Ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire – not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. Bloom had only disdain for the music college students listened to, concluding, Rather, it was his condemnation of rock music that I remembered as I rummaged through the rock song collection that clutters my mental filing cabinets, in search of songs with fossil references. I don’t want to debate his main points again (my blood pressure is high enough as it is).
In the quest for “openness” fostered by academia, students’ minds were closing because they believed in no absolute truths, just many relative truths. 25) This relativism was essentially the death of standards, as far as Bloom was concerned. The book, subtitled How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, was published in 1987 and had an implausible rise to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, staying there for 10 weeks that summer.īloom’s book is a conservative diatribe (sign of my closed mind) against recent generations of college students who he concluded were “unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality.” (p. When she asked for suggestions of other songs with fossil references, she garnered an interesting set of responses, touching on music that ranged from rock to classical.įor reasons that are the subject of this post, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind came to my mind (probably a mostly closed one, I'll admit). Hunt-Foster on her Dinochick blog highlighted a new song about fossils. I’ve been mulling over references to fossils in songs.
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