M
misterelm
Guest
Not strange at all if you are a student of music. Plus I’m sure you know several tunes from even earlier than that… Twinkle for example. Or anything you sing at Mass, rather.
Why the last 40 years? Why not the last 50? 100? 300? I’m not trying to debunk your point, I’m questioning your use of seemingly random time period since I know for a fact people were just as seedy, drug addicted, and crass in the 40s as they are today. Innocence was no more present 41 years ago in media than it is today, in fact I would say that films and commercials and other media products form the 40s, 50s, and 60s, were WAY more propaganda-y than anything today.
This has and always will be the case. Luckily there are 800+ different “points of view” and we can readily change between them. What is wrong with writing or creating based on your point of view and then presenting it to the public? Suddenly because your material is popular or widely accepted and broadcast it must now be perfectly and uniformly unbiased? Is not what you want or expect out of the Media simply your own point of view, with it’s own biases? We grow and learn by combining experiences, by taking some of one thing some of something else, and combining them to make our own ideas, or own points of view.
Frankly except for certain positions, the church did not pay very well, a lot of famous songs we know, that we hear in commercials, that we listen to in “good” television programming, classical ditties, and all later derivatives were composed in a state of “heresy” where if the original composer was identified they would have been burned at the stake, and they did so just to make money, to survive, and by surviving they produced the Ordinary or Proper that you sing today.
It has been written that Beethoven thought he was a God, some have written that he thought even higher than that, that he was “more perfect” than His image, that his productions were unexpected and of higher quality. Are you going to angrily shut off the Ninth Symphony now every time it comes up at Christmas?
It used to be a sin to write certain musical intervals in either sacred or secular music, they were considered “immoral” they were thought to represent the devil. Even hearing it was thought to corrupt the soul and create a disparity. Soon after the popular trend in music was to make music ONLY using these intervals, ONLY… We went from literally burning someone at the stake for writing, WHIPPING someone to a bloody pulp for accidently singing in error, to creating music using ONLY the things that were hated in less than 150 years. Today you can’t tell one from another, though if you know the song “Maria” from West Side Story then you know this interval well.
This is just as heated a topic, and what I just mentioned took HUNDREDS of years to finally settle.
I use music because it is what I know, other arts have fared similarly. I’m sure you can find examples of oppressed writers, painters, and inventors. I’m sure that the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of executed Russians or Germans or anyone else for that matter simply had “immoral” points of view according to some, and that those who endured the iron rod to eventually make greatness were just the lucky ones.
“Damaging morals” is and has always will be an individual thing. If someone cursing on television, someone being “loose”, someone being an “alcoholic” on a 48" TV compromises morals then the problem is not with the content but with the person viewing it. My morals are intact, your morals are intact, and I’m sure we’ve both been exposed to a variety of immoral things. What appears on TV does not matter if you have the right mindset, so the focus should be on education, not on censorship. A child burns his hand on the stove, do you remove the stove from your house or do you educate the child on the dangers of the hot burner?
This is just another topic that in possibly as little as ten years will be forgotten and supplanted with some other art fad, like painting wrists on cardboard or something. Soon we will be fussing about the morals of driving whilst resting an elbow on the vehicle’s arm rest. If you want to make it something different, take the whole picture, take the whole line of art from its very beginnings to now. What is popular has and always will change, society as of now is progressing more and more to instant gratification, so the jokes and vulgarity in television will be getting more blunt and to the point. Years ago people had nothing to do and hours to listen, so they could hide the seedy bits in hours of poetry, playwriting, or music.