by Carl Halling

Created on: July 02, 2007

Rock Music and the tragic cult of self-destruction

Rock is more than just a simple type of popular music derived from rythym and blues, country music and so on. Rather it is an immensely influential international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual substance, much of it depictable as pure "pop", which could be used as an abbreviation of popular rock. Some cultural critics have even gone so far as to describe it as a religion.

What is certain is that rock has possessed an intellectual dimension since the 1960s. From Dylan onwards there have been rock artists who've looked to past movements within the sphere of artistic modernism for inspiration, such as romanticism, symbolism, dadaism, surrealism, beat, situationism, and so on, as well as the zeitgeists which birthed them. In my opinion this was especially true of certain rock pioneers of the 1970s and early 80s.

It could be said that rock has been the principle repository of the avant garde impulse in the West since the late sixties, with its acompanying rebelliousness and negativity, although it would be false to say that rock has been uniformly negative, when much of it has been positive and uplifting, as well as artistically exalted. And yet the fact remains that rock has helped to disseminate a culture of instant gratification throughout the Western World in the last fifty years thereby significantly contributing to the alteration of its moral fabric.

Those who like myself were born in the mid 1950s, and so grew up in the sixties were of necessity affected on a deep, and perhaps largely subliminal, level by the post-war socio-cultural revolution of which rock was such an essential component. Some were more profoundly and negatively impacted than others, and I would consider myself among them. I maintain that from quitting formal education aged 16 to coming to faith some two decades thereafter, I was in thrall to a cult of "nowness" or instantaneity that has been growing progressively more powerful throughout the west since about 1955.

I recently read of a legendary rock artist from the late seventies and early eighties born like me in the mid 1950s and about whom someone very close to him described as being obsessed by human suffering, both mental and physical despite being well into his twenties. His worldview, which also incorporated a preoccupation with the dark glamour of self-destructive genius, I see as remarkably akin to mine at the time I penned the words contained in the first paragraph of this piece, or when my mother wrote her impassioned letter to me, portions of which I quoted in the previous paragraph.

There are those who would insist that far fewer young people in the late 00s are enthralled by the time-honoured avant gardist exaltation of self-destructive genius than in previous rock eras. How true this is it is difficult to say, but what is certain is that the worldview still exists, and may be set to explode once again, as it has done periodically since the late 60s by which time the golden age of youth and pop and had started to reveal a far more solemn visage with hard rock as its new soundtrack.

Only just recently, I read of a young rock idol who announced with a good deal of wistful regret that he'd destroyed beautiful things that were his for the keeping, and again I was reminded of the person I was a decade and a half ago. He could not be more different than the soul I am today, who treasures and honours the things he loves which are to a significant extent the simple things that nurture and sustain the individual and society

Learn more about this author, Carl Halling.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.