Super post.  I love that we can talk about EVERYTHING, including The Bruce, under the aspect of eternity here. 

One of the underlying phenomena of the 60s was the presumption, on the part of the WWII generation, that the rites of passage they had experienced were still intact.  And this may have been true in parts of the country, but it was wildly untrue in California where I grew up.  Even as the children of good marriages we grew up with so little supervision that we might as well have been orphans, except for the cars and the spending money.  As a result, I do see parents–especially conservative Catholics and Protestants–keeping in much closer touch with their teens–sometimes to an excessive degree, with “helicopter parents.”   The homecoming dance in the fall at our school, for example, sees parents–including the Ficketts–running hither and yon in order to insure that our teenagers have a memorable teenage social life.  We like that there’s an available structure where we an coach our kids through their first significant dates–and that we pick them up after the dance and go have hot chocolate with them. 

My parents knew absolutely nothing about the people I hung around with or what we did together.  They counted on the settings of the school and the church to insure that my associations were good ones.  They counted on the larger society, in a sense, to reinforce the values they held. 

“Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”  No, all the Mr. & Mrs. Jones’s truly didn’t.  I remember the summer all the teenage girls around me decided to go without bras.  All at once and church girls and school girls alike.  Youth culture had arrived and there truly was a “generation gap,” with out parents largely unaware that society was no longer reinforcing their values but actively undermining them. 

Now Catholic and other Christians are aware–or have no excuse not to be–that we are in a battle to form our kids in an aggressively secular society from the very beginning.  Still, there are a lots of Catholic families–even at Catholic schools–who believe that social status, money, and the life-launch platform these supply will take care of the most important things for their kids and are prepared to wink at lots of bad behavior.  Sometimes they are right and nature trumps all, in the sense of their kids making materially successful lives.  Sometimes not. 

Springsteen’s music draws on the grandiosity of youth–anything is possible at any time–and its stalking fear of turning out to be a human zero.  It captures youth’s dreams, its nostalgia for childhood, its blind self-assertion.  And, as Dan remarks, its permanently stuck there.  To turn this into a philosophy to guide an entire life is both ridiculous and the standard fare of American culture. 

Musical invention–like most innovation–is by and large the preserve of young people.  There are artists who keep innovating throughout their lives, but most find their idiom early and cannot escape it thereafter.  That’s just part of our nature as creatures.  You pair this with electronics (and now the digital age) and powerful marketing and distribution and and disposable income and you get a musical culture that is perpetually a youth culture.  The vein that Springsteen mines (almost always in the context of young love and sexual experience) becomes a perennial part of the American experience as generation after generation passes through it and the musicians of those generations express the feelings of youth in their music.  Pop music culture by virtue of the talent and money that drives it ends up casting the spell of Peter Pan over our society.  This is not so much an accusation or lamentation as it is an observation.  That’s just the way it is.

It can have its place, but as Dan is arguing there needs to be a larger understanding–a true horizon of meaning–presented to young people in order for them to understand human destiny as something other than self-transformation or–as much of pop culture likes to celebrate–”self-invention.”  They need to know what it means to be made in the image of God and that their ultimate destiny rests in God.  These are realities into which we are born, not ones we choose, transform ourselves into, or invent. 

What if we had a musical idiom–not lyrics, you understand, but a basic architecture to music–that expressed how our stories are gathered into God’s story?  The idioms matter. That’s one of the reasons churchmen, like Pope Benedict, keep coming back to Gregorian chant and the polyphony of Palestrina.  There’s a sense in those idioms of something beyond “self-transformation.”  Oddly, when you think about it, Gospel, out of which so much of rock and roll is built, has a wonderful sense of transcendence–and even the blues, the other major contributor to rock, carries limitation and tragedy in its changes.  Both of these strains were hyper-sexualized as they became rock and roll.

A pop cultural musical idiom with a sense of transcendence–that’s a challenge waiting out there for a new generation of Christian musicians.  This does not mean, I’m at pains to say, just taking what’s on offer and adding the Jesus emo of nasally white boys.  It’s the fundamental challenge of how the music itself–as music–is constructed.  I can envision such a wonder.  Perhaps before I die I’ll hear it.      

I think I learned more from your comment, Harold, than from writing my post. Thank you! Very astute observations. And I like your thought about a new governing “architecture” for pop music. I have no idea how to pursue this thought, but I believe it worth pursuing along the lines of your analogies to chant and Palestrina. There are elements in the pop music of the last fifty-plus years that are so promising, but it all seems to tend toward the innocuous–even for Dylan and U2. Maybe electronic instrumentation is part of the problem? Maybe it’s the distribution and marketing mechanisms?…

I’m not sure what you mean by healthier families.  Less divorce?–Yes.  That does not necessarily mean healthier.

I am also wondering why, when I mention that I’m glad things have changed for women, you go right to abortion.  Did I say anything about abortion?  Most women do not get abortions.  Yet, progress for women apparently automatically equates with abortion.   I’m not getting into an argument about abortion.  However, your comments along with what is going on in various states makes me question about whether or not there are certain people who want to to see women back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant and are just using the abortion issue to drive us back there. 

I have no problem with hardworking folks…I have no problem with self-transformation as long as it is linked to moral responsibility…I have no problem with respecting the genuine rights of women. What I do have a problem with is a certain notion of self-transformation that is lauded in at least some of Springsteen’s songs, and in much of popular music, which encourages us to do what we like whatever the consequences. Listen to the lyrics, for example, of Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart.” That kind of “self-transformation” I find to be dangerous.