Was Rock Music Jim Henson's 'Nightmare'?
A musical number from a beloved 1970s children's special tells us everything we need to know about how music scares the daylights out of people... at first.
If you want to get a feel for the way rock music was once seen as threatening, this scene from Jim Henson’s holiday classic Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas pretty much tells you everything you need to know:
Emmett Otter‘s depiction of rock ‘n roll degeneracy is played for laughs, and it cracked me up as a kid when I watched the film, a perennial favorite in my house that would air every Christmas season on HBO. (My mom loves it, and so it holds an extra special place in my heart because of that.) As I got a little older, the Riverbottom Nightmare Band scene got funnier — not the least because I would always get the feeling that the intimidating keyboardist Chuck the bear just had to have been inspired by Blue Oyster Cult frontman Eric Bloom.
But I would also chuckle because it was like, “Man, the Jim Henson crew must’ve really been scared of rock!” Emmett Otter first aired in 1977, which places it amidst the ascendance of punk and hip hop, but even meat-and-potatoes rock music still conveyed an air of danger at that point. Judging from this 2021 oral history on the production, it sounds like Henson, Frank Oz and songwriter Paul Williams were just having fun — and maybe making fun of themselves a little bit. Nevertheless, I still read some actual tension in the way this scary rock band trounces all over the quaint, traditional small-town/rural values that are still intact in Frogtown Hollow, where the story takes place.
Then again, Alice Cooper appeared on an episode of The Muppet Show the following year in 1978:
Today, mainstream rock is widely considered harmless, utterly mainstream and even conservative — the domain of boomers and people who grew up in the ‘70s who are now old enough to be parents and grandparents. (I would add to that mix a segment of the current youth generation who, in my view, are trying way too hard to please their parents.) If Henson and Williams were, in fact, voicing collective anxieties about counterculture causing the degradation of the social fabric, those anxieties have long since shifted to successive genres — at least until those genres became safe too.
I mean, a few decades later in 2014, gangsta rap icon Ice Cube appeared on Sesame Street:
Now that’s one hell of an astounding trajectory to go from rhyming about having the urge to kick a pregnant woman in the stomach and/or force an abortion on her with a wire hanger to talking about the word “astounding” alongside Elmo. That’s not to disparage Ice Cube — I’m a fan of the album he said that on, and his rise from N.W.A. frontman to a family-friendly household name with near-limitless mainstream appeal is a remarkable feat. He, along with Snoop Dogg, are to be commended for being mediagenic on a level that few can imagine, much less pull-off.
(Here’s the uncensored version, which you have to hear for the full effect:)
And here are Cube’s reflections on the song, from this ultra-thorough 2014 oral history on the making of the album (which I blurbed in 2020, the year of its 30th anniversary):
I got a lot of heat for the lyrics on that one. I didn’t expect any of it, but it didn’t piss me off. I really just thought it was a dope rhyme, so I was cool taking the heat for it. A lot of people liked that track, so it wasn’t all bad. When it came to the “Kick her in the tummy” line, I didn’t do that to upset people, it was just part of the flow. I mean, men just got sick minds, man! [laughs] I’ve heard men say shit like, “That bitch pregnant, I feel like going and kickin’ in her god-damned stomach!” [laughs] It’s just real. Whether they’d do it or not, I doubt it. I’ve never seen nobody do it, but I’ve heard mo’fuckas talk about it. So, for me it wasn’t nothing to put it in a rhyme. I never had any paternity suits back then, fuck no. Man, come on.
What are we to make of the fact that so many musical styles emerge, basically, from the gutter, where they offend sensibilities and threaten social norms? I’m not sure. The blues, jazz, certain strains of country, rock ‘n roll, rock, punk, hip hop, metal, and certain forms of dance music all, in their respective day, struck profound nerves of fear and hysteria in people who thought these musics heralded the end of civilization. (And those are just some of the American forms.) It’s as if music has a way of gestating in the darkened corners of society where people live-out the shadow aspect that the rest of us won’t acknowledge about ourselves.
And what are we to make of the fact that, in time, all of these artforms end up becoming enfolded into the mainstream? I’m not sure what to make of that either. Eventually, it seems, all musical styles that start out as guttural expressions of heresy are destined to go through the same progression: First, they’re rejected as garbage, then they’re embraced (and mass-marketed) as populist entertainment and, finally, they’re exalted as highbrow art. You can always tell that a genre has arrived at that point when it ends up in museums and on public broadcasting.
I’m fine not knowing what to make of why this cycle occurs. In some ways, it’s more gratifying to just savor the mystery — which is intensified, for me, by the fact that music doesn’t seem to lose its power, even as it sheds its barbed edges on its way to becoming family entertainment. If outlets like NPR, The New York Times and The New Yorker can’t help but leave a smear of elitism on all the art they touch, they don’t actually succeed in de-fanging the tiger as they bring it into captivity.
In the words of the Riverbottom Nightmare Band:
We laugh in your face /
We practice our growl and our sneer.
We break up your place /
We are dangerous when we are near.
And when we are done with our song /
we will get the biggest hand.
recommended reading: Highbrow/Lowbrow—The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence W. Levine.
<3 SRK