Rock groups are morally irresponsible

By Joan Beck

Chicago Tribune Service

Predictably, the Who is taking a who-me? attitude toward the nightmarish trampling to death of 11 young people by fans so impatient to get into Who's Cincinnati concert that they walked right over the bodies.

It's not Who's fault, insisted Peter Townshend, guitarist and chief songwriter. Never mind that rock stars have grown rich and arrogant exploiting young fans with overpriced tickets, cattle-car crowding, bullyboy ushers, and sensibility-benumbing sound and light, or that part of the crowd-control problem in Cincinnati, as at Altamont, was the customary long delay in starting the concert.

"The whole purpose of a rock concert is for people to forget themselves, to lose their egos in the crowd, and to disappear," Townshend told a New York Times reporter. Never mind if they trample or are trampled to death in the process. The Who, of course, is going right on with the shows.

Not to do so "would have put back the cause of rock music and audiences 10 years," said Bill Curbishley, Who's manager, who is busy who-meing, too. To withdraw, he told the New York Times, would be to imply an assumption of moral responsibility. Never mind that 200,000 ticket holders would have to get refunds or that rock groups and their promoters have grown richer faster by overcharging and exploiting the public than any 19th century robber barons.

There's a lot of other who-meing going on these days, too, by those who find it profitable and easy to act in ways that directly or indirectly hurt young people. And it's hard to find anyone willing to assume any moral responsibility.

Young people these days aren't growing up absurd, but growing up exploited. Not only are they being sold shoddy music on overpriced records and tapes and in cattle-car concerts, but shoddy ideas and values and lifestyles for which they are also paying exorbitant prices.

Most human societies develop customs, mores and rites of passage—clearly understood and generally agreed upon—to ease children into functioning adulthood in safe and acceptable ways. Increasingly, we are failing to do so. Far too many young people have their potential curtailed by drug abuse, alcoholism, premature pregnancy, violence and crime.

But try to tell a People-type celebrity or even a White House aide that public use of pot or cocaine lends a glamor and respectability to drug use that may encourage its abuse by young people and the response, of course, is "Who me?" Yet hundreds of thousands of teens and young adults are getting stoned out of their minds—and out of a worthwhile future—because we're condoning a drug culture which they cannot escape and with which they cannot cope.

No publishers peddling hard or soft porn or sexually irresponsible lifestyles, no producers of X and R-rated films, no celebrities with live-in friends, would assume any moral responsibility, of course, for their effects on teen-agers.

Yet sexual permissiveness is encouraging a million pregnancies among adolescents every year, and hundreds of thousands of abortions and illegitimate births. Who cares if kids can't handle the precocious sexuality adults are selling them along with the magazines and movies?

Suggest to purveyors of violent TV shows and films that repeated exposure increases aggressiveness and delinquency among young viewers and they will deny it, say it's what the public wants, and that parents should turn off the sets.

There was a time when those who sought fame for personal gain or money or votes felt some sense of responsibility for being a moral role model. But the idea seems as quaint now as it would have been for the Who to take responsibility for the welfare of their over-charged audience.

"You have to develop a kind of defensive armor," Townshend told the New York Times. "If I didn't, I don't think we could go on with the tour."

But it's easy these days for adults to develop defense armor, to say "Who me?" to the assumption of moral responsibility. Who cares how many teenagers get trampled or stoned or pregnant out of wedlock or caught up in violence as long as our personal tours go on?