Can popular music corrupt the morals of the young? The proposition sounds absurdly dated, an idea based on quaint and simplistic assumptions about innocence and purity. Yet, popular music has long been a powerful force in the lives of adolescents. By amplifying and reinforcing certain messages within our culture, it can and does influence on the way young people see themselves and respond to their own dreams and aspirations.
Let me share a personal story that touches on this proposition.
I fell in love for the first time during the summer of 1971 when I was 16. She was a year younger and almost inconceivably beautiful to me: soft, intelligent caramel eyes, clear, pale skin and pale lips that she kept unlipsticked, a high forehead, straight dark-brown hair that dropped to her shoulders, and a trim, tidy figure, often accentuated with a blue, stretchy garment that she called a leotard top.
We met during a six-week European tour/foreign study program for high school students. Each group of students was chaperoned by teachers from the schools we attended. But our chaperones could not keep us from spending long periods of time in passionate embrace.
I remember the giddy mixture of infatuation, excitement, and anxiety I felt holding her in my arms and experiencing a world of new sensations and emotions: the wild intimacy of our lips and tongues in contact, the feeling of overload on the circuitry of my adolescent body. I was highly conscious of the newness of the experimentation taking place between us– if memory serves, she was the first girl I’d kissed. I was much less conscious of love — the role that it played in making all of this feel safe and right — well, better than “right.”
During this summer, the Rolling Stones’ song “Brown Sugar” was in heavy radio rotation throughout Europe. Sitting with her and a group of our friends near the back of a hired bus waiting to take us to some site of antiquity, we’d hear the opening chords of the song and immediately begin to clap along with its steady, bouncing rhythm. I reveled in being a teenager, absolutely in the moment, secure in the company of a group of friends that included my first girlfriend. That summer, “Brown Sugar” felt like “our song” in the way that couples used to identify a particular popular song with their romance.
The music itself was so infectious and matched my mood so perfectly that I somehow learned the lyrics without absorbing their awful meaning: a vile celebration of the rape of enslaved girls and women, an ode to sex without love. Here’s a sample from verse one: “Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields/Sold in a market down in New Orleans/Scared old slaver you know he’s doin’ all right./Hear him whip the women just around midnight.”
Of course, there was no point of contact between these lyrics and my experience. But that didn’t stop me from feeling that popular culture, as represented by the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar”, was encouraging, even celebrating the powerful mystery of love and sexual attraction that I had discovered that summer. (I should add that our instinctive caution kept our experimentation well short of the sex act.)
Sadly, things never really worked out for us after the trip. I knew she had a boyfriend in her neighborhood, but I lacked the words, and perhaps the courage, to ask her to choose, and I had no one I could ask for advice. So, I put the problem out of my mind and let time and distance take their course. I told myself that, since all of this kissing and fondling was so new to me, I had better get more “experience” in that area instead of trying to deal with the complexities of relationships and my own feelings about them. Without realizing it consciously, I had begun to separate love and sex in my mind. Within a year, I was off to college, and it wasn’t until sometime after college that I was able to re-integrate love and sex again.
One takes one’s eyes off the prize for a variety of reasons, so I can hardly claim that the lyrics of Brown Sugar ruined my adolescence. (No worries, Mick — you can tell your lawyers to take a deep breath.) I’ve been happily married for years and have two wonderful grandchildren. But the buoyant bounce of its music will always remind me of a time of giddy innocence and romance, just as its vile words remind me of the hollowness and emptiness of sex without love.
