in a cottage industry of dictionaries and encyclopedias) that were useful for average Americans to know. What was odd about Cultural Literacy is odd about all recent collections of quotations. To look through any of them -- the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, the latest edition of Bartlett's -- is to realize that they are not tools for pinning down what we already know vaguely, the kind of thing John Bartlett thought he was providing in his 1855 Familiar Quotations. They are instead unfamiliar quotations -- useful crib sheets, curiosities of literature, and after-dinner speakers' handbooks filled with lines their users don't know and are not in the least expected to know.

PART III

Hirsch's mistake lay in forgetting that the old cultural knowledge was not meaningful because it was shared; it was shared because it was meaningful. It all fit into a frame, a generally accepted public system of belief about the way God and history and the world work. And when that frame at last broke, the old knowledge drifted out of public awareness, like the carefully organized contents of filing cabinets dumped in a pile and left to blow away sheet by sheet.

The gap at the center of culture didn't stay empty. It gradually silted up with something much like what Hirsch would later advocate -- something shared even if it wasn't meaningful. It filled with the lyrics of American popular songs -- from "Yankee Doodle" to "Dixie" to "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" to "Streets of Laredo" to "Happy Birthday to You" to "White Christmas" to "You Are My Sunshine"to "Heartbreak Hotel" to "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" to "Good Vibrations" to "Billie Jean" to the Titanic theme song. Who can doubt that more Americans know "When You Wish Upon a Star" than know who was President when Walt Disney put the song in Pinocchio?

It would be wrong to say that the composers and performers of those songs never imagine they are conveying actual intellectual content. So, too, it would be wrong to suppose that listeners never take pop lyrics seriously. In sixth grade my friends and I all believed that "One Tin Soldier," the theme song to the 1971 movie Billy Jack, was the deepest thing ever thought. A roommate I had in college felt he was handing on the wisdom of the ages when he tunelessly punctuated conversation with more or less apt quotations from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Teach Your Children," John Lennon's "Imagine," Aerosmith's "Dream On," and Kansas's "Dust in the Wind."

Mostly, though, no one bothers to think for long that the words to songs should mean anything in particular. We just share them. Far more important than any of the Beatles' songs -- or even than the murder of John Lennon, in 1980 -- was the fact that everyone in a particular generation knew the band's hits. Far more important than any of Nirvana's songs -- or even than the suicide of Kurt Cobain, in 1994 -- was the fact that everyone in a particular generation knew the Seattle grunge band's recordings.

The 1990s decline of rock as the dominant pop music has made available for general knowledge many other forms. We have the widest and most widely shared knowledge of the range of music the world has ever known. What defines an American these days better than the ability to hum along with both Handel and Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Charles Wesley, Ella Fitzgerald and Hank Williams, Richard Wagner and the Nestlé's-chocolate-bar song?

Memories of Meaning

THEODOR Adorno has proved spectacularly wrong in his 1938 prediction that broadcast music would make us "forcibly retarded." He did correctly observe that "regressive listening" -- the passive submission of listeners to a bombardment of new pop songs everywhere they go -- is "tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly by advertising." That's the joke when a rising San Francisco rock band plays an advertising jingle with a wink and a nod for a knowing crowd of teenagers. But even Adorno, the most culturally observant of the mid-century Marxists, was too much of a traditionalist to guess that the stupidity of popular music would make us not stupid but ironic.

If decadence is what happens when intelligence turns entirely to trivia, irony is what happens when intelligence wraps itself around stupidity. How could we not become ironic when so much of our public knowledge consists of thousands of lines of song lyrics written for the most part after the collapse of a common metaphysics that might have given them a purpose and an order? We share an enormous amount of information, and we know it doesn't mean anything, and we smile wryly at one another as we sing along.

Last year in a New York Times essay about attending a lecture given by George Martin, the Beatles' music producer, Richard Panek wrote,

Shortly after hearing [Martin's lecture], I found myself attending an impromptu solo performance of a Beatles song in the privacy of my own living room. My 8-year-old son announced that he was now going to sing "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."

"The Anthology version," he added.

Ah, yes: the Anthology version, recorded 3, 4, 5 July 1968, an outtake that "included overdubs of three saxophones and conga drums," according to the liner notes.... Yet halfway through the song, my son added a telltale "Ha ha ha ha" that was not in the Anthology rendering of the song. I looked at him.

"I switched to the White Album version," he explained. Then he resumed his performance. Yet at the end of the song, I had to look at him questioningly once again. Where were the whoops and wheezes and falsetto "Thank you"?

He shrugged. "I switched back to the Anthologyversion."

And I thought: Lucky him....

At a certain age boys delight in knowing things simply for the sake of knowing them; Panek and his son could just as well have been talking about baseball or movies or cars. But they were talking about music, and there's something disconcerting in a story about an eight-year-old with this level of knowledge of a piece of popular music recorded twenty-three years before he was born. It has to do in part with the "lowbrow scholasticism" (in the words of David Denby) involved, the induction of a child into the complex trivialities of popular culture. And it has to do with that "Lucky him" -- the father's earnest irony about a son's memorizing his father's music.

The most disturbing thing in Panek's account, however, is the meaninglessness of the knowledge the boy and the father share, the way it doesn't fit anywhere or do anything -- for somehow we still expect more than this from music. You could learn how to live from Woody Guthrie's songs, Bob Dylan once claimed. It isn't true, of course; mostly what you could learn from Woody Guthrie was how 1930s political radicalism, when fitted to the guitar chord progressions of West Virginia, could masquerade as the ancient wisdom of the American soul. But Dylan was on to a truth about certain pieces of music.

You can feel that truth in William Byrd's Mass on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, and Handel's Messiah. There's an echo still lingering in old blues tunes and in Mahalia Jackson's gospel. It's there in the Enlightenment confidence that runs from Mozart to Beethoven, trailing off in Brahms. The instrumentalist Robbie Robertson has said of the long 1967 recording sessions with Dylan that became The Basement Tapes (and are the subject of Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, one of the best books ever written on American music) that Dylan's songs always sounded as though he'd just found them in a collection of old folk songs. Taken line by line, folk lyrics may seem as silly as the words to twentieth-century popular music. But you can nonetheless sometimes catch in genuine folk tunes a glimpse of the real depths -- a world where, even if only tragically, God and man and nature still make sufficient sense that there can be a cathartic purpose to the emotion the music evokes.

The trouble is that these depths can't be faked in a different kind of world. With Blood on the Tracks (1974), Dylan came as close to succeeding as anyone. Bruce Springsteen made one effort, with the relatively slow-selling 1982 album Nebraska, and fled back to pop. The 1950s Woody Guthrie line of folk populism devolved into middle-class leftism, ending with a song like John Prine's "Paradise," the unofficial theme song of the Sierra Club's supporters: "Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel, / And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land." The mid-1960s folk-rock boom collapsed into the Mamas and the Papas.

Of course, we do have innumerable recordings of the old, meaningful works to listen to nowadays, from Saint Ambrose's fourth-century hymns to Beethoven's late quartets to the American folk standard "Wayfaring Stranger." But our ability to sense that they are meaningful is not the same as an ability to sense their meaning. Their purposefulness is not a purpose; knowing that they once fit somewhere is not knowing where to fit them now. What does a genuinely tragic folk song tell us, except that we no longer know what to make of tragedy?

Purposeless Emotion

IN 1923 Wallace Stevens published a poem, "Peter Quince at the Clavier," that runs, "Music is feeling ... not sound; / And thus it is that what I feel / Here in this room, desiring you, ... / Is music."

Stevens is the American poet most fascinated by formal logic, and he probably intended us to notice that the argument in these lines commits the fallacy that logicians call illicit conversion: the fact that all cows are mammals doesn't make all mammals cows; the fact that music is feeling doesn't make feeling music.

Or perhaps Stevens didn't intend us to notice, because this is the fallacy that seems to define the modern experience of music. It's as though music were trying to convert us to the belief that we are professional performers on the instrument of our emotional selves, producing the great music of feelings.

The result can hardly be anything other than the emotivism that Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out in After Virtue. We translate everything, even morality, from a system of ideas to be judged true or false to a set of emotions to be judged only pleasant or unpleasant. And as the constricting intellect is forced out, consigned to cataloguing the vast range of sounds available, modern music promises that there will open up for us the free play of imagination, the fantastic improvisation of feeling -- an emotional wealth undreamed of by the cramped rationality of ages past.

I wonder. Just as intelligence turns decadent when reduced to sophistication and complexity for no reason, so something peculiar happens to emotion when it has no coherent purpose except to be felt. Listening, say, to one of Byrd's sixteenth-century antiphons, do we actually feel the intensity of religious mood felt by his Renaissance audience, who shared a use for that mood? Do we actually feel as much as Beethoven's Enlightenment listeners, for whom his thunder echoed in a landscape of generally accepted ideas about God and man and nature? Certainly there is pleasure to be taken in the elegant mathematics of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." But you can sense something thinning in the twentieth century when Frank Lloyd Wright changed the title to "Joy in Work Is Man's Desiring" for his disciples.

The tragedy we feel listening to a folk ballad, the grace we feel listening to a gospel song, the humor we feel listening to one of Haydn's symphonic jokes, and all the rest of the feelings we can use our vast knowledge of music to call upon: are these actually living emotions, or only their ghosts? Adrift on America's sea of sound -- washed by constant waves of the Monkees in a clothing store, Frank Sinatra in a café, the Cowboy Junkies in a bar -- we have to wonder whether Wallace Stevens and Theodor Adorno didn't have it exactly backwards: the promise of modern music to make us performers of the music of ourselves didn't stupefy us intellectually, it stunted us emotionally. After almost a hundred years of our being increasingly surrounded by music, the emotions of public America seem to have grown poorer and sadder, as though we were no longer fully capable of feeling what we feel -- as though our breadth of musical knowledge had been gained by sacrificing depth of musical emotion.

Even sex has not survived undiminished. The rock-and-roll vision of love is an adolescent one, and hardly does justice to the fullness of human experience. But something more than seeing love through an adolescent's eyes is at work. D. H. Lawrence, the first great apostle of sexual salvation, wrote a poem in 1918 about music -- music and impotence, curiously enough. Called "Piano," it tells the story of a woman singing seductively to a man in the dusk. In spite of his willingness to be seduced, the narrator is seized by "the insidious mastery of song," and the music arouses in him not passion but childhood memories of "Sunday evenings at home," sitting under the piano and "pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings." The poem concludes,

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor,
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child
for the past.

Lawrence's evocation of a womb with the cave beneath the keyboard is worth noticing, as is his play on his "manhood" being "cast down in the flood of remembrance" -- meaning both that the adult is formed by his childhood and that he has been rendered impotent by the memory of that childhood.

Music is tied to sex in innumerable ways: through courtship lyrics, dance, seduction, the Dionysian promise to unleash primitive emotion -- yet somehow we do know, as Adorno put it, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. All one has to do is listen to the relentless beat of Maurice Ravel's Bolero (1928) to realize that the sexual power of music is real. But the gap between the music and its object is real as well. It may sound absurd to ask, but what, nowadays, is sex for? Where does it fit in the scheme of things? Even as the demand for an aroused sexual desire pours out in music all around us, the emotion itself seems sadly weakened, tinged with an awareness that it used to mean much more than it does now.

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom remarked on the sexual obviousness of rock and its masturbatory power to arouse teenagers in the absence of any reason, but he neglected rock's simultaneous sorrow. An oddly constant nostalgia runs through popular music alongside the sex -- a sense of having somehow missed better times. Revivified Beatlemania appeared almost within days of the Beatles' breakup. With "American Pie," his 1971 ballad of rock's sad decline, Don McLean had by far the longest song to that time to receive wide play on AM pop radio. And there's that curious scene in the 1983 film Risky Business in which while Bob Seger roars "Take those old records off the shelf" on the stereo, the young Tom Cruise, not even born when those old records were made, dances around sexily in his underwear. The "insidious mastery of song" that D. H. Lawrence observed is based on its cruel mixing (as T. S. Eliot put it) of memory and desire. Even the music of sex becomes impotent under our awareness of its now-lost purpose.

Music is not culture. It's the mist that plays above culture. A people that takes its music as fundamental art -- as we have taken music, making the all-penetrating surround of recorded noise the single most apparent fact of American society -- has mistaken the foam for the sea. "I am fond of music," Hermann Hesse observes in his novel Demian, "I think because it is so amoral." Hesse was right about music's genuine amorality: in a culture organized around good thought, music will express the moods fitting that thought, whereas in a culture organized around bad thought, music will express the moods fitting that, too.

But what happens in a culture without thought, a culture with expression but nothing to express? The way we listen to music re-creates, more than anything else, Hesse's Glass Bead Game: a complex and sophisticated rite filled with delicate connections perceived by its priestly scholastics, lacking any meaning, and consuming the culture's intellectual and emotional energy. All that remains is ironic incongruity and the decadent moods that can survive irony: memory and desire -- or, rather, nostalgia and concupiscence, the feeling of memory without anything to remember and the arousal of desire without any object of desire.

It seems a cruelly small profit on our enormous investment, our vast sophistication, our wiring of the entire nation for sound. Everyone I know adores music, as I do. But our elevation of a secondary art costs us something. Music cannot build a culture, and in America today music is in the way -- keeping us from the higher arts that could aim at a unified idea and a public metaphysics, a purpose and meaning for our all-encircling noise.

J. Bottum is the books and arts editor of The Weekly Standard and the poetry editor of First Things. His work has appeared in National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary.