I didn't have a chance yesterday to direct your attention to Stanley Kurtz's powerful essay that addresses Bill Bennett but expounds much more deeply on conscience, morality and behavior between the relativist sensualists and absolutist traditionalists:
From a traditional religious perspective, humans strive to create a community based on shared moral standards. Conscious of his own weakness, an individual enters a community and places himself under the authority of its moral norms. He knows that both he and others will at times fail to meet those norms. Yet a refusal to articulate and impose moral requirements on himself and others would be an betrayal of the community itself. It would, so to speak, be unbrotherly.The aesthete, on the other hand, is first and foremost an individual. He substitutes personal expression for moral judgment. To the aesthete, the moralist's judgments are oppressive attempts to coerce creativity and stifle the inner self. For the aesthete, music, sex, even drugs, are extensions and revelations of his spiritual self.
For the traditional moral man, on the other hand, the aesthete's refusal to make judgments is tantamount to withdrawal from the community. Moral man sees the spiritualized pleasures of the aesthete as a form of idolatry — an attempt to turn all that is selfish in man into a substitute for God. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued brilliantly that American pop music is, at root, a sophisticated masturbation fantasy. Bloom was right. But from the perspective of the aesthete, spiritual satisfaction comes precisely from the elaboration and contemplation of his pleasures. That is why popular music holds an almost religious significance for many Americans. (By the way, for all his condemnation of vicious song lyrics, William Bennett distanced himself from Allan Bloom's sharpest criticisms of popular music.)
The spiritualization of pleasure in popular culture is often shallow and dangerous. Yet that is not to entirely deny the worth of expressive individualism, which can take higher forms. In modern democracy, the tension between shared moral standards and free self-expression is profound and ineradicable.
Incidentally, I've shared the disposition that a preponderance of American pop music endlessly, repetitively orbits around physical love - listened to beyond small doses, the lovey-dovey stuff bores me to tears.
And - this is ancillary, to say the least - Kurtz offers up the chorus for a late-90s Sugar Ray song - I caught the song's amusing roller-derby video back in college, walking by a friend's television playing MTV. Though the subject matter is fluffy, brown sugar, the lyrics are compelling; no fountain-mountain-hand-stand-heart-start nursery-rhymes. How many rock stars know what a four-post bed is? That song, for better or worse, will outlast both its decade and Sugar Ray.
In any case, read the article.