For all those who missed church yesterday, the Grammy Awards held a nuptial mass near the end of the program last night.
In a time when states are considering imposing a regulatory requirement for couples to get certified as marriage eligible by attending state approved classes before the state will issue a marriage license, perhaps the Grammy people wanted to get a bunch of couples grandfathered into the institution by conducting a mass marriage ceremony last night.
It was pretty interesting. Individuals of all sizes, shapes, colors and sexual preferences appeared suddenly in the audience, rings in hand, dressed for marriage. Meanwhile, the stage turned into a gothic cathedral complete with stained glass window projections. The songs turned to the theme of universal love, rings were exchanged, there was a processional, or is it recessional, as the newlyweds marched out of the hall to their various wedding receptions and honeymoons.
The show had all the sincerity of a tent revival, or maybe an episode of Rex Humbard, broadcast live from the Cathedral of Tomorrow. Really, the marriage of rock music, rock concert stagecraft, ersatz religion, and liberated sex in an over-the-air television broadcast, taking up the time slot normally held by the nightly news, was something.
Along with Katy Perry’s ritual witch burning, too many Goth tunes, and country music celebrating reefer and lesbians, the music arts business desperately seeks to capture some relevancy in a world of adrift souls who will consume anything that titillates on any level.
I expect we’ll see more of this sort of thing with other political memes plugged into the liberated sex slot. We’ll come to miss the good old days when religion was merely replaced by belief in extra-terrestrials.
Country, religion, family, ideas of civilization, all the sentimental and historical forces that stood between cosmic infinity and the individual, providing some notion of a place within the whole, have been rationalized and have lost their compelling force. America is experienced not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone. To the extent that there is a project, it is to put those who are said to be disadvantaged in a position to live as they please too. The advanced Left talks about self-fulfillment; the Right, in its most popular form, is Libertarian, i.e., the right-wing form of the Left, in favor of everybody’s living as he pleases. The only forms of intrusion on the private-life characteristic of liberal democracies–taxes and military service–are not now present in student life. If there is an inherent political impulse in man, it is certainly being frustrated. But this impulse has already been so attenuated by modernity that it is hardly experienced.
Allan Bloom
The union of melody, harmony, rhythm and lyrics, combined to connect to a real emotional response, will survive this mass market insanity. But at least for a time, you’ll have to look harder to find it.
