I'm shocked that you're shocked.
Since when is the music industry about anything else except money and
power? It's an industry, an economic machine which is, like most things
economic in this country, almost totally without any sense of moral or
social accountability.
"Youth culture" in this country is not "culture" - it's simply a
marketing ploy, and has been since the late fifties, when it was
discovered that young people were vulnerable to mass-marketed alienation.
I tried telling my friends back in the days of the original Woodstock
that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Clubs Band" was no call to higher
consciousness and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" wasn't promoting LSD as
a road to higher realities. The Beatles just wanted to make money, and
we were dumb enough to give it to them.
We have been selling our children for close to half a century, and the
fact that they occasionally decide to express their resentment by blowing
away a bit of their immediate environment shouldn't surprise us. We've
made childhood into a form of psycho-economic slavery, with middle school
approximating emotionally the physical horrors of the slave trade's
Middle Passage. Don't think the kids don't "get it" when they see the
marketing of films like the latest "Star Wars" flick, or the rating of
kid-oriented movies by how much they've grossed at the box office.
What goes around comes around. We are committing massive child abuse as
a society, and like many abused children, a lot of them are responding
with alienation and their own forms of violence.
You want an answer? Go to your local drugstore's "toy" section and look
at the plastic "action figures" of decomposing corpses from "The Mummy"
being sold to our children as "toys," along with WWF caricatures and
interstellar killing machines. And we were worried about GI Joe?
We're waging a psychological/emotional Vietnamese war on our own
children. Why are we surprised when they react?
Very sincerely,
Rachel Heckert