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‘Rebellion Through Music’ by Heather Wendtland talks about the idea of youth, who through the listening and usage of music, are able to mark out their identities. She expounds the ironies involved, the lyrical connotations in particular, and how youth are still able to accept what’s perceived as ‘wrong’ and use it to their advantage. Music, to them, is like a double-edged sword, providing them with a taste of empowerment and exhilaration, yet being obnoxious to authority.
Wendtland, a university student who majors and minors in sociology and psychology respectively, writes with a personal touch from her past experiences with references to very similar examples given from other authors. Although she wrote this article as a composition assignment on cultural phenomenon for her professor, she appears to have an intended target audience of like-minded youth, seemingly trying to bring to light how they are able to “rebel” through music. Wendtland suggests the idea that such music “empowers” the listener and puts him/her in control.
This can be seen when she elaborates on how “Ice Cube’s lyrics offered” her and her friends “a sense of empowerment”. Wendtland also mentions that she enjoyed putting her “music out there and knowing full well that it was offending those in [her] presence”. She quotes Joan Morgan on an incident where African Americans “forced their music upon the whites who had no choice but to listen” and gleefully recalls how she overtly blasted such music at the gas station and thoroughly enjoyed how offended the adults looked.
These very similar examples serve to reinforce her stand, showing that power (however slight) and independence attained by daring to be different gave her a sense of rebelling against authority, thus feeling a higher self-worth relative to the others. Additionally, Wendtland explains on how youth are able to live vicariously through the music of others. They use music as a channel where unspoken feelings are expressed. It is where their ‘unexpressed ferocity’ can be experienced temporarily.
This is also shown through the example of Joan Morgan and her friends where they sang pleasurably along to Ice Cube’s song albeit his insulting of women through his music. According to Wendtland, it allows listeners to be ‘bad’ and feel ‘bad’ in a less disruptive way. It seems that screaming to the apparently crude lyrics of certain songs allows youth the liberty of expressing their inner angst, resentment and hurt in an almost tangible way. Although Wendtland states that youth are able to identify themselves via rebellion through music, specifically through the black rap and hard rock genres, not all youth are able and will do so.
Some turn to it to feel empowered, express tacit feelings, and feel gutsy, while not truly challenging the authority. A point of contention appears when Wendtland states that youth are able to identify themselves by rebelling via music only with examples that stem from the genres of black rap and hard rock; however, some youth turn to other genres of music to convey their tacit feelings. For example, a portion of youth may demonstrate their melancholy through the alternative rock genre. This specific genre is generally neither disruptive nor uncouth.
Furthermore, there are many other genres of music where there is a strong tendency towards promoting a rebellious attitude, particularly heavy metal and punk rock. This limited scope of focusing only on two areas of music only provides a rather biased view and fails to completely justify how rebellion is carried out through music as a whole. Hence, if we follow Wendtland’s line of reasoning, youth are able to identify themselves by rebelling through a mere fraction of music in general, not music as a whole.
I also feel that Wendtland’s arguments are not wholly in line with respect to the ‘rebellion’ factor. The examples she cites basically exhibit how youth sing along to blasphemous music of certain genres and how they publicly play it just to nettle the ‘whites’ or adults to show that they dare to challenge authority. There seems to be nothing beyond and more ‘serious’ than some minor psychological pressure brought about by supposedly plucky gesturing. A true rebellion would most probably constitute of something much more than immature public stunts brought about by acts of bravado.
Assuming youth who rebel through music are really able to do something much more radical and cause some sort of a rebellion, one would realise that ultimately, they will still have to submit to another authority, the police. Thus, mere acts of publicly blasting, listening and singing along with music filled with profanities and immoral overtones do not really set youth apart through a show of ‘authority challenging’ and ‘rebelling’. Wendtland’s supporting examples also lack the perspective of males.
As the saying goes, ‘women are from Venus and men are from Mars’, how males relate and express themselves through music may very well differ from their female counterparts. There is also no proof that shows all males and females having identical perceptions towards music. Youth is a category consisting of young people from both genders. Females alone do not, and are not enough to represent youth as a whole. Therefore, the inexistence of male sentiment results in skewed conclusions, directing the focus to how some females evince their rebellion through music.
In conclusion, although Wendtland has a relatively limited argument showing how youth identify themselves by rebellion through music, credit should still be given to her for being able to explain how youth vicariously live through a certain kind of music and in doing so, aid readers in relating to some youth who, like her, identify themselves using this method. Her article can be much more cogent by factoring in more elaborated examples of how youth challenge and rebel against authority, the opinion of males to the subject matter, and by bringing in more genres of music into the argument.