ROCK UNDER FIRE : But the Professor in the Ivory Tower Forgot to Do His Homework Before He Bashed Rock ‘n’ Roll

Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, would no doubt cringe at the idea, but he’s got the instincts of a true rock ‘n’ roll star.

If Chuck Berry rather than Plato had been his inspiration, this “mournful trumpet of intellectual despair” (as USA Today described Bloom) might be atop the pop charts these days instead of the nonfiction best-seller lists, where his book “The Closing of the American Mind” has been anchored for weeks.

Bloom is an assured and provocative writer with a penchant for Big Statements and Easy Targets. Reviewing “American Mind” in the New Republic, Louis Menand described the author as a “man who knows his own mind, and who thinks well of what he finds there.”

The professor, who is in fact a scholarly, button-down 56-year-old, would have made the biggest splash during the ‘60s: rock’s “golden age” of social dissection. Critics and fans would have cheered him as he ripped into the junk-food tendencies of mass culture.

In the most aggressive and lyrical moments of his book, Bloom assails contemporary directions in American education with a high idealism and fiery purpose reminiscent of Bob Dylan decrying bankrupt American institutions in “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Imagine Bloom borrowing one of Dylan’s tunes--say “Blowin’ in the Wind”--and setting his words to music. “True openness means closedness / To all the charms that make us comfortable / With the present” may not have the quite the ring of “How many roads must a man walk down,” but it surely would have earned him the support of disgruntled college students.

The thesis of “American Mind” is a seductive one: Modern man has lost touch with the classical values of education. Because of this, Bloom maintains, man is blind to the intellectual process, a condition that leaves him unable to draw upon the lessons of the past or provide the tools to forge a purposeful vision of his own society and the future. Expedience has been substituted for reason, convenience for logical examination.

This concept isn’t new. Supporters of liberal education have decried for years the drift of universities away from classic studies and toward occupation-oriented service institutions--the substitution of skills for knowledge.

A symptom of this malaise, Bloom feels, is that students have adopted “relativism” as the operative philosophical principle--the idea that there are no absolutes or truths because everything is based on your particular culture’s outlook.

Relativism, Bloom maintains, leaves students ill-equipped to grapple with questions of right and wrong because it teaches that there is no ultimate right or wrong, simply different ways of looking at things--a concept that he dismisses as intellectually and morally empty. If relativism and the importance of refocusing on liberal education are the Big Statements in “The Closing of the American Mind,” the Easy Target is rock ‘n’ roll.

“Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music,” declares Bloom, writing with the heart of a true rock provocateur .

He continues: “A very large proportion of young people between the ages of ten and twenty live for music. It is their passion; nothing else excites them the way it does; they can not take seriously anything alien to music. When they are in school and with their families, they are longing to plug themselves back into their music.”

There is more. Writing with a breathless alarm that seems more suited for news of a deadly disease sweeping through a city, Bloom proclaims that rock music today “knows neither class nor nation. It is available twenty-four hours a day, everywhere. There is the stereo in the home, in the car; there are concerts; there are music videos, with special channels devoted to them, on the air nonstop; there are the Walkmans so that no place--not public transportation, not the library--prevents students from communicating with the Muse, even while studying.”

Bloom devotes only a single, 14-page chapter in his 382-page critique to music, but that chapter is placed prominently near the beginning of the book and it features some of his liveliest writing.

Unfortunately, the chapter also contains some of his sloppiest thinking--a point that hasn’t stopped his views on the subject from getting considerable attention, including newspaper excerpts. Branding record executives as “robber barons,” he charges that the music business caters “almost exclusively to children” and that rock has “one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire.” The music’s three great lyrical themes, he says, are “sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.”

Thanks to Bloom, rock is no longer under attack only from fundamentalist preachers or Washington wives, but from the Ivory Tower.

There are thousands of useless rock ‘n’ roll albums, just as there are thousands of useless movies, useless books, useless television shows. But there is also art in television, art in movies, art in books--and art in rock ‘n’ roll.

Bloom sees the music in monolithic terms. He’s unable to discern the difference between a joke like Twisted Sister and a socially conscious group like U2. For him, the symbol of modern rock ‘n’ roll is Mick Jagger, though there is no indication in the book that Bloom has ever heard a Rolling Stones record.

He describes Jagger as a “shrewd, middle-class boy (who) played the possessed lower-class demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was 40.” At one point, he confesses, “I discovered that students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame.”

Pointing out that Jagger has begun to fade in the last couple of years, Bloom says, “Whether Michael Jackson, Prince or Boy George can take his place is uncertain. They are even weirder than he is, and one wonders what new strata of taste they have discovered.” One wonders indeed.

In passages like this, Bloom is beginning to sound like a cranky character in a National Lampoon spoof, using names as if they were lifted at random from the latest copy of Rolling Stone magazine, equating eccentric costumes with moral and philosophical positions. The guy looks funny, so he’s weird. Case closed. Is this the kind of sloppy and dishonest logic that Bloom would accept from one of his own students?

My guess is that Bloom isn’t ignoring inspiring, high-principled artists like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and U2 because they don’t fit his thesis. He simply doesn’t know about them.

By failing to recognize rock as a 20th Century art form, Bloom exhibits both an ignorance about the times and--equally important--an ignorance about the young people he professes to care about.

He calls these students “nice” but lazy and unresponsive, yet he is so isolated from an important aspect of their culture (though rock music is far from the only influence, as he would have you believe) that it is a wonder he can communicate with them at all.

No one denies that much of rock is a shameless exercise in mindless commercialism. That’s why it is such an easy target. However, the heart of the music is something very much more: the same passionate and inspiring search for understanding and insight that characterizes every art form. From the primitive celebrations of Elvis Presley in the ‘50s to the more socially oriented messages of Dylan and the Beatles in the ‘60s, rock music encouraged young people to challenge assumptions and think for themselves--a goal shared with liberal education.

Dealing with issues of society and the search for self-identity, rock artists brought a social realism to pop music, which for years had been exactly the vacuous if entertaining medium that Bloom imagines rock to be now.

Rock became a source of stimulation and comfort in the ‘60s, partly because so many other American institutions--including schools and the church--were unwilling to take seriously the questions and concerns of the new generation.

Literally creating their own language, the most important rock ‘n’ roll artists connected with a young audience more profoundly than most film makers or authors because their work was aimed initially at a specific target audience.

The art form and the culture grew together--and the boundaries expanded as the audience and the artists aged. Much of rock is aimed at children, but the artistic pulse of the music now reaches a demographic that is creeping past 50.

Though rock lost much of that social relevance in the ‘70s, several key artists continued to express themselves with insight and individuality.

Ironically, Bloom’s book hit the stores during a time when rock has regained much of its early social purpose--as evidenced in the work of such best-sellers as Springsteen, U2, John Cougar Mellencamp, Prince and Los Lobos, who deal with questions of community, responsibility and, in some cases, spiritual values.

These are voices that Bloom needs to hear--because they are voices that his students are hearing and they are voices that speak with a purpose and dignity as they seek to combat what Bloom describes as the “impoverished souls” of today’s young people.

And what of the many other great pop artists who have contributed to the richness that rock music has become--people like Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Marvin Gaye, the Who, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, the Doors, Joan Baez, the Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Gram Parsons, Roxy Music, the Eagles, the Clash, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton, Sam Cooke, Frank Zappa, Chrissie Hynde, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, Talking Heads, the Four Tops, Sly Stone, Jerry Lee Lewis, David Bowie, Bob Seger, Otis Redding, Elton John, Santana, Sam and Dave, the Temptations, X, John Prine, the Police, the Sex Pistols, the Grateful Dead, Randy Newman, Tim Hardin, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Iggy Pop, Van Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Rickie Lee Jones, Joy Division, Ray Davies, Led Zeppelin, Little Feat, Little Richard, the Neville Brothers, the Sex Pistols and Bo Diddley?

Is our culture really poorer because of these artists?

Cloaked in the ribbon of academic respectability, Bloom’s careless, scatter-gun observations represent more than a curious lapse in intellectual discipline. They serve as a disheartening thesis that encourages parents and educators to look at young people with suspicion and contempt.

In his New Republic review, Louis Menand picks up on Bloom’s clumsiness and potential damage, “I suspect one of the reasons (his book) has evoked so much unqualified praise is that it gratifies our wish to think ill of our culture (a wish that is a permanent feature of modernity) without thinking ill of ourselves. It does this by making young people our scapegoats--something that has become a bad cultural habit recently.”

The challenge for Bloom and higher education is to find ways to understand and relate to today’s students, not set up new barriers of mistrust through flawed, ignorant broadsides like “The Closing of the American Mind.”

It’s not the freshmen entering classrooms this fall who are responsible for the changes in higher education that Bloom finds so disturbing, and it’s not the music they listen to that is the enemy. However much he may ridicule the students, his colleagues are the ones who have failed. The first mind Bloom needs to open is his own.