Has Rock Music Dumbed Down American Students?

The children of working-class Americans embraced rock ‘n roll during the 1950s because it offered maximum emotional satisfaction with fewer intellectual demands.  No need to bone up on academic learning when feel-good “rhythm” had no prerequisite.

      Did World War II unleash a mindless sensuality, masquerading as freedom, that routed the protracted thinking necessary to do well in many academic subjects?  We need only think of Holland with its minimal prostitution and licentiousness before the war, then its drug-laced aftermath.  John Stossel cites historian Thaddeus Russell in “What We Don’t Know About History Can Hurt Us” to make the point:

     “American soldiers brought jazz during World War II to the eastern front. Soviet soldiers brought it back. Eastern European soldiers brought it and spread it across those countries…Stalin was hysterical about this.”

     The authorities were particularly concerned about young people performing and enjoying sensual music.  “Any regime at all depends on social order to maintain its power. Social order and sensuality, pleasures of the body, are often at odds. Stalin and his commissars understood that.”

     American authorities 30 years earlier also feared the sensuality of black music, said Russell, attacking it “as primitive jungle music that was bringing down American youth. Stalin and his commissars across Eastern Europe said exactly the same things with the same words later.”

     Then rock and roll came.  “That was even more threatening,” Russell said. “By the 1980s, disco and rock were enormously popular throughout the communist world.”  The communists realized they had to relax the rules or risk losing everything, but it was too late. One of the most amazing and significant spectacles was Bruce Springsteen’s concert in East Germany in 1988, when a crowd of 160,000 people who lived behind the Iron Curtain sang “Born in the USA.”