A really strange moment yesterday: I was listening to a local rock music station, and they dusted off a song from two decades ago, from shortly before I started listening to such music.

It was a sexual suggestion song, a variety that only existed for a few years in the 80s and early 90s, in the period between the Beatles’ I want to hold your hand and R. Kelly’s I want to [fill in the blank for the entire album]

For some time, hair metal from 1990 has felt dated to me, but this time, it felt downright quaint. And that was what was disturbing. It was Poison, a band I’ve never liked. The song was Talk Dirty to Me, not exactly a great start. And even now, as I look up the lyrics, I don’t feel like reprinting them here.

Still, Talk Dirty to Me was supposed to be raunchy (and it was), yet it’s almost polite in today’s scene. Considering that even the Onion found R Kelly pitifully filthy, we’re in a painful spot.

Actually, it’s a misogynistic spot. I’ve had an untested hypothesis over the last few years, that sexual anarchy, at the cultural level, will ultimately favor the sexually aggressive. On aggregate that means men, but not just any men: those who tolerate no limits to their freedom.

Quaint, in this sense, means innocent and just a little ignorant. It's a word of condescension. In hindsight, Poison probably deserve condescension, because the logic of their song--the logic of lust--cannot be resolved except by raising the stakes, which is exactly what the passage of time has done. That's what it means to be a slave to one's passions.

We are not doomed to follow. We can develop sustainable tastes. How that's done I don't know, other than that it involves healing, which usually points to an external source to our own will.

Singalongs can terrify me on occasion. I grew up in cold-war Europe, you see, where the memory of Nazi fascism and the presence of Soviet conformity developed in me and in my friends a bit of paranoia whenever mobs appeared.

Never mind that at raucous hockey games we readily participated in singing down our opponents. Because fascism is thrilling if you’re on the inside.

That being said, I’ve been listening to a live CD by David Crowder, and have been deeply moved by the lusty singing-along on behalf of the crowd: they’re having a great time; they’re really praising God.

And more: I’ve been reading about Why Men Hate Going to Church and have been feeling gloomy about the male presence in the church. Part of it’s the music: a lot of our praise and worship is, well, feminine: we sing about our feelings about Jesus, and how he’s a knight in shining armor.

But listening to Crowder here was a breath of fresh air, with a male-dominated crowd singing their hearts out, including a particularly cheery Hank Williams cover. They were unified, and they didn’t seem at all about to goose-step down to the town square. Good stuff.

Here's a great book I've enjoyed this winter: Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power

It's a book I could have used while writing Blessed Are the Uncool: It’s a missing link, of sorts. Author Marcus Reeves explores the history of hip hop’s uncomfortable relationship with the black power movement.

As he tells the story, black power ran out of steam in the mid 1970s, and for a variety of reasons: persistent legal troubles; incessant internecine squabbling; and perhaps most importantly, success.

Courtesy of pop culture, black people began to see their tastes on TV, and hear their music on the radio. Meanwhile, Civil Rights victories made the need for change feel less pressing for a new generation of African Americans.

But at the same time, our inner cities were failing. In the late seventies in the South Bronx, New York, ghetto hopelessness rose in tandem with the end of the black power movement. It was at this time that rap music began to appear.

Initially nothing more than party music, rap music began to become a vehicle for communication about inner city life beyond the party. And over the ensuing decades, from Public Enemy to Tupac Shakur, several of hip hop’s leaders were also children of the black power movement, steeped in its ideas from a young age.

Others, however, like Snoop Dog and the Notorious BIG, took the muscular aesthetic from Black Power, stripped it of its message, and went for a nihilistic, violent, and hedonistic expressiveness, glorying in guns, booze, licentiousness and—above all—respect from other blacks. This was gangsta rap.

Eventually a balance would come to hip hop, as the unsustainability of gangster lifestyles became apparent.

Still, there has always been an element of generational conflict in the relationship between hip hop and black power. Reeves’ key point lies in what he calls the post-black power generation: those who take black dignity for granted and live exclusively for the moment. With little historical education or interest, all they have is today. Progress is defined in weeks or months—certainly not in decades.

Somebody Scream! is an important contribution to African American history. We’re approaching the moment (rap’s 30th birthday has already passed) when historians—far better storytellers than most pop culture writers—will begin to get their hands on rap, so we can expect more in the coming years.

I have one complaint with Reeves’ treatment: his apparent blind spot to coolness itself. I know I wrote a book on the issue, so forgive the windiness. But from my vantage, hip hop’s revolutionary impotence appears entirely related to its foremost commitment to coolness.

Coolness—which I’ve defined as the performance of permanent rebellion—exists only in the moment. Revolutions (like Black Power) draw strength and humility from historical consciousness. Hip Hop’s cool insistence on living only in the moment condemns it to have no future and, accordingly, no consequence, despite its massive pop cultural weight.

Until Hip Hop grows beyond petty coolness, it will never grow up.

[photo credit: Bronx, by sxc.hu member bkeim]

Culturally speaking, whose is classical music?

Whenever I go to a symphony, two demographic observations stick out: the crowd is nearly all white; and the performers are white and Asian.

Historically, the music derives from a place and time: Western Europe, in the early modern era. But does that make it European? Here’s a book I’ve read recently—the title says a lot: Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music.

Author Mari Yoshihara is mainly out to argue that classical music is the property of everyone, despite its European origins; and that Asians in classical music nevertheless face obstacles in claiming this universal birthright.

The overarching problem here is that Yoshihara takes Europe’s claims of universal culture at face value. The music was born at a time when Europeans imagined they were moving beyond nation and tribe. But this cosmopolitanism would begin to shatter as folk looked with horror at the excesses of the French revolution. But that's another story.

So what if Yoshihara's historical work is faulty: does the claim of universality make it so? If classical music claims to be universal, is that also an invitation to make it universal? Whose is this classical music?

Pictured: Yo Yo Ma, at the World Economic Forum.