A Trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The films Paradise Lost and Bowling for Columbine both show how we consistently blame the media for negatively influencing our children, instead of thinking about what society has done to these troubled kids to cause them to want to be violent in the first place. People blame goth culture and angry music like Marilyn Manson for making kids angry, without understanding that it is more like the other way around: angry kids find solace in music that is equally fed up. But I think what I find most interesting about this whole discussion is Henry Jenkins' point that we as a society are afraid of our children, due to their culture being different than our own.
At first I found this concept hard to understand, but a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame changed all of that. This weekend I attended a wedding in Cleveland Ohio and decided to stop by the museum before the wedding. Besides depicting the origins of Rock and Roll and the direction it has taken more recently, it also had an entire section dedicated to the initial backlash against rock and roll when it began. Several monitors depicted experts, much like those in the films we watched, speaking against the negative influence of rock and roll and how things like the beat would lead the children to satanism. I was shocked. I never realized that Elvis was almost as controversial in his day as Marilyn Manson is in ours. The generation that grew up listening to rock music that their parents railed against is the same generation railing against goth culture now. But it only highlights the fact that, as Jenkins pointed out, it is not the content of teen culture itself that scares society, but the fact that it is different than their own.