DON'T PUT ANOTHER DIME IN THE JUKEBOX. National Review publishes a lecture Stanley Kurtz gave on Allan Bloom at Princeton. One can only imagine what Bloom, who despaired at the desuetude of American higher education, would make of the fact that an Ivy League university countenanced Kurtz' lengthy exegesis on rock and roll and hiphop -- especially since Kurtz' foreordained conclusion is that the 1986 publication of The Closing of the American Mind was a "major culture-shaping phenomenon," which would imply that parlor songs had replaced rock and rap in the soundtrack of American life. Yet the best Kurtz can do is point to a Rolling Stone interview in which Mick Jagger and Keith Richards express weariness with hard music, which is understandable, since their last dozen records seem to have been designed to spread such weariness generally.

This leaves Bloom nothing but blame, and black people provide him with a modish target:

Unfortunately, I think hip-hop is going to be just fine. To see why, let’s consult Bloom’s treatment of race...

To spare you some pain, let me condense it: blacks forced colleges at gunpoint to admit them, which of course just ruined colleges and blacks alike. As a result, gangsta rap has become popular with "many of Europe’s discontented Muslim youth," which "drives some of these young men toward Islamist radicalism." Kurtz' mechanism of action is ingeniously muddled:

For many of these young Muslim boys, the notion that their Western girlfriends are actually “ho’s” flows from a still robust ethic of family honor, in which the sisters of these rappers are often held to radically different standards than their gangsta brothers. The contradiction between this traditional family ethos and the baseness of street life drives some of these young men toward Islamist radicalism. Rap emerged as a kind of antithesis of an already weakened family system. Juxtapose rap with its communal family opposite, and the results are nothing short of explosive.

Miscegnation plus Jay-Z equals jihad! Yet we still haven't put Stephon Marbury in preventive detention. It's a wonder the Republic still stands.

If, 20 years on, rockers and rappers are destroying Western Civilization more effectively than ever, what's so "culture-shaping" about Closing?

So in my view, far from vitiating either the book’s impact or its positive effects, Closing’s fearless philosophical doubt actually generated its success — not merely in terms of sales, but also as a conservative cultural force. Traced down and studied in isolation, Bloom’s skeptical philosophical core may appear to be as oddly forbidding as the invisible black hole at the center of a galaxy. Yet the seemingly destructive power of that core actually sets the surrounding stars into motion.

Pundit poetry is always tough to parse, but I think Kurtz means the book is great because it gave lunatics such as himself steady gigs at rightwing blabfests.