Allan Bloom Closing of the American Mind rock music and deaths

Fri Jan 18, 2019

it's friday

time for philosophical friday with redpill

as a gen-x'er i was a young teen when my church in the 1980s asked me if i read allan bloom's
Closing of the American Mind

i also heard christians explain why rock music is unhealthy by quoting allan bloom

This is the significance of rock music. I do not suggest that it has any high intellectual sources. But it has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions. Modern-day rationalists, such as economists, are indifferent to it and what it represents. The irrationalists are all for it. There is no need to fear that “the blond beasts” are going to come forth from the bland souls of our adolescents. But rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not ems, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children’s emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later. (op. cit.)

Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement.

allan bloom recommends mozart and Beethoven instead

the way i saw it as a young teen at the time, with no internet, no web browser, before NCSA mosaic

Allan Bloom taught at Yale, Cornell, University of Chicago, top universities of the world. he was my only source of info on these elite schools.

if he's against rock music and prefers classical, there must be something there.

i've since rejected his ideas as nonsense.

but the idea that rock music is a pathway is something that had some impact on my thinking though i do listen to it, has to do with the lifestyle of rock music

this is Alexandra Ross-King, 19

Alexandra Ross-King, 19

Friends of a teenage girl who died in a suspected drug overdose at a Western Sydney music festival said she knew something was wrong.

Nothing could save Alexandra Ross-King, 19, after she was rushed to hospital from FOMO music festival on Saturday. Jan 12, 2019










at age 19 she went to a rock music concert, did drugs, and at age 19 she is dead forever.
there are plenty more examples of this

my original intention was to follow allan bloom's blue print, listen to mozart, and go to yale, cornell or university of chicago as a student.

i thought the faculty of those elite institutions of higher learning were like allan bloom and preferred Mozart to the Beatles or led zeppelin.

i don't have an issue per se with allan bloom as an elitist, or aristocrat, since the whole point of the ivy league like harvard is to create aristocrats, and elitists.

if students bound for harvard truly believe in equality, why not attend a local community college? everyone is equal anyway?

i have always felt leftists attending elite institutions like harvard and yale were hypocrits.

i've since learn that many harvard bound students actually do listen to rock music like the Beatles.

at the time i had no information as to what harvard yale princeton stanford university of chicago cornell was really like.

based on the closing of the american mind and allan bloom who was an actual faculty member and student there, i got a rather distorted picture. allan bloom himself did listen to mozart and read shakespeare and milton but it doesn't follow all students and faculty do.