No Rock And Roll Fun

ROCK MUSIC, THE SCOURGE OF OUR NATION: Why, we ask with a sigh, does any attack on the decline of culture generally always have to decry rock music? Of course its not Schoppenhauer - indeed, that's its attraction, in many ways (not to decry Shopp, of course) - but it does, sometimes, produce something shining, and transcedent. Of course, the late twentieth century seemed to be an attempt to destroy the good work done by evolution and elevation over the previous thirty-odd centuries, and the 21st has sped up the process, but it's not neccesary to dismiss an artform that articulates voices that had been silent - it even created a whole social identity in teenagers. After fifty years, the belief that loud music is a passing phase must surely be discredited? Of course, it's easy to pick holes in some parts of the rock opus - as Roger Kimball does here:
But what seems at first to be an effort to establish cultural parity turns out to be a campaign for cultural reversal. When Sir Elton John is put on the same level as Bach, the effect is not cultural equality but cultural insurrection. (If it seems farfetched to compare Elton John and Bach, recall the literary critic Richard Poirier’s remark, in Partisan Review in 1967, that “sometimes [the Beatles] are like Monteverdi and sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann’s.”) It might also be worth asking what had to happen in English society for there to be such a thing as “Sir Elton John.” What does that tell us about the survival of culture? But some subjects are too painful. Let us draw a veil …
But not all rock music is 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' or 'Diana died, boo-hoo.' And ignoring the truly sublime rock moments, all this does is to undermine the rest of Kimball's argument - apart from anything, no artists should be accepting awards from the State; it's the duty of art to not allow itself to be co-opted; and, further, if you can't see that some pop music has the quality and feel and value of any other work of art, then how can you be judging the culture fairly? Your arguments, however well made - and in his New Criterion piece, Kimball makes many - become fatally tainted with the feeling that you are praising what you like, and decrying what you do not understand. And since when did something's cultural value reside in how pleasing it was to the greatest of the masses?