I discovered this article in a newspaper last weekend. Naturally it made me think about a previous post I had recently made.
From the Edmonton Sun, Saturday April 26, 2014.
“Pop-culture a sea of nihilism”
by Kevin Hampson
It’s not hard to figure out what the heavy metal band Megadeth is all about. If their name doesn’t make it clear enough, consider the title of their first album: Killing is My Business...and Business is Good!.
It cannot be lightly dismissed that the alleged killer Matthew de Grood posted a reference to this band on Facebook before five people were stabbed to death in Calgary.
The post read “Dread and the fugitive mind - the world needs a hero.” This is a reference to a song on Megadeth’s 2001 album, the cover of which bears the image of a skeleton climbing out of a bloody corpse. The song is told by a sadistic narrator who apparently steals from people and kills them.
In the past, such interests would have raised alarm. But it’s become “normal” to fantasize about killing, and fans of that sort of thing seem to be getting more defensive with each mass-killing-without-motive. They argue that mass killers simply have twisted minds and their obsession with violent media - which is a common trait among them - is incidental.
But, obviously, the health of one’s mind is affected the things that one puts in it.
Obviously, dwelling on ugliness and horror, day in and day out, can’t be good for the psyche.
But here we get to the fundamental point. Nothing is obvious anymore, because we have, as a culture, embraced the idea that truth is subjective, which is as much to that “reality” doesn’t exist.
Older people aren’t so affected by this, because they got their bearings as children from the western cultural tradition.
Younger people, however, have no reference point beyond pop-culture, which tells them to follow their personal feelings and impulses. They’re drifting on a sea of nihilism.
It’s worth considering how this happened.
Megadeth would seem to have little in common with Louis Armstrong. And yet, Dread and the Fugitive Mind features an archetypal pop-culture character - the anti-hero who goes around killing people - that can be traced back to Armstrong’s hit Mack the Knife. That song was a translation of Mackie Messer, a hit in 1930s Germany.
In The Closing of the American Mind, political philosopher Allan Bloom wrote that Mackie Messer epitomized the moral ambiguity that permeated German culture before the rise of Hitler.
The philosopher Nietzsche loomed large; he had declared that “God is dead” - and good and evil were mere values, no better or worse than any other values.
Mackie Messer evoked a chapter from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (a big influence on the Nazis), which describes a neurotic killer who murdered for no other motive than “the joy of the knife”.
When Mack the Knife became a hit in 1956, Americans were naively unaware that its master lyricist was Nietzsche, Bloom wrote.
A decade later, however, Nietzsche was a favourite of the counterculture movement, which sought to throw off the restraints of traditional morality.
Significantly, the most popular film with young people during the 1967 Summer of Love was Bonnie and Clyde. It shocked many people, for it was the first film to depict realistic graphic violence. And the purpose of it its slow-motion shoot-out scene was, obviously, to gloat over the spectacle of violent death.
Today, relativism has become our basic worldview, and our pop-culture has sunk to depths that no sane person would have contemplated a few decades ago.
Add to that the dramatic rise in mind-altering drug use, and you have conditions that seem to invite madness.
Our current problems - the surge in post-secondary students with mental health problems and the rise in mass killings - were entirely predictable.
This is the exact type of ignorant opinion that I was referring to earlier. Published in a newspaper, nonetheless. While the Sun is not exactly known for journalistic integrity, it seems as if it is striving to become known for idiotic columnists. I realize the irony of pitting opinion against opinion, but some opinions are more shortsighted than others. This one irritates me. I don’t know whether the author is purposefully trying to incite anger in sensible people, or whether he actually is that naive.
I doubt any sane person thinks it’s ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ to fantasize about killing day in and day out. Most people can separate the basics of societal rights and wrongs, although the author seems to think that pop-culture dictates the choices that every individual makes. If you want to talk about pop-culture, metal music seems more irrelevant than many other musical genres that are very rarely mentioned in connection with violent incidents. For the most part, metal does not really fit into the typical pop-culture stereotype of being on the radio, making network TV entertainment shows or having multitudes of mind-numbing gossip magazines and articles related to it. (Obviously magazines and articles exist, but you won’t find them on the shelf of your local convenience store or grocery store, or even in the majority of dedicated book and magazine shops).
Even more irritating and shortsighted about this article is the fact that the author suggests that older people are morally superior to younger people. Notably because younger people have “no reference point beyond pop-culture” while older people have apparently been raised to follow traditional western values. Which have typically come from the church, which makes me wonder if the author has ever picked up a bible. Speaking of dwelling on horror and violent media makes me think the author should take a look at what the ‘western cultural tradition’ is based upon. Last time I checked, there was plenty of violence in the bible and it has been around longer than any of the other media referenced in the article. Which somewhat renders the main point of this article useless.
To further argue how trivial this is, history has been steeped in violence. Long before Nietzsche and the counter-culture movement, there have been warring tribes, conquerers, conflicts and violence. I doubt music inspired violence in the same way that the author is claiming throughout those hundreds of years of history. Humans have likely been murdering other humans before music came into existence. The last two paragraphs of the article seem to introduce two totally different ideas. Mind-altering drug use? I hate to inform the author that humans have also been consuming mind altering drugs for much longer than any of the pop-culture references he attempts to connect were even conceived of. Perhaps not for recreational reasons, but even the most rudimentary research would have highlighted that mind-altering drugs have been used for a significant amount of time in several different cultures.
I suppose this is why I have a love/hate relationship with opinion columns and letters to the editor published in newspapers. Sometimes they are so naive that they are truly annoying. Especially when they attempt to attack something that the author clearly has little understanding of, or is completely ignorant about. Honestly, I do not even really like Megadeth, nor do I think De Grood posting Megadeth lyrics had much of a relevant connection to the Calgary incident. Like mentioned before, there are other issues that will probably prove more relevant in this case. The one thing this particular column published in the Sun does is illustrate ignorance as every young person is apparently governed by pop-culture and incapable of independent thought, and metal (popular) music clearly causes violence. Arrogance is also quite apparent because people the author’s age and older are all clearly morally superior to every younger person in existence. I would argue it’s also poorly researched, but the point of the article is not that strong to begin with. This is another trivial attempt to use music as a scapegoat, and a poorly conceived one at that.
(If only I could get paid to spread my disorganized thoughts to the masses...)
