Which Singer Has Done The Most To Erode Morals?

[Socrates]

[quote name='Nathan' date='Sep 24 2005, 05:49 PM']Peter Singer.
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I beat you to that! (early in the thread) :

[Nathan]

Haha, beaver dam! Gotta be quick around here, I guess.

[crusader1234]

[quote name='Socrates' date='Sep 24 2005, 04:55 PM']Responsible for what?  Everything??  Elvis didn't invent rock'n'roll - he was simply the first huge star.  He got his style from black blues musicians.  Bill Haley and his Comets were really the first white rock'n'roll band.

The "rock'n'roll" style of blues began ca 1950 among black musicians.  Elvis and the like basically desegregated the music and made it popular among white teenagers.
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Precisely. Before Elvis, Rock & Roll existed, dirty dancing existed, etc... but back then it wasn't at the forefront of media... especially media targeted at middle class white teenagers. He didn't invent sex in music, but he sure spread it around. I mean, if you think about music video's today, it all hails back to Evlis thrusting his pelvis on TV. And, if we're talking about erosion, he certainly caused a lot of erosion. I mean, Maddona pushed boundaries, but at that point boundary pushing was commonplace. Elvis broke into a relatively wholesome scene and really shook things up and basically set the stage for every shimmy and shake we've ever seen.

[Cow of Shame]

[quote name='crusader1234' date='Sep 24 2005, 07:08 PM'][snip]Elvis broke into a relatively wholesome scene [/snip][right][snapback]736577[/snapback][/right]
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Not having lived in that era, I don't know exactly what was going on behind closed doors....but in my mind, '_relatively_ wholesome' is right....I believe that the human race has always been immersed in depravity, but it's overall *public* acceptance by society has simply changed. To say that singers have been eroding morals is truly passing the buck here. Musicians are only doing things that society is allowing.

If Madonna's records had stopped selling in that awful 'pointy-boobed, tell-all sexpot' phase of hers, you can be sure that she would have cleaned up her act. Society is at fault for condoning the carp that comes from the arts.

I think the musicians are simply an indicator, not the cause, of the direction of our culture.

Edited September 25, 2005 by Cow of Shame

[jasJis]

This has got to be one of the most mis-guided threads yet. The last few posts have been coming close. If you read "Robison Crusoe" by Danial DeFoe, written in the early 1700's, you would be shocked by what it says about the aimless, immoral, lost, teens of the time. It sounds like they are talking about now.

Current (for the time) music genre's is a reflection of society. Pointy-boobed singers are accepted any ways, but it's modern media that spreads the opportunity to be seen or experienced accross great swaths of today's population. It's apathy about what the messenger's saying that erodes the morals. It's natural for teens/young adults to question the values of their parents. Mass media transmits this message, apathetic society doesn't counter act it.

From the flappers and jitterbuggers of the early 1900's, to the depressing Country & Western of 25 years ago, to the urban anarchists of today's hip-hip, it's still the same doubt of the establishment. Modern Mass media is the core distributor of the most extreme, the most interesting, the most shocking, the most harmful messages that erode our morals. Today's Hip-Hop has the most destructive message of our time, but it will be replaced in a few years with something new as it get's tempered with more main stream / less controversial artists. Just as there's still screaming chaos rock, there's also this 'emo-rock' that's just depressing. One only has to look at the wide range of themes that mega artists like the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, The Beatles, U2, Elvis, etc., to recognize the full range a music genre and it's artists, goes through.

[Winchester]

Country singers in large part did a similar thing in glamorizing drinking and fighting.

Then there was Johnny Cash, who had a sense of vthe wrongness about excess.

[Cow of Shame]

"Current (for the time) music genre's is a reflection of society. ..."

Ah, nicely written....pretty much what I was trying to get across at 2 am

Edited September 25, 2005 by Cow of Shame

[Socrates]

[quote name='Winchester' date='Sep 25 2005, 01:04 PM']Country singers in large part did a similar thing in glamorizing drinking and fighting.

Then there was Johnny Cash, who had a sense of vthe wrongness about excess.
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I'm really not much of a country fan (though I love Johnny Cash), nor am I much of an expert on the genre (despite the fact that I live in hillbilly country), but I think a number of the posts here about country really miss the boat and show complete ignorance about this genre.

For anyone who's even casually listened to traditional Country and Western (formerly "hillbilly") music, it is clear that it has very little in common with the violent and nihilistic excesses of much of rap, rock, and "pop."
Country would deal with themes of things such as drunkeness, unfaithfulness, adultery, and even killing (along with more positive themes), but they were rarely "glamorized" or held up as a model of how to live. They were merely dealt with as (often unfortunate) parts of life.
Country largely accepted Christian mores of right-and-wrong, and was never a protest against traditional morality.
Similar things can be said about other forms of traditional American music such as the blues.

Popular music only really started becoming a protest against "traditional values" in the '60s, post British Invasion, and was carried to further extremes with the coming of punk, rap, etc.

The deliberate shock, ugliness, vulgarity, and blatantly anti-social attitudes found in much of recent rock, metal, and rap, stand in sharp contrast to traditional forms such as country and blues.
I am not saying all rock is evil, or that country is blameless, but merely that the attitude that "it's really all the same" is false and wrong-headed.

I'd recommend reading Martha Bayles' [i]Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music [/i]if you are interested in how popular music became corrupted. (I don't agree with everything she says, but worth a look).

[jasJis]

Socrates,
It certainly seems true that you don't know much about the genre of 'Country'. It's demeaning to call where you live 'hill-billy' country. You just didn't understand the post. Current music is much more of a symptom and less of a cause of society's ills. It's mass media in general that is used to excacerbate the ills by popularizing the extreme.

[Guest T-Bone]

[quote name='Winchester' date='Sep 25 2005, 12:04 PM']Country singers in large part did a similar thing in glamorizing drinking and fighting.

Then there was Johnny Cash, who had a sense of vthe wrongness about excess.
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[quote name='Socrates' date='Sep 25 2005, 02:18 PM']I'm really not much of a country fan (though I love Johnny Cash), nor am I much of an expert on the genre (despite the fact that I live in hillbilly country), but I think a number of the posts here about country really miss the boat and show complete ignorance about this genre.

For anyone who's even casually listened to traditional Country and Western (formerly "hillbilly") music, it is clear that it has very little in common with the violent and nihilistic excesses of much of rap, rock, and "pop."
Country would deal with themes of things such as drunkeness, unfaithfulness, adultery, and even killing (along with more positive themes), but they were rarely "glamorized" or held up as a model of how to live.  They were merely dealt with as (often unfortunate) parts of life.
Country largely accepted Christian mores of right-and-wrong, and was never a protest against traditional morality.
Similar things can be said about other forms of traditional American music such as the blues.

Popular music only really started becoming a protest against "traditional values" in the '60s, post British Invasion, and was carried to further extremes with the coming of punk, rap, etc.

The deliberate shock, ugliness, vulgarity, and blatantly anti-social attitudes found in much of recent rock, metal, and rap, stand in sharp contrast to traditional forms such as country and blues.
I am not saying all rock is evil, or that country is blameless, but merely that the attitude that "it's really all the same" is false and wrong-headed.

I'd recommend reading Martha Bayles' [i]Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music [/i]if you are interested in how popular music became corrupted.  (I don't agree with everything she says, but worth a look).
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[quote name='Johnny Cash']When I was just a baby, my momma told me,
"Son--Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns."
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
Now I hear that whistle blowin', I hang my head and cry.[/quote]

Mr. Cash does not glamorize the killing of the man. He's singing that he's in jail, and has to live with the results of his actions.

[Socrates]

[quote name='jasJis' date='Sep 25 2005, 03:55 PM']Socrates,
It certainly seems true that you don't know much about the genre of 'Country'.  It's demeaning to call where you live 'hill-billy' country.  You just didn't understand the post.  Current music is much more of a symptom and less of a cause of society's ills.  It's mass media in general that is used to excacerbate the ills by popularizing the extreme.
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Is there a specific point you disagree with in my post? Did you actually read it carefully? (And yes, historically, what became known as "country & western" prior to like 1959 or so was called "hillbilly" even by those who played it - whether or not this term is demeaning is really beside the point - my mom's side of the family is from the rural Ozarks - so I'm not using the term to be demeaning, sorry if anyone was offended.)

The main point of my post was that traditional country is really a far cry from gangsta rap, nihilistic punk, or sexed-up pop. To imply that these musical forms all have more-or-less the same anti-social message, or that things like "gangsta rap" are really not that different from old-school country or blues is simply false.

Music with a deliberately and blatantly anti-social, anti-moral message is a fairly recent development.

[Socrates]

[quote name='T-Bone' date='Sep 25 2005, 04:01 PM'][quote name='Johnny Cash']When I was just a baby, my momma told me,
"Son--Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns."
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
Now I hear that whistle blowin', I hang my head and cry.[/quote]

Mr. Cash does not glamorize the killing of the man. He's singing that he's in jail, and has to live with the results of his actions.
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Exactly, though no one here actually said that Cash glamorized these things.

[jiyoung]

For the record, Christina Aguilera has an amazing voice. Britney Spears is, er, not so much...

I agree though that music is a reflection of the moral decay of society, and not a cause of it. Before, certain things were taboo--let's take premarital sex, for example. Back then, it still happened, it just wasn't culturally accepted. Therefore there was less of it going on. But now, it's more acceptable, and it's a part of our culture, and now it's happening with more frequency, and singers are singing about it and rappers are rapping about it and not giving it a second thought. Maybe the two feed off each other. But I think music is more of a way that we can pinpoint [i]when[/i] values started eroding, and not [i]why.[/i]

[frozencell]

While there are a plethora of immoral celebrities I chose Madonna because I feel that she was the most mainstream person on the list that actually contributed a massive amount of behavior that made immorality very acceptable in the public's eye on entertainment.

[Guest Rick777]

i chose madonna too, i dont think shes at all as popular as she once was but she has contributed a lot of,hmmmm, how shall i say, a lot of sexually themed music(and books).