4. How do you feel about all this adulation and hero worship? When Mick Jagger’s fans look at him as a high priest or a god, are you with them or against them? Do you share Chris Singer’s almost religious reverence for Bob Dylan? Do you think he -- or Dylan – is misguided? Do you reject Alice Cooper as sick? Or are you drawn somehow to this strange cloven, perhaps Because he acts out your wildest fantasies?
     5. These aren’t idle questions. Some sociologists say that your answers to them could explain a lot about what you are thinking and about what your society is thinking -- in other words, about where you and your society are. “Music expresses its times,” says sociologist Irving Horowitz. Horowitz sees the rock music arena as a sort of debating forum, a place where ideas clash and crash. He sees it as a place where American Society struggles to define and redefine its feelings and beliefs. “The redefinition,” Horowitz says, “is a task uniquely performed by the young. It is they alone who combine invention and exaggeration, reason and motion, word and sound, music and politics.”
     6. Todd Rundgren, the composer and singer, agrees. “Rock music,” he says, “is really a sociological expression rather than a musical force. Even Elvis Presley wasn’t really a great musical force, it’ s just that Elvis managed to embody the frustrated teenage spirit of the 1950s.” Of course Presley horrified adult America. Newspapers editorialized against him, and TV networks banned him. But Elvis may have proved what Horowitz and Rundgren Believe. When he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Sunday night variety show in front of millions, a kind of “debate” took place. Most of the older viewers frowned, while most of the younger viewers applauded.