A blogger linked to by Steven Den Beste explores the limits of multiculturalism:

I read a great comment by one of my favorite intellectuals, Camille Paglia in Salon last month critiquing the concept of multiculturalism. In short, the problem with multiculturalism is that it requires monocultures that have to not subscribe to the concept of multiculturalism. But you can’t really make other people subscribe to multiculturalism or else all those cultures start to bleed together and lose all of their individuality. Japan loses its “Japaneseness”, Turkey loses its “Turkishness”, Germany loses its “Germanness”, and so on unless you’re really good at making up history, like when Japan claims things from China, Korea, or the West as being Japanese. Now you’ve just got one homogenized culture left.

In his look at Alan Bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind two decades on, Mark Steyn writes that, not all that surprisingly, such a bland confection is about as filling as a can of Diet Coke:

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

As Steyn notes, "We are all rockers now"--and he's right. Just listen to what's playing on your local department store's muzak, which is probably indisuishingable from your local Classic Rock FM station:

Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

That’s another reason I don’t like the term “popular culture”—because hardly any individual examples of popular culture are that popular. I don’t mean that whatever the current Number One single is this week will sell far fewer copies than the Number Ones of the 1940s, but in the sense that a gangsta rapper is not as popular as Puccini was ninety years ago, or Franz Lehár a century ago, or Offenbach. Popular culture has dwindled down to a bunch of mutually hostile unpopular popular cultures. The only thing about it that’s universally popular is its overall undemanding aesthetic.

So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.

Which is, ironically enough, quite a contrast to the music that it replaced, the music of our parents and grandparents: In the 1950s, decades before rock and roll became The All-Pervasive Aural Wallpaper Of Our Lives, the average person had all sorts of cultures available to him, as they were absorbed into the American pop music of the time: boogie-woogie, Calypso, the Samba, the Waltz, the extended harmonies that Gil Evans was employing in the 1950s under Miles Davis' trumpet, these are all byproducts of extremely divergent cultures, as is European classical music of the prior centuries, which pop arrangers happily stole from, royalty free.

Hey, I love the late John Bonham's 16th-note kick drum patterns as much as the next guy, but it's amazing how much of the rest of pop culture got trampled underfoot along the way.

Update: On the other hand, "It's an obvious impossibility for an entire genre to not stumble into eternal truths on occasion and one place where rock consistently does so is in the bleak view of the battle of the sexes."