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Re: Other classic rock groups with lame lyrics...

"My name is not Jimmy, no."

My question was in jest. I was referring to Jimmy Page, but I see it soared right over your head.

"Someone who knows what it's like to listen to people go on about how nobody will be listening to the likes of Duke Ellington or Miles Davis a generation from...awhile ago."

Oh, dear. I hope you aren't referring to me. If so, you have it exactly backwards. I believe folks *will* be listening to Ellington and Davis a generation from now. Please reread my original post.

"That said, I probably like more 'unsophisticated' rock music than 'sophisticated' rock music. Not the point."

Not the point indeed. The point is that *all* rock is unsophisticated. Rock is produced for children and there is nothing more pathetic than a fifty-year-old man listening to the same drivel he did at sixteen. Unfortunately, such emotional retardation has become commonplace in our culture. Bloom gets it about right when he notes that rock is the ersatz substitute that has arisen on the ashes of classical music, in an ethos in which there is no *intellectual* resistance to attempt to tap the rawest emotions. Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire--not love, not eros, but raw sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.

It acknowledges the first emanations of children's emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously (just as the porno merchant does), legitimating them, not as small sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to bloom and become lovely flowers, but as the *real* thing. Simply put, rock gives children, on a silver platter, with the blessing of the entertainment industry, everything their parents counseled them that they must wait for until acquiring sufficient maturity with which to harness such unbridled passions.

Teenagers realize rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's BOLERO is the one piece of classical music that teens recognize. In alliance with some real art and much pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of such dreck for voracious young appetites. Never was there an "art" form directed so exclusively to children.

Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such a decadent subculture. (That is how I know that people will still be listening to Bach a hundred years hence. All of us do not remain eternally eighteen.) With rock there is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art. In short, rock turns life into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. And you, dear boy, are welcome to it.

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