It was only to be expected that The New York Times would fall
madly in love with Rent, the “rock opera” that—with no little
help from the Times itself—is turning out to be this season’s
biggest and most bogus theatrical sensation. After all, any
WORK THAT COMBINES ROCK MUSIC AND AIDS and drug addicts and a
multiracial cast and one star who plays a lesbian performance artist
AND ANOTHER WHO PLAYS AN HIV-positive transvestite sculptor is
calculated to spark a lot of heavy breathing at the Times’s
culture desk. Add to this a story line “updated”
from Puccini’s La
Bohème—but transposed to Manhattan’s Lower East Side for
“realism”—and you have a mixture that is irresistible to anyone who
prefers his sensationalistic trash overlaid with a few rhinestones
of “culture.”

This winning combination alone would doubtless have
assured the success of Rent (reviewed in these pages last
month by Mark Steyn), which is now moving on to Broadway
after a wildly successful opening run at a tiny off-off-off-Broadway
spot. But when the thirty-five-year-old composer of Rent, Jonathan
Larson, was found dead of an aortic aneurysm in January just a few
days before the show was to open—well! For the Times, anyway,
this personal tragedy instantly transformed the hitherto unknown
Larson into an artistic martyr and Rent into a work of
unquestionable genius.

So it was hardly a surprise when on Sunday March 17 the Times
devoted a large proportion of its Arts & Leisure section, including
most of the front page, to various tributes to Rent and its
ill-fated author. Inevitably, the cultural benchmark to which Rent
is compared is that compendium of 1960s fatuousness, Hair. Rent
is indeed a “Hair for the 90s,” as the Times gushed—though it
lacks the one really significant thing about Hair, namely its
status as a novelty object. Once upon a time, nudity and obscenity
on stage were shocking; now such antics are usually little more than
evidence of a certain species of dramatic impotence: artistic
aphrodisiacs resorted to when genuine theatrical imagination fails.

For the most part, the Times’s chorus of praise was Pavlovian in
its predictableness: “one man’s vision,” “a classic tale of luck
grit, ambition,” etc. But the “Classical View” column by Bernard
Holland, the Times’s chief music critic, distinguished itself by
surprising even us with its abject capitulation to everything trendy
and meretricious in the response to Rent. Mr. Holland began by
citing a recently published letter to the editor that had contrasted
walking across the campus at Yale University thirty years ago—when
on a sunny Saturday afternoon what wafted out from dormitory windows
were the sounds of the Metropolitan Opera broadcast—with the
situation today when virtually the only thing heard is rock music.
The writer—correctly—deplored this development. But the chief
music critic of The New York Times (whose companion at Rent, he
told us, was
“a bona-fide rock-and-roller”) does not consider the triumph of rock
music an evil omen; on the contrary, he castigated the letter-writer
for being hidebound and— most egregious of sins
for the
politically correct—“exclusive.” Here is the key passage
of his animadversion:

Classical music, having carefully developed a two-centuries-old cult
of the past, now finds itself in an ambivalent position. It rightly
defends a repertory of great music by dead composers, but it has
become distinctly inept at handling the present. The righteous
indignation of our letter writer abets the suicidal tendencies of
so-called high culture. High culture places its artifacts at the
peak of a mountain and proceeds to push away the ascending creative
minds that are not of its direct bloodline. Art like this retains
its identity as do all closed societies: by rejection.

“So-called” high culture? “Direct bloodline”? “Closed societies”?
What, we wondered, could Mr. Holland be thinking of? The good
opinion of his “bona-fide rock-and-roller” companion, perhaps? He certainly
wasn’t thinking about the music. Indeed, he
acknowledged that “from a musical point of view” he
“wanted Rent to be better than it is.” (He also noted the
“college-dorm patness to the show’s social politics”—that is to
say, its
adolescent radicalism, self-indulgence, and anti-Americanism.) But
the Times’s chief music critic
argued that “whether or not Rent succeeds as an opera, a
musical or anything else is beside the point.”
Really? What does matter,
apparently, is that Rent “brims with good will,” that the “effort
behind it” and its “sense of adventure” “say something serious about
a sophisticated culture trying painfully to create a more inclusive
art.”

A more inclusive art”? Again we have to wonder what Mr. Holland
can possibly be thinking of. Someone with his long experience of
classical music surely knows that few art forms have been more
omnivorously inclusive than classical music, which precisely over
the two-centuries he mentions has shown itself open to all manner of
vernacular traditions from folk songs to jazz. What Mr. Holland
cannot bring himself to admit is that rock music—which consists of
little more than a handful of simplistic musical clichés repeated ad
nauseam and at great volume—is really a form of anti-music. It is
not the new hope for youth culture but a sign of the artistic
poverty (not to say moral degeneration) of that culture. There is
plenty to disagree with in Plato’s social philosophy, but he was
surely correct that we can tell a great deal about the character of
a society by the character of its music. What does the character of
rock music—which, as Mr. Holland notes, is coming to “dominate” the
world—tell us about ourselves? Mr. Holland ends by proclaiming
that, as someone who has spent his life with classical music, he is
“alarmed for the future of its important artifacts.” We are alarmed,
too—and not least because that future is increasingly being looked
after by people who, like Mr. Holland, have given up on high musical
achievement and are busy cultivating its demotic caricature.