Two bits on NPR recently changed my point of view on two things: The West Wing and young people's music. First about The West Wing. I heard several interviews over the course of a week with David Chase, the creator and producer of The Sopranos, promoting the new season, which of course, like everyone else I am watching and so far really enjoying.

They asked him to compare producing for HBO, a cable channel, with commercial TV. He said the difference is over-stated, and most of what's on The Sopranos could be done on the big networks. Then he explained how The West Wing works and opened my eyes.

Without naming the show, he said they give the plot a sense of urgency and importance by making the characters walk fast and using a SteadiCam. Now I've watched for both, and imagined a not-moving camera and actors that stay in one place, and all that's left is stupid unbelievable overly dramatized TV crap. I can't believe I was so easily fooled. Was I, or has the bubble of belief just popped, and if so was The West Wing ever more than a quick camera and quick feet?

Second perspective-alterer. Yesterday on All Things Considered, a very young thoughtful and sweet analyst, Mikel Jollett, explained slowly and carefully why rap music is a way for us old folk to look inside ourselves and find our parents and grandparents, disapproving of us as we now disapprove of the younger generation's music. It finally happened, the young folk have invented something that proves us to the hypocrites that we are. What relief. (No sarcasm.)

Here's the deal. What is it with the young people's music these days, the drugs, violence, raw sex, perversion, explicit language. Back in our day music meant something, it was a cause, we were fighting back against a heartless system that was killing us, both spiritually and physically. We took drugs to turn on and tune out.

But it's not true, the young man pointed out. And he did his homework. He played a long section of an old 60s favorite, Everybody Must Get Stoned, by Bob Dylan. It's a great song, one of his most popular (and it's so stoned that's not even the title!). But was it really better than Maggie's Farm, or Blowin in the Wind? Of course not. But it's fun because it's about breaking the rules.

I just listened to Lola by the Kinks. "I'm not dumb but can't understand why she walked like a woman but talked like a man." And Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison -- some of the biggest heroes of our day died tragic deaths at their own hands. Did their music mean something and if so did we get it, or did it just make us feel like we too were living on the edge? Probably more of the latter.

Jollett's point is that youth wants to be corrupted, and if I remember correctly, that's true. I never did most of the things that were in the songs I admired as a kid, and it certainly freaked my parents and grandparents to hear what I was listening to, but of course, that was the point. Music for young people is a ritual that's still sacred. That we grimace and don't recognize that it's exactly like the music we loved when we were young, is validation that they're doing something new. And god bless.

10:28:07 AM