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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thu. 12/09/04 05:37:47 PM
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"Eminem Is Right" Another monumental essay at Policy Review, this one by Mary Eberstadt. Also published in this month's issue (brackets and quoted ellipses in original): .... Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Pink, Good Charlotte: These bands are only some of the top-40 groups now supplying the teenage demand for songs about dysfunctional and adult abandoned homes. In a remarkable 2002 article published in the pop music magazine Blender (remarkable because it lays out in detail what is really happening in today’s metal/grunge/punk/rock music), an award-winning music journalist named William Shaw listed several other bands, observing, “If there’s a theme running through rock at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it’s a pervasive sense of hurt. For the past few years, bands like Korn, Linkin Park, Slip-knot, Papa Roach, and Disturbed have been thrusting forward their dark accounts of dysfunctional upbringings.... As the clichéd elder might mutter, what’s wrong with kids today?” Shaw answers his own question this way: “[T]hese songs reflect the zeitgeist of an age group coping with the highest marital-breakdown rate ever recorded in America. If this era’s music says anything, it’s that this generation sees itself as uniquely fractured.” As he further observes, so powerful are the emotions roused in fans by these songs that stars and groups themselves are often surprised by it. Shaw relates the following about “Coby Dick” Shaddix of Papa Roach, who wrote the aforementioned song “Broken Home”: “He’s become used to [fans] coming up and telling him, over and over: ‘You know that song “Broken Home?” That’s my f— life, right there.’ ‘It’s a bit sad that that’s true, you know?’ [Shaddix] says.” Similarly, singer Chad Kroeger of Nickelback reports of a hit song he wrote on his own abandonment by his father at age two: “You should see some people who I meet after shows.... They break down weeping, and they’re like, ‘I went through the exact same thing!’ Sometimes it’s terrifying how much they relate to it.” That Nickelback hit song, titled “Too Bad,” laments that calling “from time to time / To make sure we’re alive” just isn’t enough. Shaw’s ultimate conclusion is an interesting one: that this emphasis in current music on abandoned children represents an unusually loaded form of teenage rebellion. “This is the sound of one generation reproaching another — only this time, it’s the scorned, world-weary children telling off their narcissistic, irresponsible parents,” he writes. “[Divorce] could be rock’s ideal subject matter. These are songs about the chasm in understanding between parents — who routinely don’t comprehend the grief their children are feeling — and children who don’t know why their parents have torn up their world.” That is a sharp observation. Also worth noting is this historical point: The same themes of adult absence and child abandonment have been infiltrating hard rock even longer than these current bands have been around — probably for as long as family breakup rates began accelerating.... See also "When War Must Be the Answer". Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 12/09/04 05:37:47 PM |
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