What Does a 60-Something Professor Have in Common with His Early 20-Something Students?
History in our music: Rock and Soul class, week three
What does a 60-something professor have in common with his early 20-something students?
It’s probably not an abiding passion for the novels of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, though as Elvis Costello once sang, accidents will happen.
Clearly I’m talking about music, and in this case the music from what we know as the Rock and Soul era — 1960s until now if we’re liberal in our arts definition. So in yesterday’s class, I tried an experiment of sorts, based on two guiding principles:
- No one should demean anyone else’s musical faves, and here I mean that I should not exercise my vastly different years of experience to make these young people feel inferior, unwanted, or out-of-their-depths.
- We all have stories to tell and sometimes, even often, those stories are predicated, inspired, or based in the music we love and that’s been passed down or suggested to us.
With these two principles in mind, I asked the students to send me at least one song that they feel I need to hear. Their choices not only reflected their own character and turns in life, but also ranged about as widely as I could have hoped for. From St. Vincent and the Stone Roses to Home, Greta Van Fleet, Conan Gray, Futurebirds, and this one:
Love and music for sure.
I asked them how they found these songs, and many came from scrolling Tik Tok. Make of that what you will. Some came via friends’ suggestions, but the one that intrigued me most was the student who likes Greta Van Fleet. This student, by her own admission, is a Country music lover, but a friend took her to a dual bill show featuring Van Fleet and Metallica. She didn’t comment so much on the latter, but Van Fleet knocked her out — the voice, the driving beat.
I hope she’ll write that story soon.
The next section of class focused on history, but in a way advanced to me first by Questlove in his 2021 best-seller, Music Is History (Abrams Image Books).
In his “1981” chapter, he takes us through his young days of making a movie and then of discovering that he is a descendant of someone named Charlie Lewis who came to America on the Clotilda, “last slave ship known to have come to the United States.” This is the point that Questlove confesses that he became interested in history.
His own history.
And he argues that such is true for many of us — we don’t know or want to know history until we’re somehow personally involved or “connected.”
As for the movie he was in while still in school (West Side Store), he doesn’t know if any of it, even a few frames, still survives. It was, he says,
“…a history of a time and place, of a business and a community around it. That movie mattered to me at the time because I was in it, but if that’s the guiding principle, history should matter to all of us at all times, because we’re in it.”
Okay, okay, okay.
My class is making history, and that’s how we concluded yesterday. But before that conclusion, we had a few chapters left to write — chapters involving specific songs that I wondered if they knew, and if so, how they knew them, and if they knew that, then what stories, what personal histories, might they be able to remember, relate, and then write about those particular memory songs?
Here are a few examples:
I knew this would be a test, but two notes in, my student, Kasey, raised her hand:
“Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit.”
“How did you know?”
“My dad has it on his playlist and he’s played it many times over my life. It’s not his favorite Airplane song — too hippie-dippie, but he still likes it.”
And Kasey does, too.
Next up:
Of course most of them knew this, and one student talked about the routines she and a friend used to make up to the song, the outfits they wore, and something like which of them could assert their best Rihanna posture. Got to be a greater story there!
It’s fun to see how far back their knowledge and history take them. I wonder if at age 21 I would have recognized something that came out roughly fifty years before I was born? Even though Dad played “Sing Sing Sing” for me countless times, would I have recognized it cold?
But this one, a student named Molly got within five seconds:
She didn’t quite remember how she knew it, but maybe a dad or a mom, granddad or grandmom is to blame. I’ve asked her to do some grander remembering!
I ran through others, and I have to say that Molly and Kasey were the big winners knowing The Ramones, Pink Floyd, Prince, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Joan Jett, and Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Again, I’m waiting on the histories of this personal music to come and have charged them with certain research duties.
We ended with one they all knew, I think, and maybe they wondered how I knew it:
Personal history doesn’t care what’s popular or not, pop or rock or soul. It finds you through your daughter’s radio and CDs. It keeps hold of you even if you never danced to it for some school recital, as one of my students did, or have used it as the backdrop for whatever childhood games took the day for you, one day long ago.
The weirder notion is that when this song was first released, not one of the students in my class was alive.
History is like that; you didn’t have to be there to remember it.
More to come as we discover Sly and the Family Stone, The Police, and A Tribe Called Quest.
Thank to Three Imaginary Girls for publishing.
