I believe great art should serve big ideas, okay most successful pop songs are about getting the girl or the boy, or getting over heartbreaks, but in this case, may be pop songs are not major art.
Obviously, it takes time for most big scientific and philosophical ideas to go mainstream, but why not using music to diffuse them faster? Unfortunately it is not done that often, because these ideas aren’t that accessible and pop-rock stars aren’t necessary into that kind of stuff. That’s why it was so thrilling to read this Greg Graffin’s interview in the LA Weekly! He is some rare specimen in the music world, beside being the frontman of Bad Religion, he has also a PhD from Cornell University, has taught evolutionary biology, and has always been in touch with the scientific world and its revolutionary ideas. This is what he said in the interview:
‘Recently we had this Mayan apocalypse. One of the things that all religions have is a narrative of doomsday. There has to be some kind of overarching fear of the future. If there wasn't, none of the religions could invoke this important thing — that science has no evidence of by the way — called free will.’
[…]
‘Those things we've let go of, but there are still things we cling to tenaciously. One of them is this belief in free will, which almost no professional psychologist in the modern world believes. Every religious leader insists on it to the point where they get apoplectic if you suggest otherwise. That is something we won't be able to let go of right away. It will take a while.’
Isn’t it the biggest idea ever? The death of free will, certainly announced by all the neurobiologists I have heard of, should be all over the place, should be shaking things up everywhere, and made a splash in our conception of reality. Instead it is ignored and we continue to live in our delusion we are in control of our destiny. Our whole world, our judicial system are built around this notion of free will, what if neurobiologists tell us that it doesn’t really exist? The Descartes era is long gone in the science world, it’s about time people realize that reason doesn’t rule anymore! Randomness, not control, is everywhere in our nervous system and this leads to indeterminism in our behavior, meaning that the absence of free will isn’t actually the equivalent of determinism. And science has experiments to prove it, experiments demonstrating that the brain acts before the person is even aware of it. Brain scans have destroyed the idea of free will as we know it, and our decisions are made unconsciously. And it goes even further, if neurobiologists have found unconscious neurons that drive decision-making, the common and dualist idea of the mind separated from the body is gone too. This is what science says right now, and who knows about it? Almost nobody.
I am not saying all songs should be talking about this, but art should be the vehicle of this sort of big ideas. Bad Religion has certainly done it for more than 30 years, and they aren’t the only ones, but you have to admit that the market is invaded by pop-rock songs with trite, shallow or plain cheesy lyrics. Come on, more songs should be thought-provoking, if pop-rock music is art, lyrics should elevate the debate, not dumb it down!