Music is in the Ear of the Beholder
...usic that “defined a generation”. Bloom speaks about Rock music and how it had an affect on teenagers of the 80s. “Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air students breathe,” (Bloom, 47). He believes that “very few [students] have any acquaintance at all with classical music.” (Bloom, 47). He says that good students who studied and did well in school listened to Classical music, and “students who did not fit into the groove,” (Bloom, 47) listened to Rock music. Bloom says that Rock music “has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire” (Bloom, 50). He says that Rock is directed toward children who “do not yet have the slightest imagination of love” (Bloom, 51). He feels that as these “exposed” children have ruined imaginations and that when they grow up it will be very difficult for them to have a “passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.” (Bloom, 57). Bloom asserts that liberal education is what will encourage success and a good and pleasant life. He believes that people who had listened to Rock as teenagers will have empty and false lives and will not be very successful. Music is merely for entertainment and can not, in any way, have an effect on anyone’s accomplishments or mistakes. This essay may have been written in the 80s when sex and drugs was accomp...