by Ben Shapiro
Spears’ 2000 follow-up album to . . . Baby One More Time was the chart-smashing Oops! . . . I Did It Again. Again, the content centered on sex. Lyrics from the title number contained this famous line: “Oops! . . . You think I’m in love / That I’m sent from above / I’m not that innocent.”
She wasn’t. Indeed, at this point Spears and her management apparently decided to leave any semblance of traditional morality behind. By May 2000, Britney had told an Australian interviewer that her favorite sexual position was “on top,”37 and had posed again for Rolling Stone, this time clad in an American flag top, with the caption: “BRITNEY WANTS YOU!” The American Family Assocation called for a ban on her music, noting “a disturbing mix of childhood innocence and adult sexuality.”38 This is the clear danger of the pop tarts: They drag their audiences from cooing their songs to imitating their dress to miming their behavior to living the lifestyle they espouse.
Britney was also recanting her desire to be a role model, explaining: “I don’t like to be thought of as a role model. I’m human, I make mistakes like everybody else. I just try to be the best person I can be for me.”39 When I make a mistake, I usually don’t end up on the cover of Rolling Stone in my underwear. Neither does anyone else I know.
By this point, Spears’ career and lifestyle had become a series of hedonistic adventures, leading the New York Times to brand her “the postmodern virgin-whore.”40 A quick fifty-five-hour marriage, a few music videos glamorizing anonymous sex, a few more MTV appearances; over the past two years, Spears has become Madonna-lite. Like Aguilera, Spears’ music has tended toward depressing nihilism as well—in one of her latest music videos, she even commits suicide.41
Amorality isn’t a recipe for happiness, but Spears’ fans keep on buying. Her popularity has hardly waned among pre-teens and teenage girls. As a Washington Post reporter wrote:Britney popularized the slut strut in music videos assembled by a former porn director and single-handedly wiped out the Spice Girls. Short skirts became known as “Britney skirts.” Young girls grabbed Teen People off the newsstands when Britney was on the cover, packed Britney look-alike contests and Britney concerts . . . There’s also Britney on sunglasses, handbags, bellybutton rings, video games, and of course, singing Pepsi’s “Joy of Cola.” Last year, according to news reports, the Britney Empire made more than $100 million US, more than the Tiger Woods machine. Is this what America means by girl power?42
It’s important for parents to keep tabs on their children’s role models before those role models “mature.” Parents are continuing to buy into the cleanliness of Disney Channel stars/pop tarts like Hilary Duff and Lindsey Lohan, but each is busily transitioning from a role model to a Madonna look-alike. Duff sounds eerily like a young Spears or Aguilera when she claims “I think that I’m pretty straightforward, and I’m an honest person and if people look up to that because I’m just being myself, then that’s cool. I don’t necessarily feel like I have to break away or get out of this type of genre that people have put me in. I do think that I’m growing and my music, especially on this second album that’s coming out, is more mature, but not so mature that it’s beyond that younger audience, because I do know that I have that younger audience.”43 Duff’s first album, Metamorphosis , sold more copies than Madonna’s and Spears’ last CDs combined.44
Lohan, who turned eighteen in 2004, started off doing family fare like the charming The Parent Trap and the funny Freaky Friday. Her most recent projects have included Mean Girls and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. There’s only one problem. As Rolling Stone describes it, “There comes a time in the life of every teenage girl who works for the Disney Corp. when that girl realizes she has suddenly—how shall we phrase this?—‘broadened her appeal.’”45 Lohan has appeared at various clubs with the Hilton sisters, drinking and smoking, as well as wearing low-cut dresses to show her newly acquired breasts, a topic that’s received a gratuitous amount of discussion time among porn generation men.46 As the Chicago Sun-Times correctly commented, “We’re still not sure if they’re real or not, but Lindsay is giving us plenty of opportunity to observe them.”47
Shortly after turning eighteen, an event tracked and greeted enthusiastically by dozens of websites run by young men, Lohan posed sexily for the cover of Rolling Stone. The caption read: “Hot, Ready and Legal!”48 This is a common porn technique. Pornographers often use stars barely over the legal age, and then pose them as young girls. If this sort of behavior doesn’t constitute pedophilia, it certainly promotes it.
For more mature audiences
Among older teenagers, Britney and Christina are generally eschewed in favor of alternative rock. The floozy sexuality of pop music and early rock leads to greater and greater nihilism in “more mature” rock music. As Harvard Law student Chris Craig, twenty-five, says, “I think some of the older bands put out non-nihilistic stuff. The jaded nihilistic music is the product of the younger bands.”49 Alice, a twenty-three-year-old student at Harvard Law, agreed: “It’s not cool to be happy. If you’re too happy, you’re looked at as illegitimate.”50
Dr. Joan Shapiro (no relation to author), a practicing psychiatrist for three decades, summed up the situation: “Jadedness is the cool thing to do. Their peers are jaded. The media suggests that that’s kind of what cool kids do. To fit in with their peers, kids are ultimate conformists, particularly adolescents.”
The undisputed king of nihilism-glorifying alternative rock is now-deceased Kurt Cobain, lead singer for Nirvana. Cobain glorified the apathetic teenager and the existentialist lifestyle; the title of one of his songs says it all: “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.”51
The voice of the lonely, existential teenager found its outlet in Nirvana, the 1990s icons that were self-absorbed to the point of complete despair. Nirvana’s anthem, “the best rock song . . . in years,”52 “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” is an ode to nihilism and narcissism. Its dark, dingy melody growls out at the listener. Cobain follows suit, yelling at the audience: “Here we are now / Entertain us / I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now / Entertain us / A mulatto / An albino / A mosquito / My libido / Yea.” The nonsensical, Gertrude Stein-esque lyrics confuse and distance—and that’s what they’re meant to do. The universe is a random place, and we’re stuck in it. Cobain re-emphasizes this just seconds later, gnarling “And I forget / Just what it takes / And yet I guess it makes me smile / I found it hard / It’s hard to find / Oh well, whatever, nevermind.”
If the world is too hard to figure out, you might as well just give up. The good news is, you get to form your own subjective system of morality. Anything goes. In “Stay Away,” another Nirvana hit, Cobain screams, “Have to have poison skin / Stay away / God is gay, burn the flag.” God is dead, and Nirvana put the stake through His homosexual heart.
In Cobain’s own view, the past was a record of failure, and there was no point in trying to rectify it. “I like to complain and do nothing to make things better,” he once stated.53 At the same time, Cobain wasn’t satisfied with his generation: “My generation’s apathy. I’m disgusted with it,” he famously complained.54 Following this worldview to its logical end, Cobain blew his own brains out with a shotgun.55
Nirvana spawned a whole host of imitators, and the dark and dingy became the mainstream. The most extreme branch of nihilistic rock is the heavy metal/goth genre. Rock musicians rail against the very notion of a benevolent God, finding solace and rebellion in siding with Satanic imagery and messages. They take moral darkness to a whole new level. As DJ Mark Shannon told me, “Heavy metal’s direction is controlled—no, dictated—by the need to increase the shock value of it, just as Hollywood has done in the movies. The problem, by the time it’s gone too far, it’s too late to stop it. And we’ve already passed that point several times.”
Ozzy Osbourne, one of the more heralded members of this genre, once headlined the founding band of the heavy metal genre, Black Sabbath, spewing songs with pagan lyrics that ridiculed morality. Now, after landing a vau
nted television show on MTV wherein the brain-fried former rock star babbles nonsensically to the enjoyment of his audience, Osbourne is a mainstream figure. In May 2002, Osbourne appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, to the delight of reporters and politicians alike. Even President Bush paid homage to the mass murderer of morals, joking, “The thing about Ozzy is, he’s made a lot of big hit recordings. ‘Party With the Animals.’ ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.’ ‘Facing Hell.’ ‘Black Skies’ and ‘Bloodbath in Paradise.’ Ozzy, Mom loves your stuff.”56 Just over two years later, Osbourne would repay the favor by comparing Bush to Hitler during Ozzfest, a heavy metal festival.57
Osbourne’s heirs include Marilyn Manson and morally repugnant bands like Slayer, Rob Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, KMFDM, and Korn—sometimes classified as goth or death metal bands, but the more accurate term is pagan. Manson, who named himself by combining the names of Marilyn Monroe and serial killer Charles Manson, is deep into a stylized form of Satanism, proclaiming himself “Antichrist Superstar.”58 His hatred for religion is monumental. In his “The Reflecting God,” he christens himself a god, and then states: “When I’m god everyone dies.” In Britain, one of his fans murdered a teenage girl after being influenced “by the macabre work of Manson.”59
Manson actively opposes anything that even hints of morality. Take, for instance, his ode to degradation, “Cake and Sodomy”: “I am the god of f—, I am the god of f—/ virgins sold in quantity, herded by heredity / red-neck-burn-out-mid-west-mind, ‘who said date rape isn’t kind?’ / porno-nation, evaluation / what’s this, ‘time for segregation’ / libido, libido fascination, too much oral defecation / white trash get down on your knees, time for cake and sodomy.” Manson finishes with a slap at the religious: “cash in hand and dick on screen, who said God was ever clean? / bible-belt ‘round anglo-waste, putting sinners in their place / yeah, right, great if you’re so good explain the s—stains on your face.”
Manson’s replacement religion? You guessed it: sex. “I memorize the words to the porno movies / It’s the only thing I want to believe / I memorize the words to the porno movies / This is a new religion to me,” he groans in “Slutgarden.”
As of 1999, the average teenager listened to 10,500 hours of rock music during the years between seventh and twelfth grades.60 It’s no surprise that today’s teens feel abandoned, adrift in a sea of uncertainty and meaninglessness. As Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution states:If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music—the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before—is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers ... Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents—nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today’s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents—not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there.61
Whereas oversexed pedophilia chic dominates pop music, boredom, and jadedness are the hallmarks of teenage thought. Everything “sucks,” “bites,” or “blows.” Even if you like something, you’re not supposed to get too excited about it, because nothing really means anything. We’re the generation of nm (internet speak for “nothing much”) and whatever. We’re the generation of “I don’t care.” As Kurt Cobain sang, “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.”
Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame summed up the situation nicely in a 1994 interview: “Think about it, man . . . Any generation that would pick Kurt or me as its spokesman—that must be a pretty f—up generation, don’t you think?”62
The fantasy world
Music stars, regardless of genre, employ sex to sell their product—whether it’s the porn star stage dancers at a Kid Rock show or the dancing Lolitas of the pop circuit. But it’s not just the audience that feels the effects of exploitation: Sometimes, even the pop stars themselves realize how morally and spiritually corrupt they have become.
In January 2004, Laura Sessions Stepp of the Washington Post wrote a piece entitled “Partway Gay?; For Some Teen Girls, Sexual Preference Is A Shifting Concept.” “Move over, Ellen DeGeneres, and make way for the younger girls. Way younger, actually, and way different from what most people think of as lesbians . . . These girls pack Ani DiFranco concerts and know tATu lyrics by heart.”63
For many readers, one question immediately arose: Who the hell was tATu?
tATu was a Russian pop group—two teen girls, in fact—who acted as though they were in deep lesbian love. The name of the group meant “this girl loves that girl” in Russian slang. The group opened its doors for business when the girls, Yulia and Lena, were fourteen and fifteen, respectively. They kissed and simulated sexual activity onstage and in music videos; they spoke about the enjoyment of lesbianism. In 2003, their single “All The Things She Said” racked up thirteen million sales worldwide.64 tATu sold a pedophilic notion of young girls making out; the band’s manager, Ivan Shapovalov, admitted that his idea for the band originated while surfing the net and discovering the plethora of kiddie porn websites.65
The pair claimed to have sex three times a day.66 Their management claimed that the pair insisted on a double bed in hotel rooms.67 The girls managed to avoid explaining which way they swung. And Shapovalov continued to rake it in.
Everything began to crumble in 2004, when one of the girls, Yulia, became pregnant by her married lover.68 It turns out that Yulia had already had one abortion the previous year in order to prevent public awareness of her heterosexuality. She also became suicidal, explaining “I have such thoughts that I want to die.” Lena, her musical partner, says she feels “disgusted” by the way she acted. “I felt so bad about it for a long time. I realize that the time would come to pay for everything you’ve done in your life. And I now want to redeem my sins. I go to church all the time. I tell the priest everything about tATu. And he tries to help me. He blesses me . . . I feel I am absolutely talentless . . . I am leaving showbusiness.”69
These gained international celebrity, but lost their innocence. They convinced thousands of young girls that lesbianism was normal, or at least valuable for titillating men. They helped define deviancy down, and promote a “live and let live” world. And they destroyed themselves. tATu is the logical culmination of the pop tart mentality. Do anything to sell an album. Use your authority as a role model to model behavior that would make a hooker blush. Push the boundaries. Teach young girls that true strength is in bucking “old-fashioned” social convention—yet teach them simultaneously to cater to the most perverse form of male sexual fantasy.
In short, undermine traditional morality. But be careful how far you push things, since it’s all about the cash and parents are the ones with the wallets. Lucky for the pop tarts that millions of parents spend less time worrying about what their kids listen to and watch than whether they should order their latte with non-fat or soy milk. Britney Spears is a morally repugnant piece of work, but she’s right about one thing: “It’s a fantasy world that I’m doing . . . It’s up to the parents to explain that to their children.”70
CHAPTER FIVE
WHERE PIMPS AND HOS RUN FREE
“The new trend today is depravity.”
BROOKLYN RAPPER MOS DEF1
John Kerry finds rap “music” fascinating. At least that’s what the Massachusetts senator and Democratic 2004 presidential candidate told MTV’s Gideon Yago in a blatant attempt to pander to the black vote.
“I don’t always like, but I’m interested. I mean, I never was into heavy metal. I didn’t really like it,” Kerry said. “I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ‘cause it’s important.”2
Believability has never been Kerry’s strong point. As columnist Mark Ste
yn wryly noted, “Reckon if you bust into his pad and riffled through his and Teresa’s CD collection you’d find a single rap album?”3
While Kerry was “bother[ed]” by rap lyrics advocating cop killing, and felt “that sometimes some lyrics in some songs have stepped over what I consider to be a reasonable line,” he refused to advocate government censorship of such lyrics.4 Hey, if anyone knows what it’s like to be held down by The Man, it’s John F. Kerry. He had to bus’ a few caps in Vietnam, you know, to protect the bruthas and all.
Kerry’s is the politically correct view of rap, where the music is “a reflection of the street and a reflection of life.”5 We live in a world of multiculturalism and diversity, where every culture supposedly has its own material to contribute to the giant collage that is America. What pompous, wrong-thinking person would refuse to honor the gangsta art form for its beauty (Kerry and his ideological brethren imply), or treat it as anything less than our modern-day Gershwin or Sinatra?