It May Well Be That A Society's Greatest Madness Seems Normal To Itself

I'm much younger than Mr. Steyn and Mr. Bloom (and I need I add more dashing and handsome? No, I do not) but I found myself in agreement.

"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.”

To add: remember when movies didn't have soundtracks filled with pop songs? Watch almost any movie from the '70's and '80's (such as Dog Day Afternoon, which I saw for the first time a few weeks ago) and there's all this silence. Sometime in the '90's movies and music videos merged and music is now used to mask bad dialogue, add emphasis to limp scenes and sell CDs/downloads.