The “Generation Gap” in Aesthetic Creation

An Opening Salvo to Reclaim Surrendered Territory

The music of Frank Zappa was beloved to the Generation of 1968; certainly not to the generation of their parents – for whom music meant melody, consonance, beauty, grace, rhythmic energy and joyfulness – for they had spawned a brood dedicated to the destruction of everything their parents' generation had created and held dear. In its stead, ‘68ers were attracted to ugly, loud, crude, simplistic, routinized, unintelligent and meaningless hype.

Instead of the sophisticated light bounce of their parents' anthemic “String of Pearls,” young people of the 1960s worshipped the trance-like blackness of “Sympathy for the Devil.” The romance of “Moonlight Serenade” or the joy of “Basin Street Parade” was for fuddy-duddies; while the drug-induced hallucinations of “Purple Haze” or the 17 minute long love-song-as-horror-flick “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (reportedly the drunken slurring of “in the garden of Eden”) found an audience numbering many tens of millions of adolescents.

Listen to the difference.

IF IT’S ALL CALLED “MUSIC,” THEN WHAT IS MUSIC?

The answer is that rock ‘n roll, or for that matter, fusion, free jazz, acid jazz, hip-hop, rap, etc., all grown out of the poisoned soil of the 1960s – do not rise to the level of Music. They are organized sounds. The qualities that transform sounds into Music are not present.

Of course, there are exceptions. But the Generation of '68 overwhelmingly rejected beauty; rejected joyfulness; rejected the faculty of aesthetic discrimination; rejected form; rejected even basic musical literacy and competency. This psychic break between parents and children was labeled, in all its demonstrations, the “Generation Gap.” (Later ironically commercialized as a TV game show of the same name and also used for advertising jingles.)

Something had happened which parents did not understand at the time, but they knew that The Kids Were Not Alright. Just watch this frightening video of Vanilla Fudge on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968.

Manic, drugged, loud, wild, hyped. Young people ate it up; while their parents wondered what they had done wrong. It may not now seem as grotesque as it once was held to be. Since 1968, we have been inundated with far more perverse and grotesque demonstrations of bad ideas on a daily basis. But at the time, it was new and sensational. For some reason, Americans and much of the Western world gravitated to it. What had happened?

For now, suffice it to begin with Allan Bloom's 1987 contention that young people and “their music” were indicative of systemic educational failure and widespread moral impoverishment. (Read: The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.)

FRANK ZAPPA ON THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW (1963)

A film clip demonstrates this gap. Steve Allen (born 1921), television presenter, prolific song writer, jazz pianist and writer, was not a ’68er. In 1963, his popular TV show gave Frank Zappa (born 1940) about 90 seconds to “play music on a bicycle.” Zappa somehow talked his way onto the show.

Steve Allen seems to be rather good-natured about this novelty act. After all, jazz was still strong and the onslaught had not yet arrived. The boys in the band must have thought it was a joke. Allen demonstrates his disdain momentarily with humorous disrespect at the end.

Frank Sinatra, the subtle vocal conveyancer of literate lyrics and memorable melodies, who was the idol of the generation of the parents, was not as kind.

“My only deep sorrow,” he said, “is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ‘n’ roll.

“It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact dirty—lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.

(Trenton Evening Times, Sinatra Blasts At Rock ‘n’ Roll, October 28, 1957, picking up an AP wire, cited here.)

Steve Allen and the boys on his bandstand were likely just as contemptuous, as well they should have been. But like meets like – Frank Zappa was musically contemptuous.

In 1958, at the age of 17, he’d [Zappa] found an unlistenable album by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse and read it as a barcode of his own personality. He used it as an “intelligence test”: if people enjoyed the record – like his classmate Don Van Vliet, the future Captain Beefheart – they could enter his social circle. If they didn’t, they were barred. (Cited here.)

Surely, something is seriously wrong in ideation when a young man, who seems to possess musical skills, is attracted to the bastard noises Varèse “composed.”

“Ionisation,” indeed. If you’re willing to pay to sit through this, I have a bridge to sell you. But many bought and STILL buy! One of Zappa's most popular albums was entitled, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” with “compositions” like “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” that rival in sound the title's horrifying imagery.

Take that, enemies of music!

One can't know if Zappa's early cyclophonic “music” was merely his nascent appeal to mockery – as far as I know, he never composed anything beautiful or serious in his life (if I am wrong, please correct me with an example) – or the kind of grandiose sensationalism used intentionally to attract attention. Like this “fire eater” we all know and love:

Perhaps both. Either way, none of it rises to the level of Music. Whatever it is, it's something else.

GOING FORWARD

The full answer to “what happened?” is more profound even than Bloom’s work suggests. I will address this question in subsequent posts and podcasts on the Birth of Venus Substack. Knowing what happened and why will help to allow those who wish to reclaim the beauty, truth and joyfulness of aesthetic creation that was paramount for the Artist before the Generation of ‘68 arrived on the scene with their torches and pitchforks. We can build again. We must.

‘68 is bankrupt. It’s over. Tens of millions of Americans yearn for imaginative works of beauty right now this very minute. They pine for real nutrition, and not detritus, to enliven their lives. They do not know why most of what they endure is so bad or where to get the good stuff, if they even know there is any. But when they see it, they know it and the experience of it creates in the beholder a dramatically richer, positive and hopeful inner life.

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