Introduction
Since the end of the 19th century, the life of people has become faster and faster. Technological solutions and new modern conveniences create a new paradigm and new order to things. The impact of technology on socioeconomic conditions of society was perceived by three competing schools of thought: the subjective preference theory of value, the cost-of-production theory of value, and the abstract labor theory of value. Each was concerned with technology’s impact on socioeconomic activities as a way of understanding the valuation of human activity. Technology reduces prices for higher consumption through mass production and substituting machines for labor, and allows the individual to apply talents to division of labor.
Time and History
During the 1980s-1990s, nee technologies and emerged and create new way of life for many people. The appeal of these new options can be directly related to perceived virtues not to be found in the typical Tin Pan Alley product: an obvious spontaneity and informality in terms of musical process, an emphatic approach to rhythm that satisfied the important desire to dance, an intense and sometimes extravagant display of emotion, and the unapologetic treatment of subjects considered taboo as well as traditional subjects treated in a more realistic manner. The latter aspect became a special focus for guardians of public morals because of the sexual content of many songs, couched in blunt everyday speech or in suggestive double entendres inherited from the blues. The much bally-hooed breakdown in reticence about sexual matters during the early years was, of course, but a prelude to the free speech aesthetic that came to characterize the rock and roll repertory as the decades passed (Bell, p. 65).
Time and Music
The most conspicuous target for the would-be censor has always been the lyrics of rock and roll songs, which have been labeled from the very beginning as trivial, sexually suggestive, or even obscene. The difference in the nature of song texts, however, must be related to the traditions from which they spring. Song texts of mainstream America had long been influenced by the high culture of Europe, however watered down for middle-class consumption. Romantic love, the subject of the vast majority of all songs, was treated in a highly idealistic, typically sentimental manner. Although rarely profound, the language tended toward the poetic, preferring a high-priced vocabulary filled with euphemism and fully respectful of an unwritten, but widely sanctioned code of public propriety (Ashton, p. 43).
Philosophy of Time
By the 1950s, there was a rising concern about the blurring line between scientific inquiry and technological activity. However, until quite recently, science has remained largely divorced from technology, each pursuing its separate path and maintaining its separate identity (Bell, p. 65). This dominant understanding retains the view that technology extends science, that science “applies” technology. Yet Martin Heidegger argues that technology is ontologically prior to science and that science, far from being the origin of technology, is its necessary tool. Technology “sees” nature, takes it in a certain way, and “enframes” it. For this reason, technology precedes science. In this inversion of the usual interpretation, the very purity of theory functions as the tool of the metaphysics of “resources.” Thus, both science and technology are embedded in a particular cultural trajectory. Neither is neutral, and both are part of an earlier metaphysical position. Although such an interpretation seems counterintuitive and contradictory to the dominant view, it provides another perspective to understand technology and society (Berendt, p. 93).
Rave and Ecstacy
The discovery of LSD accompanied the rediscovery of other plantderived hallucinogens – mescaline from the Mexican peyote cactus, and psilocybin from the Mexican ‘Magic Mushroom’ teonanactl. Both had featured prominently in ancient religious rites. These hallucinogens were joined by the ultimate synthetic recreational drug. Ecsrasy in the later twentieth century – a compound that combines the stimulant properties of dexedrine with mild mescaline-like hallucinogenic properties. Many drugs are rapidly absorbed into the blood vessels present in the large internal surface area of the lungs. The cigarettesmoker can obtain a pulse of nicotine to the brain within seconds of lighting up – and can then adjust the delivery of nicotine very precisely by controlling the frequency of puffs and the depth of inhalation. Because of the rapid delivery offered by this route, many anaesthetics are delivered by inhalation; as with the cigarette-smoker, the anaesthetist can control the level of anaesthesia very precisely by varying the rate of drug delivery (Colas, p. 44).
Ecstasy is quite an old drug. Its popularity as a recreational drug coincided with the rise of the rave dance era of the 1990s. Ecstasy combines the stimulant and alerting effects of amphetamine with euphoriant and mild hallucinogenic properties, probably due to its interaction with serotonin receptors in the brain as well as the dopamine system. Ecstasy was freely available until the mid-1980s, when it was made illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic – that is, a dangerous drug with no medical uses. The properties of the drug are well suited for the rave dance scene – allowing users to stay awake and active all night and inducing a pleasurable feeling of well-being (Colas, p. 48). Following the ban on Ecstasy, a number of the designer amphetamines, which lay for a while outside the legislation, became popular. But Ecstasy has proved more popular than any of these, especially in Western Europe. Supplies are readily available from illicit laboratories in Holland and other European countries. Some East European countries have started a new export industry based on supplying Ecstasy to the US market. Several hundred thousand young people use the drug every week. Some users become deluded and may cause their own unintentional injury or death – for example, thinking that they can fly and jumping out of a window. Like Ecstasy, LSD is closely associated with rave dance culture (Colas, p. 54). The drug interacts potently with particular serotonin receptors in the brain to cause intense auditory and visual distortions and hallucinations. It is so powerful that the human dose is about a quarter of one milligram (one-thousandth of a gram). The drug is usually dispensed as a drop of drug solution dried onto a small piece of blotting paper, which is swallowed. There is little evidence that LSD users become dependent on continuing supplies of the drug, but there can be adverse effects. Not all LSD experiences are pleasurable – the ‘bad trip’ can be an intensely unpleasant and frightening affair (Ashton, p. 88).
Technological Innovations
Music (and race culture in particular) is the best example of new order and speedy life. During the latter half of this century, the reaction to rock ‘n’ roll and rap music has become a clash of cultures. There is no consensus regarding musical tastes. In many ways, biases play a large role in the reaction. Because creativity goes back to the roots of a culture, the clashes occur between the roots of European and African musical sounds and words. In Euro-centric music, creativity means change, sometimes quite subtle, with one melodic message building upon and replacing another. The melody is central (Colas, p. 44). Composers try new musical forms and methods, new sounds. Different lyrics often interact, building upon a western melodic sequence of sounds. Creativity in Afro-centric music depends on repetition and the revitalizing sounds of the beat. The rhythm is primary. The words fit the beat and overtly express human emotions. Such constants are all the more noticeable in rock and rap music that is predominately tied to African sounds and explicit lyrics (Hebdidge, p. 66). There are no easy solutions in sight. One problem is that the Indeed, the abuse of drugs is continuing to increase and the criminal underworld that supplies this apparently insatiable demand is flourishing. There are no easy solutions in sight. classification of recreational drugs is inappropriate. It suggests, for example, that Ecstasy and cannabis are dangerous narcotic drugs, whereas the weight of scientific evidence now available says that they are not. A majority of people in most Western countries favour a relaxation of the laws restricting the use of such ‘soft drugs’ as cannabis and Ecstasy. Furthermore, there is no scientific justification for classifying such drugs (Colas, p. 54).
The justification for such controls is based on fears about the effects of rock and rap words and music: that such expressions might cause youth to become ungovernable, unlikely to follow society’s rules. The possible effects include modeling of bizarre behavior, as well as imitating alien sounds, speaking taboo words, emulating violent lyrics, fulfilling sexual desires, copying the performers’ outlandish antics and being overwhelmed by extreme audience reactions. Many adults see the musicians as instigators, whose compositions and actions violate society’s norms and appear to encourage sexual antics and savagery such as murder, drug use and suicide. Because music can convey feelings and emotions, the danger of this music is clear and present to those who fear these behaviors, and fear it enough to justify censorship and control (Hirst, p. 98).
Social custom ruled the rituals and relationships for borrowing and obtaining them. Although the steel ax expanded the bodily skills and amplified the capabilities of the tribe members, its use was limited to the same traditional functions, leaving the new-found leisure time for sleep. The missionaries’ disappointment in the aborigines’ failure to use the “new technology” for more productive and efficient ends, in fact, highlights YA phenomenological hermeneutics of technology is required to explore both possibilities and limitations of technology. Society and technology are so closely intertwined that to examine one is to examine the other. It is important to emphasize this dialectical relationship between society and technology (Kluckhohn and Murray 65).Technology shapes the skills and abilities of labor and, therefore, establishes distinctive divisions of labor through its development. Technology also provides new opportunities and potential for social development. In turn, society has control over technology and manipulates it according to its needs and desires. Society dictates technology by interpretation and its construction of meaning (Rose, p. 33).
Violence and extreme behavior as found in rap lyrics sells. Before he was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996, Tupac Shakur, one of gangsta rap’s biggest stars, was encouraged to be extreme in his antics and rap lyrics by the multimillion-dollar record industry. His first album, All Eyez on Me, released in early 1996 for Death Row Records, sold over five million units. The more confrontational he was, the more newsworthy he was, and the more his releases sold. To some he became a hero; to others, a demon. According to Connie Bruck New Yorker ( 1997) examination, Tupac was caught in the middle between his own character and the commercial image his record company required, and he paid the highest price of all. By the 1990s, visual displays were as important as music. MTV, founded in 1981, was revolutionary in that audiences could hear the lyrics, learn the code words, and see the artists up close without having to go to clubs or rock concerts. The distinction between advertising and entertainment disappeared with MTV as a trend-setter, promoting youth and youth culture. Aimed at America’s 14-25-year-olds, MTV switched to rap before mainstream radio stations did (Rose, p. 53).
Adult pressure groups, such as the PMRC, began protesting not just the words, but the visual images of sex and violence filling such videos. Yet this youth network, while more explicit in visual content, refused to play music with sexually explicit words, such as “fuck.” The music embraces attitudes about urban life and how to respond to personal relationships and what to do, to social values and what to embrace. Such popular music aimed at youth has been, and will continue to be, political, with lyrics expressing attitudes about social mores, civil rights, racism, war participation, sexism, the environment, the urban blight, police brutality, and authority. Rock and rap music, representing the generational tension in western society, is a recurring conflict with attempts to censor, to “bleep” the message, the rock ‘n’ rap musical expression — because of the children. The role of art and of the artist in culture has been hotly debated for some time, in both the art world and mass cultural productions. The argument that modernist dogma appears long ago to have abandoned any avant-garde claims and become an unwitting ally of the status quo is supported by the use of abstract expressionism in corporate architecture. In this context, nonrepresentational art serves as decoration, providing ambient color schemes rather than challenging preconceptions (Studlar, p. 67).
These concepts, despite their differences, indicate that a rapid socioeconomic transformation process is under way. This process constitutes what is conventionally called the “information society” whose characteristics are different from earlier agricultural and industrial societies. An information society is a nation in which a majority of the labor force is composed of information workers and in which the use and application of information is the most productive element in its economy (Studlar, p. 67). The information society encompasses several changes in socioeconomic development: (1) a change from goods to services -rapidly increasing the human-oriented service sector such as professional, technical, educational, health, and fast-food industries; (2) a change in the character of work — work is primarily a “game” among persons in their daily experience (professionals and clients, salesmen and customers); (3) a change toward the growth of the knowledge class — by 1975 more than 25 percent of the labor force in the United States were in the technical and professional class; (4) a technological change toward high-tech industry, whose main products are small devices and affordable machines that generate, manipulate, and transmit information, such as semiconductors and microelectronics; and (5) a change in the spread of new information technologies and the development of telecommunications for remote services and activities with the explosive growth of computers (Virilio, p. 23).
Rock ‘n’ roll and now rap exemplify the anxiety present in the commercialization of minority voices, in the conflict between the money to be made in a free market and the lack of control over cultural production. Associated with youth, rock ‘n’ roll has always been viewed by the purists as an oppositional voice. Unlike pop, it does not conform into a safe, neat, commercial package. The threatening nature of rock music has always made it commercially successful. Time may also be said to be unreal on psychological grounds in the sense that it is not involved in all experience, and as it is supposed to be universal it should be a factor in all experience. This argument usually involves reference to abnormal or unusual experiences (Studlar, p. 87). The absence of a temporal factor is notable in the mystical experience in which since there is only one event, time is lacking since it would involve a comparison of events or awareness of change. The experience of time is also impossible in this case because in the very nature of the mystic’s experience there is no division of attention and therefore no comparison is possible (Hebdidge, p. 62).
Another argument is that which starts from the premise that the mystical experience reveals reality in a way in which ordinary experience does not. This experience is said to be essentially timeless, or to reveal reality as timeless, and it is considered more important than usual experience, which manifests wide variations in temporal quality. In estimating this argument it should be noted that mystics always consider that experience as having greater significance than our usual experiences. This type of argument always involves a contrast between two types of knowledge and their objects, such as contemplation of ideas as opposed to opinion concerning the sense world, the preference, of course, being given to the former. This view recurs constantly and constitutes the most serious objection to considering that the time process is real (Colas 87). The direct impact of this level of invention is limited to city form. Most of the infrastructure is embedded underground, or uses previous utility lines (telephone network, rail tracks) or even facilities that are invisible to city inhabitants (microwaves, electromagnetic transmission). This subsector is centered on a combination of computers and telecommunications in interactive information networks: broadcasting channels of radio, FM stations, television stations, cable television, VCRs, and home computers (Bloch, p. 83).
Technology and New Order
The relation of time and values is a much more complex affair than this argument would suggest. In a world as apparently imperfect as this, it is a question whether value can have any real significance in independence of the time process. Also it is not demonstrated that the eternity of one class of existents, as values, is incompatible with the temporality of another. In Euro-centric music, creativity means change, sometimes quite subtle, with one melodic message building upon and replacing another. The melody is central. Composers try new musical forms and methods, new sounds. Different lyrics often interact, building upon a western melodic sequence of sounds. Creativity in Afro-centric music depends on repetition and the revitalizing sounds of the beat. The rhythm is primary. The words fit the beat and overtly express human emotions. Such constants are all the more noticeable in rock and rap music that is predominately tied to African sounds and explicit lyrics (Ashton, p. 43).
It is this overlapping of epochs which furnishes the basis for what might be called concrete continuity in distinction from the mathematical meaning of that term. Concrete continuity is the fact that because of the overlapping of epochs it often makes no difference whether we deal with a duration which is an epoch or not. Continuity in this sense is derived from the nature of the epoch, a rather complicated overlapping of epochs being the fact which is so designated. The relation of time and values is also important if time is used in this sense. As has already been pointed out, one of the serious objections to considering time to be completely real is that if real it apparently brings into jeopardy any value to which we may have attained or which has in any way become actualized. There is no escape from this. Yet, on the other hand, it is entirely on account of this same temporal quality of experience that ideals have their significance. Ideals or purposes play a very important part in our life: certainly on a pragmatic basis they should be assigned as high a degree of reality as external objects. Yet it is only as time is real and cumulative that this is possible. That is, any striving toward the future can have meaning only if the future is not only related to the present but when actualized will in some sense contain the present. At the same time, teenagers sought not just new musical sounds but voices and words to speak to them individually as they forged adult identities. The music was ever-appealing (Berendt, p. 84). Adolescent upheavals also meant surviving stresses about sexuality, romance, morality, parents, authority and government. The emerging new forms of rock and rap music can speak personally to these older children. Because teens’ tastes are still forming, still impressible, as many approach adulthood their quest centers around the music, if not in lyrics and sounds, then culturally by breaking previous modes with taboo words and musical actions (Bell, p. 87).
Conclusion
Music and culture have become the blame for what was wrong with the country’s emerging adults. Popular music that not only sounds different but has suggestive lyrics aimed at children frightens many parents. The response has been a series of attempted controls that have encompassed government as well as economic and commercial forms of censorship. The justification for such controls is based on fears about the effects of rock and rap words and music: that such expressions might cause youth to become ungovernable, unlikely to follow society’s rules. The possible effects include modeling of bizarre behavior, as well as imitating alien sounds, speaking taboo words, emulating violent lyrics, fulfilling sexual desires, copying the performers’ outlandish antics and being overwhelmed by extreme audience reactions. Many adults see the musicians as instigators, whose compositions and actions violate society’s norms and appear to encourage sexual antics and savagery such as murder, drug use and suicide.
Works Cited
- Ashton, M., The Danger of Cults: From Fervour to Fanaticism (Birmingham: Christadelphian Publishing Office, 2002).
- Bell, C., Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Berendt, J. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003.
- Bloch, M., From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- Colas, D., Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
- Hebdidge, D. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen, 2001.
- Hirst, C., Religion Politics and Violence in Nineteenth Century Belfast: The Pound and Sandy Row (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).
- Kluckhohn, C. and Murray, H.A. Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture 2nd 1edition), London: Cape, 2001
- Rose, T. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Music/Culture), Wesleyan; 1st edition, 2000.
- Studlar, Gaylyn, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg; Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
- Virilio Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006.