Influential Beats: The Cultural Impact of Music

By Selwyn Duke

The Devil really is a fellow of wine and song,
Playing a tune that trades right for wrong.
The tone-deaf man will hear his notes and say,
What could be wrong with being festive and gay?
And when a sad tomorrow that tune does bring,
Few will know that from their own lips it did spring.

There perhaps is something primal about music, something that can touch or twist one’s soul. This is no doubt why Ludwig van Beethoven said, “Music can change the world,” and William Congreve famously wrote that music “has charms to soothe a savage breast.” And music’s power is tacitly acknowledged all the time. For example, last year Michelle Obama lent her name and image to a rap album that complements her “Let’s Move!” anti-obesity campaign. And while a track featuring a trio called “Salad Bar” and a song entitled “Veggie Luv” is easy to mock (given their mother’s priorities, I can just hear Sasha and Malia singing, “And we’ll have fun, fun, fun till daddy takes the tea cake away”), there is method to the first lady’s madness. As Boston College professor emeritus William K. Kilpatrick wrote in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong:

[We] tend to learn something more easily and indelibly if it’s set to a rhyme or song. Advertisers know this and use it so effectively that we sometimes have difficulty getting their jingles out of our heads. But there are more positive educational uses. Most of us learned the alphabet this way and some of our history as well (“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Concord Hymn”). Recently some foreign language courses have been developed which employ rhyme and song as the central teaching method. Similarly, one of the most successful new phonics programs teaches reading through singing.

Quite true. To this day I can recite a McDonald’s Big Mac-recipe jingle I heard as a little child — verbatim. And I only had to hear the weather advice “Red sky in morning, sailor take warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight” once to remember it forever. But since all power can be misused, can music possibly usher in a storm of civilizational upheaval? If it can soothe the savage breast, does it not follow that it can also inflame it?

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Philip France]

Selwyn,

Thank you for this most magnificent essay. More and more I look up to you as a prophet in our time. This may sound egregious to some so please allow me to explain: Most people assume that the Biblical prophets were considered such because they foretold of future events. That is not the entire truth. Some prophets were such because they forthtold. Take the prophet Amos for example. Show me one instance whereby he foretold anything and I will eat the book.

Getting back to your essay, I was particularly pleased with the following passage:

“The problem that Plato recognized and sought to remedy was summarized nicely by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man when he wrote, “No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” Lewis was likely, of course, thinking primarily of personal temptation, but there is another time this phenomenon becomes apparent. If you’ve engaged in political debates, you’ve no doubt encountered people who operate based on feelings and are so resistant to reason’s dictates that your intellect is powerless against them. This is especially typical of a certain type of political partisan in our time, one I won’t call by name here (though I can tell you what I’d like to call him), but with whom, let’s just say, conversations can’t exactly progress. But whatever you call such a person in a given time and place, what you’re witnessing is always the same: an individual with a corrupted emotional framework that engenders attachment to misguided ideas.”
Here you accurately describe our resident troll, one Robert Berger.
This brings to me a reminder of a song that I enjoyed during my youth. The song was “Back Seat of My Car” by Paul and Linda McCartney (from their album, “Ram”). During the song’s coda, they repeat the following refrain: “Oh, oh, we believe that we can’t be wrong,” I consider such a mind-set dangerously sociopathic.