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The understandable response would be to ignore the whole thing. But ignorance is not an option. The clash, however angry and ominous, is not just the usual dustup between raucous young stars and the professional squares who oppose them. It's not just about dirty words and bad attitude. The battle over pop raunch reflects a crucial fissure in American social and political culture that was born a long generation ago and came of age in the Reagan-Bush era.
On its face -- and as cued by the smiling faces of its Presidents -- the U.S. has breezed through a feel-good decade of peace and prosperity. The official culture is breezy too. A look at our most popular movies and TV shows suggests we are a nation of superheroes and pretty women, of Cosby kids and caring, thirtysomething L.A. lawyers. We make funny home videos and vacation in Disney World. And, at our peril, we let the rest of the real, dirty world go by.
Too often official America seems willing to let the rest of its own society go by too. It pretends the tabloid atrocities on TV news shows are aberrations. It either closes its eyes to the human street litter -- the homeless, the junkies, the insane -- or blames them for not getting with the program of self-help economics. It largely ignores the ghetto, where the black underclass has built its own furious culture on the slag heap of Great Society failures. It discounts much of the young white working class, in tattered towns and trailer parks, who feel left out of bland, sitcom America.
The makers of the new pop do not ignore this rage. They embrace, exploit and transform it. As the California rap group N.W.A. announces at the start of its album Straight Outta Compton: "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." What they know from the street may not be what the heartland wants to hear. The message may be cleansing or hateful; the lyrics and limericks may expand or debase the language. And if X-rated pop adheres to writer Theodore Sturgeon's useful rule that "90% of everything is crud," most of it may be awful -- just dirty, not funny or erotic. But even at its grossest, the form is a vital expression of the resentments felt by a lot of people. Get used to it, America: we live in a four-letter world.
The evidence is especially strong in two areas:
Pop Music. "There's no message to heavy metal," says Penelope Spheeris, director of a documentary on the music. "It's about being rich and famous and getting laid." Nonetheless, metal has taken heat for a decade, with its electrified invitations to head banging and hell raising. Now other groups are taking the flak. Example: Guns N' Roses, the talented but loutish rockers whose album Appetite for Destruction has sold almost 9 million copies. Their song One in a Million says, "Police and niggers, that's right, get outta my way./ Don't need to buy none of your gold chains today . . ./ Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me./ They come to our country and think they'll do as they please,/ Like start some mini-Iran, or spread some f disease./ They talk so many goddam ways, it's all Greek to me."