Cultural Depravity

These things come down the pike in perpetuity.

What was once rebellious is now mainstream and inescapable; what was once suggestive is now graphically explicit — and, most worryingly of all, it’s being aimed at a fan base that is getting younger and younger.

Mike Stock (one third of the legendary pop factory Stock, Aitken and Waterman) has publicly attacked pop culture for prematurely ‘sexualising’ today’s children. He believes it’s all gone too far: ‘These days you can’t watch modern stars — such as Britney Spears or Lady Gaga — with a two-year-old.

‘Now, 99 per cent of the charts is R&B and 99 per cent of that is pornography.’

Granted, the linked source has bigger issues to fry regarding Lady Gaga.

Statistically, “kids today” are engaging in less sex than “kids yesterday”.  Maybe it’s about to explode,and perhaps a sudden new wave of sexual commodification has lent different affects in de-sensitizing the generations.

The thing is, I don’t think there is any up-tik.  No, I have no parenting suggestions on raising your kids in the long since plateu-ed mass pop culture.  And I say “plateu”.  At some point in the past thirty or more years, we reached the point where the innuendo became blatant, double entendres became less double, and have been at that point ever since.  Mind you, the word “rock and roll” is a euphemism itelf.

Give me the lyrics to this song — an Instant Stripper classic I’m sure, and I will not be able to tell you which of the past few decades it came from.  Looks like Vintage 80s Motley Crue?

Actually, the message of the song — all things considered — is much better than this song, which is played within a two hour radius of this minute on your local “Classic Rock” radio station.

From the Halls of Respectable and clean, the boy band of the early 1990s, a group that my mother (who, in car trips on vacation would flick the station between NPR and to something that’d ad blurb with “No Hard No Hard, No Rap”) bought from the CD Club — Boyz 2 Men — came a Middle School dance staple which largely posed the question — “All at once or one a time?

I skip back to fifth grade, and I’m somewhat taken aback to remember a smart and aware girl talking to the teacher about such things, surrounded by — absurdly enough — “I’m Too Sexy for My Shirt”.  Surely George Michael or Madonna put out something more notable at the time, right?

The low point in terms these matters — and we’ve had nothing as bad as this — your various teen sexpots marketed in part as jailbait does not approach the depths of depravity as this song from 1971 — this song.
… Interestingly enough, she may have  had it both ways on meaning.

But regarding our depraved culture — here you see just how young we’re hitting at everyone.

Leave a Reply