The primal scream of teenage music

IF THERE IS ONE SUBJECT on which the parents of America passionately agree, it is that contemporary adolescent popular music, especially the subgenres of heavy metal and hip-hop/rap, is uniquely degraded - and degrading - by the standards of previous generations. At first blush this seems slightly ironic. After all, most of today's baby-boom parents were themselves molded by rock and roll, bumping and grinding their way through adolescence and adulthood with legendary abandon. Even so, the parents are correct: Much of today's music is darker and coarser than yesterday's rock. Misogyny, violence, suicide, sexual exploitation, child abuse - these and other themes, formerly rare and illicit, are now as common as the surfboards, drive-ins, and sock hops of yesteryear.

In a nutshell, the ongoing adult preoccupation with current music goes something like this: What is the overall influence of this deafening, foul, and often vicious-sounding stuff on children and teenagers? This is a genuinely important question, and serious studies and articles, some concerned particularly with current music's possible link to violence, have lately been devoted to it. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry all weighed in against contemporary lyrics and other forms of violent entertainment before Congress with a first-ever "Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children."

Nonetheless, this is not my focus here. Instead, I would like to turn that logic about influence upside down and ask this question: What is it about today's music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?

As the reader can see, this is a very different way of inquiring about the relationship between today's teenagers and their music. The first question asks what the music does to adolescents; the second asks what it tells us about them. To answer that second question is necessarily to enter the roiling emotional waters in which that music is created and consumed - in other words, actually to listen to some of it and read the lyrics.

As it turns out, such an exercise yields a fascinating and little understood fact about today's adolescent scene. If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music - the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before - is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem - these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today - suicide, misogyny, and drugs - with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.

To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times. The self-perceived emotional damage scrawled large across contemporary music may not be statistically quantifiable, but it is nonetheless among the most striking of all the unanticipated consequences of our home-alone world.

Demigods of dysfunction

TO BEGIN WITH music particularly popular among white teenage boys, one best-selling example of broken-home angst is that of the "nu-metal" band known as Papa Roach and led by singer/songwriter "Goby Dick" Shaddix (dubbed by one reviewer the "prince of dysfunction"). Three members of that group, Coby Dick included, are self-identified children of divorce. In 2000, as critics noted at the time, their album Infest explored the themes of broken homes and child and teenage rage. The result was stunning commercial success: Infest sold more than 3 million copies. MTV.com explained why: "The pained, confessional songs struck a nerve with disenfranchised listeners who were tired of the waves of directionless aggression spewing from the mouths of other rap-rockers. They found kinship in Papa Roach songs like 'Broken Home' and 'Last Resort.'"

In fact, even their songs about other subjects hark back to that same primal disruption. One particularly violent offering called "Revenge," about a girl hurting herself and being abused by her boyfriend, reflects on "destruction of the family design." Of all the songs on the album, however, it is the singularly direct "Broken Home" that hit its fans the hardest, which summarizes the sad domestic story it elaborates in a pair of lines: "I know my mother loves me I But does my father even care. "

Another band that climbed to the top of the charts recently is Everclear, led by singer Art Alexakis (also a child of divorce, as he has explained to interviewers). Like Papa Roach, Everclear/Alexakis explores the fallout of parental breakup not from the perspective of newly liberated adults, but from that of the child left behind who feels abandoned and betrayed. Several of Everclear's songs map this emotional ground in detail - from not wanting to meet mother's "new friends," to wondering how the father who walked out can sleep at night, to dreaming of that father coming back. In the song "Father of Mine," the narrator implores, "take me back to the day /when I was still your golden boy." Another song, "Sick and Tired," explicitly links the anger-depression-suicide teen matrix to broken homes (as indeed do numerous other contemporary groups): "I blame my family I their damage is living in me. "

Everclear's single best-known song, a top-40 hit in 2000 that ruled the airwaves for months, is a family breakup ballad ironically titled "Wonderful" - to some fans, the best rock song about divorce ever written. Though the catchy melody cannot be captured here, the childlike simplicity of the words brings the message home loudly enough. Among them: "I want the things that I had before I Like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door. "

Another group successfully working this tough emotional turf is charttopping and multiple award-winning Blink-182, which grew out of the skateboard and snowboard scene to become one of the most popular bands in the country. As with Papa Roach and Everclear, the group's interest in the family breakdown theme is partly autobiographical: At least two members of the band say that their personal experiences as children of divorce have informed their lyrics. Blink-iSz's top-40 hit in 2001, "Stay Together for the Kids," is perhaps their best-known song (though not the only one) about broken homes. "What stupid poem could fix this home," the narrator wonders, adding, "I'd read it every day. "

Reflecting on the particular passion with which that song was embraced by fans, Blink-182's Tom DeLonge told an interviewer, "We get e-mails about 'Stay Together,' kid after kid after kid saying, 'I know exactly what you're talking about! That song is about my life!' And you know what? That sucks. You look at statistics that 50 percent of parents get divorced, and you're going to get a pretty large group of kids who are pissed off and who don't agree with what their parents have done."1 Similarly, singer/bassist Mark Hoppus remarked to another interviewer curious about the band's emotional resonance, "Divorce is such a normal thing today and hardly anybody ever thinks how the kids feel about it or how they are taking it, but in the U.S. about half of all the kids go through it. They witness how their parents drift apart and all that."2