So many things are happening faster than I can comment on them, I figure I'd rather wait until next week just before Christmas and wrap up what will have happened up to and including Christmas Eve, because everything is turning against Trump in an accelerated fashion. (I wanted to comment on the failure of Congress to renew Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out that that story isn't over quite yet.) And even that may not be sufficient, as Trump will likely continue committing atrocities right up to the moment the ball drops in Times Square on New Year's Eve and start committing new atrocities in 2026 without missing a beat or taking a break.
But in the meantime, there are a few stories and topics that I must address before then. Like the issue involving the band Cheap Trick.
"We were asked to perform at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony to pay tribute to our lifelong brothers in Kiss, and to support artists and the arts," the band explained in a message posted on Cheap Trick’s X social-media accounts. "We agreed to do it for those reasons, and no others."
I am not one of those people who will never listen to Cheap Trick again or who will boycott their shows to protest their appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, as I take them at their word. But this flap just proves how wrong it is for the Kennedy Center to award honors to rock bands, and this of course is an issue that predates either of Trump's two nonconsecutive terms. Rock and roll has long been about sticking it to the Man with the proverbial finger, and as an establishmentarian institution meant to support mainstream and highbrow performing art, the Kennedy Center is the Man in all his grandiose glory. The fact that not only Kiss got a Kennedy Center honor but also several other rock acts in the past - including Led Zeppelin, who weren't even American - shows how respectable rock has become in the recent past. Because Led Zeppelin, though regarded as the founding fathers of heavy metal, were based in American blues and also added touches of English folk and Jamaican reggae to their music, the Kennedy Center was able to provide an explanation - a tenuous explanation at best, but still an explanation - for why they were being honored for their contributions to the arts. There is no obvious explanation or excuse to give a Kennedy Center honor to a band known for distorted, flamboyant noise, singing about the overt sexiness of young women (sample lyric from "Rock and Roll All Nite": "You show us everything you got / Ooh baby baby, that's quite a lot"), and generally being loud and stupid.
But, even the best rock and roll is inappropriate for a stage designed for "serious" musical performances, be it the National Symphony Orchestra's concerts or an opera, the stage being massive enough to, as Paul Fussell wrote, support a production of Verdi's Aida with "immense heroic processions and herds of real elephants and camels, with everyone speaking - nay, singing - the best possible Italian." Then again, maybe rock and roll isn't inappropriate for the Kennedy Center; as I've noted before, and as Fussell noted long before I did, the Kennedy Center mostly stages lowbrow entertainments, to the point where the Aida you'll see on its stage is not the Verdi opera but the Elton John-Tim Rice Broadway musical based on it. (And, given the political correctness that permeates our culture these days, the only acceptable Continental language in this country is Spanish, the language of Latin jazz, mariachi and salsa - all of which I happen to like, by the way - whereas Italian opera is the stuff that DWEAMs - dead white European and American males - are made of. French? Nah, that's for pompous twits!) Implicit in the choice of rock and rollers for Kennedy Center honors is that all art, even subversive lower-middle-class art meant as a revolt against the classical, intellectual music of the educated and overeducated classes, is worthy of equal recognition, even if the lowbrow music honored, like Kiss, is crass and vulgar, or even if the highbrow music honored is pretentious and empty. The performing arts in general and music in particular are all democratically created in America, and thus democratically honored . . . and democratically dismal.
And it's going to get worse at the Kennedy Center if a Democrat is ever President again. A Democratic administration will overcorrect Trump's Kennedy Center honor choices of metal meatheads and action-movie actors by honoring pop singers whom the Democratic Party's hip progressive base listens to - mostly disco divas who go by single names - and more hip-hop stars who both rap and act. Like the rapper legally known as Dana Owens, who got a Kennedy Center honor a couple of years ago. (Aside: I think Owens' CBS show, the "Equalizer" reboot, got canceled because, in the age of Trump, airing an action series that shows a heavy-set black woman beating up white guys in rapid succession - at least that's what my mother said the show basically was - could get you in trouble with MAGA. And right after that, CBS happily welcomed Bari Weiss to run its news department.)
But I need to return to my original point - it is totally and completely inappropriate to honor rock and roll at the Kennedy Center when rock and roll was and remains a street rebellion against the highbrow conventions of serious music. But reversing course and honoring only cellists and classical pianists, especially East Asian child prodigies, is decades too late. Hey, Bob Dylan received a Kennedy Center honor despite having famously sung that "even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked."
Dylan got the honor in 1997, the first year of President Bill Clinton's second term and the year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Yeah . . .
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