Impressionable Youth

I wish to express my great dismay over the casual, even flippant coverage the Los Angeles Times gave to the societal problem posed by the music industry’s molding of impressionable teen-age minds through unrelentless pornographic and self-destructive lyrics. Anyone who has watched more than 15 minutes of MTV or listened to a typical rock station on two or more consecutive days know that a basic premise of the music business is repetitive play. The problem of constant depreciation of teen-age moral and self-image is further multipled through the ease of playing tapes or discs over and over on home, auto and/or personal Walkman-type stereos. No other generation of youths has had to withstand such an overwhelming bombardment of easily available and easily played destructive material.

One would expect that adults in any society would want to protect and nurture its teen-age youth, but not the American music industry and their defenders in the press. “Give them what sells” is the marketing motto of the music industry. The defense that the Los Angeles Times gives to purveyors of self-destructive music reminds me of the robot-like gun control. Gunshot victims may be stacked up at municipal morgues throughout the country, but as far as the NRA is concerned, “do not even think about handgun control.” Teen-agers may be committing suicide right and left, but as far as the Los Angeles Times’ written reaction goes, “do not even think about controlling what is sold over music counters or played over the airwaves or through cable TV.”

The most appalling defense of youth disparagement that I have read to date is the commentary by Times staff writer Mike Boehm (“Unstable Reactions Our Fault, Not Artists’,” Oct. 4). To equate the potential harmful effects of seeing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in a stage setting perhaps just once in a lifetime to the drumming of an (Ozzie) Osbourne lyric over and over directly into the ear of a susceptible teen-ager requires the type of educated mind that is unfathomable to me. What an absolutely unbelievable comparison! “Romeo and Juliet” is even deemed a tragedy, which is more than can be said for what Mike Boehm considers the suicide of a teen-ager.

A. DANIEL ELIASON

Santa Barbara