Southerner in a Cold, Cold Land

Introduction

The following is an assignment from a class at the University of Minnesota focusing on Media Literacy Studies. The assignment is an exercise in appreciating the culture of the middle school or high school student by way of making a case for the value of a given popular song, artist, or genre that is undervalued, or routinely criticized by critics. The discussion that follows centers around a conflict of whether or not utilizing undervalued pop music in the classroom may affect some students’ senses of agency. Also, central to the conflict is an inherent evaluation that teachers have to make when selecting texts that are appropriate for the goals of their teaching. I begin with the assignment guidelines, followed by my initial submission of the assignment. After feeling that I had not adopted the position that I had been instructed to do, I felt the need to engage my professors in a brief exchange about the nature of the assignment. The sequence of email correspondences follow my initial posting of the assignment. I have changed the names of professors to avoid any unnecessary conflicts that could ensue.

Assignment

Week 10: Popular Music

Develop a four-to-five paragraph description/defense and post it in the Discussion Section of Course WebVista website.

Posting

Let me precede this posting with a disclaimer of sorts. In an attempt to jump headfirst into this assignment, I chose to write about a song that I only heard for the first time moments before writing the following. Also, I have strong, strong feelings about garbage culture in this country getting worse and worse. Eight years with G.W. Bush in office is absolutely suggestive of an American public whose abilities to discriminate between good and bad, right and wrong, high and low, helpful and harmful (all of which seem to be such basic things) has certainly diminished greatly in recent years. I used to use the term “guilty pleasures� to describe my love for AC/DC, Queen, Electric Light Orchestra, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Hank Williams Jr., and the list could go on, but I can’t say I really feel that guilty anymore. Snoop and Hank Jr. have questionable messages, for sure, at times. Racism, for one. And Snoop Dogg’s lyrics can usually be counted on for perpetuating misogynistic ideas. But since I can recognize these things I don’t worry about feeling guilty anymore. Essentially, my initial knee-jerk reaction to the pop song I found stands too much in the way of any potential defense of this as anything but the crap that it is. I have not provided any YouTube link to the video, or audio thread, so as to avoid exposing anyone further to its socially corrosive nature. Lastly, I would not ever encourage anyone to value such music, unless it somehow provides a link into understanding our own culture, our human nature, or other such lofty pedagogical goals. Deep down, I feel that any text lends itself to an understanding of such big picture ideas, but if this is the only sort of stuff we engage in we’re essentially doing a time warp to a more primitive age.

When I think of using pop music in a Language Arts classroom, I cannot help but feel for my students who so frequently cannot help but to swallow and regurgitate all the crap U.S. cultural artifacts that record companies, television programmers, and Hollywood executives bombard them with. Without fail, 9 out of 10 popular songs, films, and tv shows are at a level of mediocrity that, my gut reaction tells me, has NO PLACE in my classroom. However, thinking about this assignment of working pop culture into the classroom, if I were to bring in the horrible music that young people know (deep down) is bad, but cannot distinguish from better music because they have not heard it yet, it will most definitely be on my terms.

Any garbage pop song will do. A quick look at MTV’s website reveals a song I’ve never heard: Tokio Hotel’s “Ready, Set, Go!� I watched the video for approximately 45 seconds – long enough to realize what the gimmick is. Clichéd lyrics that speak of anguish, loneliness, isolation: an orgy of teenage emotion (but lacking anything resembling the tightness or subtlety of poetry). A song structure and lead vocals that sound like a bad impression of Billy Corgan’s vocals. And an Eighties glam/metal hair band aesthetic from the lead singer as well. The video and the lyrics, too, feature nods to Orwell and Roger Waters. Scratch Orwell, actually. I doubt anyone involved with this production has read his work; no doubt, they’ve probably just seen the film Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and are replicating the scene where the kids march around with shapeless masks, singing about not needing an education (i.e., thought control). Without question, there would be some dark sarcasm in the classroom, if I were to bring this song, or any other song played on MTV, into my class. Students may identify with the gist of the song, but they ought not to revere a song-writer for putting words to paper that any of their peers could easily replicate.

Students need to know that they are absolutely capable of coming up with poetry, prose, and any other means of reflection through language that are not as easily encapsulated as the message of pop songs.

I have a beef with pop music. Mainly, there is an incredibly vast amount of great music out there being made by talented, young musicians whose messages are literate, sincere, authentic, and often still very much derivative in some way to work that has come before. Unfortunately, these musics/ideas are not nearly as aggressively marketed to the American public as what the majority of the public will learn to love for no other reason than they have no idea that it exists.

So, if I were to bring pop music into my classes, it would mainly be for the following purposes:
- Comparison study of popular artifact with the more significant text of which it is derivative (e.g., how are the central ideas portrayed notably different; which has the deeper meaning; what makes one seem more authentic, or well crafted than the other);
- Explication of clichés in the language used throughout the song;
- The role of image in the creation of an aesthetic (e.g., what does the “look� of the members of the band tell us about who they intend their audience to be?)
- Film techniques such as montage, mise en scene, and cuts that are used throughout the video to enact meaning and engage the audience.

A primary reason I hesitate to bring pop music into my classroom is because I do not wish to isolate myself out of the classroom community by ridiculing students’ tastes in pop culture. Undoubtedly, they might not initially like many of those works I feel they would benefit from having been introduced to. However, the empty-headed pop music they’re force fed daily by everyday media could easily be replaced with the likes of Patrick Wolf, Annie, and Robyn – all young musicians who embody everything great about pop music, exploring sexuality, narcissism, uncertainty, and all other such primitive feeling with artistic merit, having actually written the lyrics and music they perform.

Powers states, “The fact that somebody out there loves a song doesn't mean I can't despise and eventually dismiss it. But it does mean I have to really think about what that song becomes when it's played in a crowded room� (Powers, 244). In a way he’s right, but often if I begin to dwell on why people are drawn to aesthetically vacuous and morally worthless cultural artifacts, my conclusive statements on the condition of humankind diminish a little. Powers makes an example of the reviewer who dismisses works as derivative, but I would not dismiss a work of art for being derivative. Pretty much all the music I love is derivative of something, which speaks more to the idea that everything we come across in this life affects us in meaningful and meaningless ways.

Sanjek speaks of how imposing one’s taste on others does not reflect his feelings about the power of new/other works to affect social transformation. He writes, “Whenever the mainstream taste of the wider public descends into a pattern that the cognoscenti consider debased, the obsession with repertoire emerges in full force. Dismissing the Top Ten out of hand and replacing it with cultish preferences bears an unappetizing similarity to the educated classes barricading themselves against the barbarians at the gates� (Sanjek, 172). To a certain extent, I agree that there is something awful about music critics as purveyors of “cultish� works of art and neasayers to everything that doesn’t fit into their ideal aesthetic world. The same goes for film critics who praise the works of Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, and other such directors in lieu of more popular films whose narrative structure is not so fractured and obscure. But I also feel that a teacher ought to address the negative consequences of a public accepting ANY OLD THING in the place of works that have redeeming social/cultural value. I remember thinking, when I was in high school, that 2 Live Crew’s “Hoochie Mama� was pretty entertaining, even though I knew it was terribly, terribly sexist to the point of suggesting violence against women. The music is infectiously catchy, and irresistible to many impressionable, young people who enjoy such music. But the messages are there, often right out in the open, and young people are more often exposed to those works lacking such socio-cultural value. So, part of our jobs as teachers might be to take an initiative of helping students learn to critique these works, while encouraging them to explore arts and ideas that require a little bit of digging to get to.

In an article about YouTube, Trier suggests a variety of ways of involving students in media study and criticism within the classroom. For instance, he says, “Students could watch these videos outside of class and then write a response. A class discussion on the issue could happen afterward� (Trier, 602). I like the idea of using YouTube videos as texts for students to respond to. I think such an activity could engage students in ways meaningful to their own personal media input experiences.

Initial criticism of assignment

Professor Rice,

David Gower

Teacher response

HI, David --

Thanks for taking the time to write about this. I'd only say that, as you know, the assignment was meant to challenge this notion that you put forward in your note below: