School of Rock

The tired cliché is that rock and roll will corrupt God-fearing parents’ sons and daughters, for once they hear the guitar riffs and the screeching vocals, then the devil has got them forever. Putting a damper on all that fire-and-brimstone talk, M. Taufiqurrahman says that rock music’s thinkers can serve up a lesson or two about the classics.

There has also never been a dearth of “evidence” to get concerned parents to wean their kids off the devil’s music. An oft-quoted case for rock’s corrupting influences is the alleged subliminal seduction contained in several songs that were reportedly responsible for a number of suicides among young rock fans.

Such bands as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Eagles and Judas Priest have been accused of placing subliminal audio tracks in their music to praise Satan, corrupt the souls of the innocent, own up to the death of band members and all other manner of hellish tendencies.

The tendency to use drugs, booze or other mind-expanding substances among rockers has also served as a punching bag for people who don’t like rock music in the first place. For worried parents, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain – figures lionized in the annals of rock and roll – are nothing but mixed-up buffoons who did too many drugs to escape the problems of sudden fame and fortune. Perpetually under the influence, they figure as worrisome bad influences for impressionable youngsters.

On the lighter side of things, parents and worried significant others alike may be more concerned about the corrupting influence of rock music on their loved ones’ sartorial choices.

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There’s no doubting rock music’s strong influence on clothes and style trends. However dreadful the 1980s pastel suits, bubble shirts and highlights, some of us merrily subscribed to the fads and committed serious crimes of fashion that we only repented two decades after the fact.

Even prodigious fashion designer Marc Jacobs fell prey to rock’s corrupting tendency when he was the designer at Perry Ellis, known for its clean-cut all-American look.

In 1992, at the height of grunge, Jacobs was so enamored by the music from the Pacific Northwest that he decided to put it on the runway: flannel shirts, thermals, Doc Martens and crocheted skullcap. Jacobs was fired for it.

With so many casualties, it is better to just steer clear of anything rock and roll?

Well, if you can get past all the clichés and just stick to the music – and lyrics – you’re in for probably the best education that even the top colleges couldn’t give you.

This will ring especially true for depressed kids who spent their lonely nights poring over the liner notes from The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, studying Morrissey’s cryptic lyrics, dissecting his every word and trying to decipher the meaning behind the following lines:

Keats and Yeats are on your side
But you lose because Wilde is on mine

For the Smiths’ devoted fans, these two lines from “Cemetery Gates” can serve as an introduction to a full-fledged course on three of English literature’s most important writers.

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And if you believe that music is more than just the tune that accompanies you on a long drive or the booming noise that soundtracks a late-night drinking fest, the investment that you make reading Keats’ poem “Ode on Melancholy” will pay off when you finally find the link between Morrissey’s morose wit and Keats’ fixation with death and gloom.

I believe that after reading passages from Keats, which among others state that the only way to engage the great mysteries of life is to suffer “misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression”, you won’t see Morrissey as just another run-of-the-mill rock idol.

Unless you think that Keats and Wilde are bad influences, it is now time to bring home a fresh copy of The Queen Is Dead before unwrapping a copy of The Importance of Being Earnest for your 15-year-old.

For those who doubt the merits of rock as a serious art form, the works of avant-garde rockers the Beatles, Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, David Bowie and the Velvet Underground stand alongside the works of modernist composer Steve Reich, Glenn Branca or even Beethoven.

Listen to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” back to back with Beethoven’s Hammerklavier and it becomes obvious how striking the similarities are between the two.

But if you think the music from Sonic Youth’s seminal album Daydream Nation is too abrasive or that the Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico is musically sub-par for unabashedly ripping off minimalist composer Terry Riley, just look at the albums’ cover arts and your lesson in fine art will begin in an instant.

The “peel slowly and see” cover art of The Velvet Underground & Nico, a stark and minimalist work by Andy Warhol, is probably the reason why so many young people decide to go to art school or become graphic designers.

And if you’re still in doubt about the power of music or whether it has influenced the history of fine art or vice versa, Daydream Nation represents a condition in which rock music and fine art are not mutually exclusive.

For the album cover art, Sonic Youth used a “high-art” painting of a candle by German artist Gerhard Richter titled Kerze, and by doing so, the band, in the words of art critic Jutta Koether – writing in the album’s liner notes – produced an underground masterpiece that visually describes loss and self-doubt, two sentiments best described by the burning candle image.

Earlier in the 1980s, Manchester’s own New Order used a Henri Fantin-Latour piece as the cover of their Power, Corruption and Lies. Shortly after Daydream Nation came out, the Stone Roses splashed Jackson Pollock on the cover of their self-titled album, and Patti Smith hired Robert Mapplethorpe to shoot her for the cover of Horses.

So next time you have trouble turning your kids on to Chopin, try baiting them with a bit of the Clash.

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