Much of today's popular music has a tendency to encourage the worst behaviors imaginable. It seems that one of two things is happening: a) I'm getting too old and disconnected to popular music to appreciate it, or b) it is becoming increasingly vulgar in content. It also appears that this music has provided today's children and young adults with a plethora of role models that continuously suggest that promiscuity, drugs, disrespect for women, and a complete lack of responsibility for one's actions are social norms. No, I'm certainly not naive enough to believe that these problems haven't existed forever. Yes, I believe they are worsening due to a number of factors, one being the degradation of morality in popular music (and culture in general).
So, from my point of view, one of the main culprits of this is the popularization of rap music with lyrical content equivalent to pornographic poetry. Often, these lyrics contain descriptions of sex acts that should make most people blush. However, the reaction is, most often, indifference to the vulgarity, mostly due to people being desensitized by continuous exposure. I believe that this also encourages many people, especially those young and impressionable minds, to engage in the popularized acts of sexual promiscuity. These same songs also tend to be very misogynistic, using derrogatory terms to refer to women.
In addition to the rap music of today, I also feel that much of the pop music, in the vein of Brittany Spears et al, teaches young girls that the proper method of interaction with boys is solely sexual. It seems sad to me to see thirteen year old girls scantily clad walking through the malls in order to pick up their next boyfriend. Hopefully something will come along to change this trend and, perhaps, provide a set values for our future generations.
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You bring up some good points here. It often seems like the music is concealing what is said. Dimly, I recall someone mentioning that when she was pregnant, she and her husband went through all their favorite songs and realized that they were flagrantly inappropriate for a child to listen to, but neither of them had ever taken note of the lyrics, even while singing them.
ReplyDeleteVulgarity in music today is definately an issue. We as a culture, expecially the young, look up to the role models of today (singers and actors). Therefore, if sex, drugs, and crime is being communicated through songs, there is no puzzlement as to the youth following those dangerous footsteps. Hopefully, teh future songs will incorporate educatgional words of wisdom rather than sexual inundos.
ReplyDeleteI think you bring up some good points about the amount of explicit music nowadays, sometimes I turn on the radio and I'm absolutely disgusted with the music that comes on so I just turn it off. It would be better if some of the pop music had a point other than sex and drugs.
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