What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?

Music as the healing universal language that unites us all, you’re doing it wrong:

Suge Knight, Hip-Hop Record Executive, Shot at Club http://t.co/yOzsnbSDp9

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 24, 2014

(This seems to happen on a regular basis to the “gangsta” rap impresario.) And again:

Report: London Rapper Key Suspect in Beheading of James Foley: Sunday, Fox News correspondent … http://t.co/eh4zOW6frJ @BreitbartVideo

— Breitbart.TV (@BreitbartVideo) August 24, 2014

When pre-Carson Tonight Show host Jack Paar died in 2004, Mark Steyn wrote that in sharp — and depressing — contrast to Paar’s sophisticated early 1960s middlebrow show, “Today’s pop culture is not Marshall McLuhan’s global village but a global housing project of warring ghettos. On the 21st century ‘Tonight Show’ the musical guests are relegated to twenty-seven minutes past midnight, because the country fans hate the hip-hop, and the hip-hoppers hate the Lite FM stuff, and if you put ’em on any earlier, the audience tunes out.”

Very early in the career of The Who, Kit Lambert, the band’s exceedingly bourgeois early manager, hyped the group by declaring, tongue firmly in cheek, “The Who are really a new form of crime. They are anti-social, armed against the bourgeoisie.” Similarly, it’s certainly a legitimate argument that the musicians who played Woodstock did much to cause the fall of South Vietnam to the totalitarian communist North — as Orwell said, the quickest way to end a war is to lose it. But again, at least they did so metaphorically, with guitars and amplifiers. When did pop culture decide to take the metaphor of “a global housing project of warring ghettos” far too literally?