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Lisette, 13, a seventh-grader in Mamaroneck, N.Y., loves heavy metal and doesn't understand what all the fuss is about. Read her the lyrics to One in a Million, and she shrugs, "It's just a song." She loves Motley Crue's You're All I Need, but "Sometimes it's hard to understand the words because of the beat. And that's what I like about heavy metal bands. Besides, they're gorgeous! A lot of adults don't like them because when they're married and settled down, they don't think about having action or talking dirty. But teenagers do because of their sexual peak. If songs have curses in them, they're not going to bother kids. Everyone knows swear words by the third grade. My advice to parents is to let your kids grow up and do what they want to do." What burns Lisette is the idea that her music should be censored. "I wouldn't ban classical music," she says magnanimously.
Talk to a lot of kids Lisette's age; few will say they are harmed by rock. And few are, according to a study commissioned by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. Children do spend hours each day with music. But most prefer mainstream music, and whatever style they listen to, few are tempted by the siren call to excess. "Kids take it in stride," says Stanford University's Donald F. Roberts, who helped conduct the research. The survey should reassure parents that somehow their child will survive pop culture about as successfully as they did.
Perhaps today's youth is unshockable. And perhaps that fact should be shocking. "One of the things we all seek," says Clive Barker, "is the visionary experiences we had as children. We seem to have forgotten that those experiences are not soft and gentle, but often harsh and intense." For several American generations, a child's first entertainment experience was a Disney cartoon, with its wrenching traumas of betrayal, abandonment, a mother's death. An animated film could thrill a child to pieces or scare him near to death. And it introduced him to the beautiful and frightening banquet of popular culture.
That has always been the role of art: to shock, not just to ratify the prejudices of the generation in power. And no jolt is greater than the shock of the new. Original styles almost always look crude and excessive: Picasso's in painting ("My three-year-old could draw better!"), Brando's in acting ("He's got marbles in his mouth!"), Elvis' in music ("Photograph him from the waist up!"), Bruce's in comedy ("Book him!"). In their first outrageousness, these artists seemed to signal the end of the world; instead, they were heralding a new one. "A creator is not in advance of his generation," said Gertrude Stein, "but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation." Like them or not, today's blue comics and shock rockers know what is happening to this generation and are speaking to it. That is why they are popular.