Light On Dark Water

How Guns ‘n’ Roses Came to My House

Continuing from last week’s journal the train of thought
about the difficulty of keeping the entertainment industry at
arm’s length, an anecdote:

Although I have a fairly big collection of pop LPs (I
didn’t start buying CDs regularly until ten years or so
ago), I rarely listened to them when our children were young.
This was partly because I didn’t want them to grow up on
that diet, and partly a practical consideration: when I listen to
music, I like to listen, and it’s hard to do that in
a houseful of children. When I did play rock music around the
house, it was fairly benign: tuneful and tasteful music from the
mid-‘60s and such.

For several years when our two oldest children were around ten
or twelve years old, we listened regularly to Shickele
Mix. If you’re not familiar with this radio program,
it’s an entertaining musical miscellany hosted by Peter
Schickele, the musico-comical mastermind behind the works of
P.D.Q. Bach. A typical episode takes a particular musical
technique and looks at the way it’s used in all sorts of
music, including various folk and popular forms. It’s a lot
of fun and you can learn a good bit about music from it, even if
you disagree with Schickele’s dogma that “all musics
are created equal.”

Frequently it was not convenient to listen to the program when
it was broadcast; also, in many cases programs were worth
listening to more than once. So I often taped it. One broadcast
which consisted mainly of baroque arrangements of Beatles songs
also included a string quartet transcription of a Guns N’
Roses song, “Welcome to the Jungle.” Most people who
were anywhere near a radio in the late ‘80s will have heard
this song, but if you haven’t suffice to say that
it’s very abrasive hard rock. And the original song was
included, by way of comparison, along with the string quartet
version.

One of my sons, who was probably about eleven at the time,
fastened onto the song with dismaying alacrity and intensity,
listening to it often until I over-wrote the tape with the
following week’s Shickele Mix. It was striking to
see how powerfully it took hold of him.

The point of this story? There isn’t much of one,
really: simply to note how easily the less desirable elements of
pop culture can slip, uninvited, into a home where a reasonable
effort to suppress it is being made. I don’t want to say
“you can’t be too careful,” because in a sense
you can: I do believe that some, or perhaps many, Christians, go
too far and become overly fearful and paranoid. And obviously
listening to one song a few times is not going to undo anyone.
But it is very hard to escape pop culture entirely, and as
it’s the steady diet that matters most, not the occasional
snack, I return to my point last week about the importance of the
surrounding community: it surely makes a difference whether the
likes of “Welcome to the Jungle” are to be heard
regularly in the homes of your friends, neighbors, and
family.