Birth of a conservative intellectual

My favorite definition of an intellectual: “Someone who has been educated beyond his intelligence.”

– Arthur C. Clarke, “3001: The Final Odyssey”

Prologue

I’ve been a Ronald Reagan conservative for 30 years now. This epiphany experience compelled me to write the essay below, which was the first of two essays written exactly 30 years ago for my school newspaper, The DePauw, during my senior year at DePauw University. I was 21 years old.

Note that this essay on aesthetics demonstrates a realization of the superior cognitive value of classical music over other forms of music years before the “Build Your Baby’s Brain” music series became popular for pregnant woman.

My first published opus

Music: You Are What You Listen to
DePauw University (January 1983)

Give me the music of a nation and I care not who makes its laws, I will control its people. –Plato

Music, to the majority of the populace, serves as an indispensable part of life in America. We can listen to it while we do just about anything and take it with us anywhere we go.

Music is a tremendous force, evoking a gamut of human emotions. Aristotle said, “Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness … of courage and temperance … of virtues and vices in general which hardly fall short of the actual affections … for in listening to such strains, our souls undergo change.”

The music that is considered “popular” today [makes] Henry Thoreau’s prophesies in “Walden” even more despairing: “Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”

Musical styles are consummate and serve a voluminous amount of objectives from worship to sound effects; therefore, I will limit my comments to the two most popular forms, “rock ‘n’ roll” and “pop” or “soul” music. Both of these musical forms, especially rock, have achieved unprecedented influence on the values of society.

In general, most of the songs glorify sexual immorality, occult worship, obstinate philosophies, drugs, incessant partying and drunkenness. But the central theme of our current “hit songs” is doubtlessly propagating sexual promiscuity, which is clearly manifested in rock, [hip-hop], soul and country music.

My condemnation isn’t toward the people that advocate in their lives the exhaustive list of adjectives I listed in the previous paragraph; it is against those who cringe at the mention of any of those words in a regular conversation, but adulterate themselves unreservedly to the beat and the message of rock and soul music in practice.

As a music educator and a conscientious listener to only discriminating forms of music, I have come to recognize a definite link among the several popular varieties of music. In all cases the harmonic and rhythmic materials of rock, soul and country music are critical and viably significant.

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