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So the mainstream is now two streams: one traditional and tranquil, the other torrential and caustic. To kids, the old culture looks hopelessly square, sounds like Muzak, tastes like cardboard. To parents, even those who grew up with Little Richard and Louie Louie, the new culture offers cause for alarm. Besides, how can they monitor what their kids are listening to without having to hear it themselves? "The price we pay for freedom of expression is that some things will be considered vile by some people," says Danny Goldberg, a manager of rock acts and chairman of the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Southern California. "But what's vile to a Mormon family in Utah is not vile to a black family in South Central Los Angeles."
The debate keeps coming back to language and race. Just as rhythm and blues helped create '50s rock 'n' roll, so does black slang contribute to the linguistic pungency of today's pop culture. As Brooklyn College's Ashley notes, "In the early years of the century, the tastemakers of our language were the English and Irish. Now taste is being defined by different groups. When times get tough for many people, they seek some outlet to give them a sense of freedom. This time, the rebellion is coming out in language." White soldiers in Vietnam picked up blacks' raw vocabulary, in which "m f" is routinely used as abuse or endearment, for emphasis or just filler. Richard Pryor proved that black anger and slang could find a large audience. Eddie Murphy, the top movie star of the '80s, turned the anguish into preening. In his concert film Raw and his period comedy Harlem Nights, Murphy had nothing new to say, so he said it dirty. It was raunch with no reason.
"They're trying to shock my generation," filmmaker John Waters says of the new crew, "by doing what we did to try to shock our parents' generation." Waters, who made his early rep with the scandalous comedy Pink Flamingos, makes a distinction between "good bad taste and bad bad taste. Good bad taste is always fueled by rage and anger with humor thrown in. Bad bad taste is fueled by stupidity and ignorance, and it comes out as anger." This is precisely what turns some liberal parents off about the new culture: not the language but the sneering attitude. Liberals are tolerant of everything but intolerance.
Whatever they do, they are unlikely to stop the spiral of taste from class to crass. For the history of 20th century art is the history of a flight from middle-class gentility. Two flights, really, in opposite directions, but from the same despised point of departure. High art moved toward abstraction and fragmentation and settled in the museums and concert halls. Popular art went the other way; it frolicked in the profane and did so on records and movie screens. High culture confused the middle class; pop culture shocked it. One culture was created by the intelligentsia, the other by the underclass, but both groups had the same goal: epater la bourgeoisie, which loosely translates as "gross out your parents." Your mamma can't dig modern dance, and your daddy can't rock 'n' roll. The movements were not so much revolutionary as rebellious. They proved their value and hipness by excluding the largest group of consumers: the middle-aged middle class.