 Dear students, or potential students, my name is Brown Paper, I'm a lecturer at Tilburg University and I'm going to talk today about music as a social problem. You're probably well aware of the fact that everybody can have conflicts about or overpopular music. That people disagree about the habits or the taste or the values or the behavior and when you talk about music it's also usually a discussion between adults for the youth. When you're young you used to have another taste of music than when you're older. The main question for this mini lecture is the question, is music a social problem? And how can we understand moral panic around music? Because when you talk about a social problem you also can talk about the panic which arises in society around a phenomena which people don't like, a social problem. So if we go first a small dive into the theory you could say when we talk about moral panics about different stages in moral panic. First of all, something or someone has to be defined as a threat to values, something we don't like or interest, also something we don't like but for another reason. The threat must be depicted in an easily recognizable form by the media. That has to be something which can be easily written or discussed about in the media. And also there's a rapid buildup of public concern. Something is happening and within a couple of weeks everybody is talking about that issue or that phenomena that is problematic. Which leads to a situation that also the authorities and opinion makers have to respond on what's happening in society. And the result can be that the panic resides or that the panic starts to shift towards social changes. Well, let's look at a couple of different musical problems or problems people have with music. First of all, start with jazz in the roaring 1920s. There was a lot of resistance to jazz and there were also certain claims towards jazz. For instance, it leads to sexual excess, which means that music leads to sexual downfall of the youth. And the claims were made by parents, of course, educators, clergymen from the church, from religious perspective. And also jazz was something which was aesthetically incompetent because jazz was playing kind of free-floating using your instrument so there were no formal musical rules and those claims were made by musicians, classically trained musicians, musical critics and also educators. And third of all, racial inferiority, which means jazz was mainly performed and enjoyed by black Americans and increasingly also white Americans and the middle class white were a little bit afraid about this new form of music. And we look, for instance, at the critics on jazz music in that time. They say, for instance, jazz is at its worst an unforgivable orgy of noise, a riot or discourse, usually perpetrated by players who scant musical training. And jazz is at its worst often associated with files surrounding filthy words and unmentionable dances. Maybe you'll regularly recognize some of the critique your parents might have on the music you're listening to. If we look at the social context when jazz appeared on the scene in those roaring 1920s in the United States, there was a lot to say about what's happening in society, a lot of transformations. For instance, all kind of religious social norms about what to do in public seems to loosen up, more tolerance for drinking, smoking, sensuality, having a good time. There was the Protestant ethic of drift, of being very keen on what you just planned. And save was replaced by a kind of ethic of consumption and immediate gratification, no saving for rainy days with direct consumption and having a good time. Also, most of the time until the 19th century, 1920th century, a lot of leisure was centered in the home. And now it was replaced slowly by what we nowadays call mass culture. A lot of people going out, probably what you do also, going out, having a drink in the pub or going to a club to dance, which was a shift which happened in the 1920s. Therefore, also this small family-centered world where people were very much in control, especially parents were very much in control about who was going where, was displaced by a mass public society, also kind of a loss of control. And you see immediately a reaction by the authorities in 1922. For instance, in New York, there was a bill which had to regulate jazz music and dancing. And within a couple of years, these bills were carried out in more than 60 communities and cities in the USA. When we go 30 years later, 30, 40 years later, Saint George's and Rock and Roll in the 1950s, for instance, Elvis Presley, well-known was one of the famous Rock and Roll stars. And interestingly enough, he is seen as the one who more or less put Rock and Roll on the map, although he was just playing music which was made by a black American artist who were not played on the radio and he was a white artist who was played on the radio. Interesting, if you look at the last picture, you only see the upper half of Elvis Presley. Because at an important television show, the Ed Sullivan Show, he was only filmed from the head to around, to his shoulders. The reason why, because he was dancing very frantically with his legs and his pelvis, that's why he's called Elvis the Pelvis, and mostly female audience liked it very much, but it was seen as very sexual behavior, so it was not appropriate on national television. And when you look at what happens in Rock and Roll, you see the same kind of mechanisms happening which we already saw with jazz music. There are all kinds of objections towards rock music, from a racial and moral kind of perspective, especially from the radical right wing, the Kugelius Klan, or Christian Crusaders. From politics, we talk about the 1950s in the mid-20th century in the United States. Rock was also seen as an effort from the Soviet Union, a communist effort to undermine the social and political system of the United States, which is a pretty ground claim, if I may say so. But also, again, sexuality. The idea was that Rock and Roll leads to moral corruption of the innocent and vulnerable youth. The poor children had to be protected against this dirty and sexual kind of music. It also was associated already in the 1960s and 1950s, but especially more in the 1960s and 70s with drug use and also drug abuse. Maybe you know the song from The Beatles, the British rock group The Beatles from the 1960s, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and it was actually standing for LSD, which is also known as a famous drug at that time. Then we enter the 1970s. And in the 1970s, there was a new type of music becoming increasingly popular, disco music. Most of you will probably know disco also because in contemporary dance music there's a lot of referrals to the old disco music from the 1970s. An interesting thing about disco music is that actually it's a kind of music which has as an side effect an emancipation of certain groups in society. In a way, it was realizing the dream of the 1960s, the dream of freedom and of maybe the idea that the hippies had in the 1960s, trying to get rid of the authority of your parents and of the government and then trying to live your life as free as possible. The more important, it was also dancing on the disco music was mostly done by homosexuals, Afro-Americans and Hispanics, minority groups in the United States. And this was a way of emancipating these kind of groups. And it was also a total change which was very important in the 1960s. In the 1960s you'll have all those protest songs, rock music, folk music, people like Bob Dylan and Joan Bays and so on. And it changed and those were politically loaded songs about, for instance, changing in society against the war in Vietnam. And disco was about dancing, was about escapism, hedonism, which means that the important lyrics in those protest songs were actually changed into bodily movements. Disco music is not well known because they have very political or social lyrics. Most disco music don't have much anymore lyrics than dance, dance, dance, or I love you or something like that. So there was a huge change. And interestingly enough, when you talk about emancipation, for instance, dancing with the same sex was forbidden in New York until 1971. And disco is also a club nowadays, it's a place where a lot of people men dance with men, women dance with women, or they dance together. But that was 50 years ago that was even forbidden. So in that way, disco was a form of emancipation and at the same time, a lot of people were afraid of disco, especially the older generations. The character of disco was described by Dyer as being erotic. The music was directed to the whole body, dancing with your whole body. It was about romance, especially the Philly soul of the 1970s. There were a lot of violence. There were songs on relationships, not on political issues, but on relationships and love. And it was about materialism, consumerism, etc. Think about the luxurious disco take like Studio 54, or maybe in the early 1980s, where Madonna had her greatest hits with, or her huge hits with material girl. So the interesting thing about disco is that on one hand it's a kind of underground sound, which for the specific ethnic minorities, but at the same time later in the 1970s it became a mass product and became mainstream. And disco was music for everybody. It was an enormous growth of the places where you can dance on disco music, growth of the now called disco takes or clubs. Movies which were promoting the music, for instance Saturday Night Fever, and as a result a lot of rock groups started to also change from rock music to a kind of disco influenced form of rock. Miss You By Drawing Stones, or I Was Made For Loving You by Kis, that were rock groups who combined their rock music with disco sounds. And also radio stations were switching to the disco format, which means most stations were originally playing adult oriented rock, rock music, and now they were switching to more and more disco music. So disco also became to be seen as a social problem by a certain part of society. For instance, the most extreme example might be the radio disjockey Steve Dell, who organized a disco demolition day in 1979 during the half time break of a baseball game. He asked all the people around the Kowinski Park in Chicago to come to the stadium to burn their disco records. And one of the reasons was he was a white male radio disjockey who used to play all kind of rock music, but his radio station changed the format to more and more disco and dance oriented songs and he got fired because he was not playing that kind of music. So there was a kind of critique and revolt against the idea that disco became mainstream. So we now enter the 1980s, again it's a mini lecture so we go rapidly through history. And in the 1980s there was a kind of conservative turn in the political climate. That's here in the United Kingdom, Ronald Reagan in the USA. It was less progressive like the 1960s and 1970s. It became a more conservative climate and there were all kind of social movements who were concerned with violence against women, anti-drugs, the first AIDS outbreak and the panic around AIDS. I mean we are now panicking about corona but AIDS can also be seen in that kind of light. It was a disease nobody understood at that moment. There were more and more questions there about pornography, missing children, child molestation, all kind of social problems, moral problems which were arising on the political agenda in the 1980s. And interestingly enough the question is who was getting the blame for these kind of problems. Well, music was one of the obvious candidates for taking the blame for all these social and moral problems in society. For instance, especially hip-hop in the United States of America. And there was the Genesis of the Parents Music Resource Center and one of the ladies here is also Tipper Gore which is the wife of El Gore, one of those former USA president candidates. And she started a movement against explicit lyrics in music, especially rap and hip-hop music. And probably you're well aware of the sticker Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics. They tried to warn people, especially young people about all those filthy languages which were used in hip-hop and rap music. So the Parents Music Resource Center was focusing on this. The PMRC was focusing on these kind of problems in music. Basically they had several claims. They said that popular music contributes to a rise in teenage suicide, a rise in teenage pregnancy and also a rise in drug addiction, especially among young people. Interestingly in that account, you might know the movie Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore who was trying to find out how it was possible that two students of a high school in the United States were killing their fellow high school friends. And one of the explanations was that those guys who were killing their friends and the other students were listening to the music of Marilyn Manson and that was one of those obvious, more conservative explanations of a social problem. A social problem was caused by listening to the wrong music. And at the end of the 1980s, early 1990s, you see the same kind of mechanisms arrive when house music started to enter the scene and also rave music in the UK. But mostly the panic around house music in the 1980s, early 1990s, was about the use of ecstasy or E. And especially when the first girl, in this case Leah Betts in 1995, was found dead on a rave party. It was immediately an enormous moral panic about the use of ecstasy pills by young people. Maybe nowadays you're accustomed to go to a pop concert or a festival and you take some weed or pills. But at that time there was an enormous amount of panic in the Netherlands, exactly the same. There was also a drug panic in the Dutch party scene. Although in the Netherlands there were also a lot of professionals who were checking the quality of the drugs which leads to a little bit different situation about the panic than compared to the United Kingdom. Also very interesting was the reaction of the government because one of the problems or the problems around drugs were connected with listening to house music and going to house music raves. They enforced the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act which explicitly stated that you give the authorities the right to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave. And the rave is also defined as gathering on a land in open air of hundred or more persons at which amplified music is played during the nights. And the interesting thing is that it's also mentioning in the law that the music is an emission of repetitive beats if you want to know how in the late 1990s music genres like drum and bass or break beats arrived that was also to do with trying to be not producing repetitive beats but slightly not repetitive so that you could escape this criminal justice and public order act. So when you look at house music and culture you will see that also house music like disco is breaking with the long-standing European musical tradition about clear strong structures and meaningful lyrics. That was also the difference between the 1960s folk music with political lyrics and social lyrics versus disco. We see the same in house music. Interesting thing is sexuality like in disco is not only seen from a male point of view. It's a kind of both sexes and it has an enormous mass appeal like disco music in the late 1970s. Increasingly amount of people are going to race and enjoying house music in the 1990s. So it's not only for small subculture which makes it even more scary for the older generations. And the interesting thing about house music which hadn't happened before was that it also was breaking down the barriers between different lifestyles and different social classes and different musical genres. If you think about terms like world music that only appeared on the scene in the late 1970s but had a breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s and also the difference between generations who do like house music was way smaller than it used to be. Okay, well, I have to conclude because I'm already over 20 minutes so what are my concluding remarks if you look at music as a social problem. You could see that it's about that music is something which is attacking the existing order. Dancing and rhythm and songs without or no songs and no texts or whatever or missing meaningful lyrics. And the hedonistic idea that pleasure is the highest achievement is scary for the powers that be. And especially when you talk about sexuality there was the fear for bodily movement. So there's a beautiful quote from an author of a religious anti-rock book the same core bodily movements which led African dancers into a state of frenzy are present in modern dances. It's only logical then that there must be also a correlation in the potentiality of demons gaining possessive control of a person through the medium of the beat. And kind of racist remarks against African dancers and also religious connotation by pointing to the devil as kind of the cause for this kind of effect of music. Any interesting thing also from a sociological point of view is that music has to do with youth as an ambiguous category. On the one hand those usually older generations or people in government try to protect the innocent youth they're afraid of sexuality or bodily movements and also afraid that the fact that young people are easily influenced think about the parental advisory stickers but at the same time older generations usually are a little bit scared for youth because the youth is carrying new musical subcultures so therefore youth is a human category of transition, of change. And in a broader perspective you can say that the appearance of the popular music is an attempt to assert moral control of a world thought to be out of control. There are a lot of societal changes which are reflected sometimes in music but people who have difficulties with these changes usually point the finger to music and say well music is the cause of all the trouble and evil in the world. But basically when you look at all those examples I gave in the past century you see that there is something different going on it's not music per se music is only an expression of change. Well I hope you liked the mini lecture thank you very much for your attention and have a pleasant day.