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Old 02-06-2004, 04:55 AM   #23 (permalink)
ARTelevision
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Location: USA
There are many voices rising up regarding this.
It does make sense to be aware of and consider what they are saying. A controversy exists and it will not be easily dsmissed.

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Pop culture has been in decline for awhile
The Jackson Sun
jacksonsun.com
Feb 6 2004

Blessedly, I was away from the television during the now-infamous halftime extravaganza at the Super Bowl on Sunday, so I missed the "wardrobe malfunction," the "costume reveal," seen 'round the world.

Actually, there was a good reason I was away from the TV. In a rare moment of foresight, I intuited that whatever MTV/CBS was going to serve up, the north Georgia-born, World War II vet, churchgoing father-in-law with whom I was watching the game was not going to enjoy it one bit. So I engaged him in a bit of upstairs billiards during halftime, and we missed the whole thing. Little did I know how very right that intuition would prove to be. Of course it didn't take a genius to know that a show featuring Nelly, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake might just prove to be too much to bear for millions of people like my father-in-law. After all, these "artists" have a long track record. Why should we be surprised if their acts on the grandest stage of all are true to what they do the rest of the time?

What happened on Sunday is not just that Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson conspired to spice up their little dance number, and something did (or did not) go as planned. At a deeper level, what happened is that the rapidly degrading MTV culture in which our youth are saturated met the Super Bowl, a cultural event offered to all Americans - indeed to all the world in America's name. That clash has produced an immediate fallout that may yet prove to be of some cultural value, even while we are still wiping our eyes wondering what our children, our parents and our grandparents have seen.

The fact of the matter is that many Americans are (or have been) blissfully ignorant about the declining moral and aesthetic standards that in recent years have swept across the landscape of mass market television (especially cable TV) and music. Of course, concerned adults have been lamenting those declining standards since the 1960s. This doesn't mean that the concern is illegitimate. What it really means is that the standards have been in continuous decline for more than 40 years.

I was first clued in to how bad things have gotten when my teenage kids stumbled upon the MTV movie awards show at a hotel room when we were on a beach vacation last summer. Just about every award was offered by a foul-mouthed star who seemed to be competing with the previous one to see how many F-words could be stuffed into a 3-minute presentation. Then there was a homoerotic song and dance number involving dozens of young girls in prep school outfits which culminated in their flinging off their skirts. That was the end of that afternoon of television for us.

But it is not the end of the exposure of my children, and everyone's children, to the very same material. We can snap off the TV, but our kids can find the same clip on the Web in a hundred places, like Howard Dean's scream. We can snap off Nelly and Outkast and J-Lo and whoever else is on the radio, but our kids can find their way to the same music online, unaltered by the countless bleeps, blanks, and substitute words that one hears on mainstream radio stations.

To those adults who did not know it, Sunday was a wake up call, saying the following: These are the "artists" whose every song is memorized by our children, whose faces (and barely covered bodies) are plastered on their teen magazines and sometimes their bedroom walls, whose clothing styles and seduction styles are imitated by pre-teens and teens alike. These smirking, boundary-crossing, raunchier-the-better singers, rappers, dancers, and actors are the icons of this generation. Theirs are the songs downloaded by our children off the Internet, or listened to on the most popular Top 40 radio stations in town, or pumped into their ears under those headphones.

What happened on Sunday was simply that the rest of America got a peek (so to speak) at what pop culture looks like right now, at the way sexuality is sold to our children. It seems that a lot of us did not like what we saw.

But lest we allow ourselves too much anger at MTV, Janet, or Justin, we should think about our own complicity. How many of the commercials offered on Sunday contained sexually provocative material? How many of us have watched the Darwinian meat market dating programs offered by mainstream television? How many of us are aficionados of situation comedies that make sex their main topic week after week? How many of us have looked at Internet pornography, perhaps America's fastest growing industry?

The halftime show crossed a line that many Americans had never before seen crossed on "family hour" television. But the really bad news is that such lines are crossed every hour of every day before the eyes and ears of our nation's children, and that the rest of us are too busy being titillated by our own amusements even to notice.

David P. Gushee is Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University. Write to him at The Jackson Sun, Editorial Department, P.O. Box 1059, Jackson, TN 38302.
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