Sunday, December 12, 2004

Sign of the times

Do Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182 and Pink know that they’re “Demigods of dysfunction”? Mary Eberstadt, in an excerpted essay from her book, Home-Alone America, theorises on why so many kids today listen to “deafening, foul, and often vicious-sounding” music. She concludes: “If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. [Her italics.]”

Eberstadt continues: “The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.” And many of the top artists in this category, she says, “have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager … dysfunctional childhood.”

Read the full thing.

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