The online versions of my courses contain discussion forums, dreaded by all online students, but I’ve worked for years to get them to be something effective. Like everything I try in the classroom, there seem be times and classes for which they work very well, and times when everyone is just going through the motions. I keep a number of “starter posts” on hand so that if a class is slow to get going each week and crowds the deadline, there’s something there for students to comment on. Here’s one I wrote recently for a discussion of offensive lyrics in music:
I’ve struggled for a long time with rock music in particular and pop music generally for its lyrical content, and I’ll explain why:
There’s a reason I chose music as my profession: I love it for its own sake, and the experience of music, broadly, is an enjoyable one for me. In fact, I love it so much that when I go to live performances, I get really annoyed and bothered by anything that distracts from the music: as you might expect, this means the rock concert experience is very frustrating for me most of the time, and I usually prefer listening to records to being in a live rock performance. You may think, “Well, this is just a grumpy middle-aged guy,” but believe me that I’ve always felt this way, from the first time I ever heard a rock concert and realized that people didn’t just sit politely and listen (the band was Hot Pursuit, a rock band made of Columbus police officers that changed the words to well-known songs to have anti-drug messages, and they played in my middle school auditorium in 1988 or so: here’s their awesome video: https://youtu.be/bQt1yjZeVvs; I believe they actually got paid by the police department to do this at least part-time).
Another quirk about me is that I tend to focus so much on the music that I either don’t really listen to or don’t understand the lyrics. I really am just more interested in the music, and I have to *make* myself think about the words most of the time. Ironically, this is, I think, the opposite problem from most students in my classes: the non-musicians are generally more in-tune with lyrics and apt to think of the contents of a song being its lyrics rather than its music. To me, though, I might as well be listening to a song sung in a foreign language most of the time.
And imagine that situation for a moment: a person who doesn’t speak English and learns lyrics phonetically might not understand whether a word or line is offensive; or, someone from outside a culture who does speak the language of a song still might not understand the nuance in the lyrics.
Sometimes lyrics have deliberately mysterious, veiled, or coded meanings, or just meanings that escape much of the mainstream: I think of The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A,” which many people (especially post-1990 people) think of as a fun disco song without realizing its homage to gay hookup culture.
So… I am repeatedly surprised by what song lyrics actually say when I stop to listen to them. They depict a world that is much broader than my personal experience, and this is at least partly a good thing. I have mostly lived a life that is not very much like the lyrics of the songs I’ve listened to in that life, and that is largely by choice. I mean, my relationship to pop music is mostly that I teach about it in a state-subsidized school and while I’ve performed in popular styles a lot, that wasn’t the focus of my training, and I’ve never tried to make a living at it. I certainly haven’t lived the “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” life that rock songs tend to describe, or the gangsta life that is so often a part of hip-hop, or the good times country life, and most of my life since my mid-20s has not been about the kind of relationship drama that fills pop songs.
And in some ways, this is what art of all kinds does: it allows us to step into a life other than our own, whether it’s a rock song about the sex a teenager wishes they were having, a video game that allows us to experience combat without actually getting hurt, a TV sitcom where we can laugh at problems instead of agonize over them, or a book that transports us to a time and place we couldn’t otherwise experience. This is a great thing.
But the more I listen to rock lyrics and the more I read about the lives of rock’n’rollers, the more I see that, for many of them, the lyrics aren’t just fantasy and reflect the actual reality of their lives. “Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” isn’t just a slogan, and it’s hard to find a rock star who wasn’t an addict, an abuser, an adulterer, a pedophile, or some combination of those. Songs about drugs are usually written by people who take drugs, and songs about sex with young girls are usually written by people who have sex with young girls. The lyrics may be coded, or their hit songs may seem innocent, but getting into deep cuts will often show you more of the true person.
And no one should be surprised by this, I suppose: very few people get from relative obscurity to the top of their field–any field–without ambition, obsessiveness, enormous ego, and at least a general willingness to be self-serving.
I’ve been reading a new biography of Chuck Berry (R.J. Smith’s Chuck Berry: An American Life) this month, and what stands out about Berry’s story is the way that he turned his fame and money into ways to constantly exert his own power over other people to get them to do what he wanted (usually in sexual ways… he was more or less clean and sober in terms of substances). There is complexity and nuance: his need to exert power came from his background as a Black man in mid-century St. Louis and the constant racism that he endured throughout his career. But he still comes off as a fine example of toxic masculinity. We study Chuck Berry for his mid-to-late 1950s songs like “Maybelline” and “School Days,” but his only Number One Pop single in the US was one of his favorites to play in concert, “My Ding-a-Ling,” an ode to the joys of masturbation. Berry got his jollies from getting the audience to sing along with him in a song about his manhood: exerting his power as a Black man over a mostly-white audience.
So: people can live their lives, and what goes on between consenting adults is just that (if your kink is doing things without consent, I don’t have any sympathy). But I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of art, especially by artists who aren’t trained “formally,” comes from a place of authentic experience, and the simplest answer is that an authentic pop song is rarely a contrivance to convince us that someone is something they are inherently not (although the contradictions between public image and private persona can be fascinating study!).
Thus, when Axl Rose, or Professor Griff, or Andrew Dice Clay make art that is offensive, or demeaning, or insensitive, I think we have to believe that is who they are, on some level. When they make comments in interviews that are misogynist or racists or anti-Semitic or homophobic, we have even more evidence that this is what they believe. Yes, over time, a person can change their ideas and behaviors, for a variety of reasons, at least in their public-facing self. Yes, someone can apologize or make amends, or even pay restitution or serve prison time (Chuck Berry spent 18 months in federal prison on crimes related to a 14-year-old girlfriend… in true Berry fashion, he said he was grateful for the time he spent finishing his diploma and taking business classes so that he could manage his own money, and his record label did everything in its power to keep the full story out of the public eye).
If pop song lyrics–clean, dirty, offensive, sexual, chaste, worshipful, fantastic, gritty–come from personal experiences, we as listeners then have the task of figuring out what we do with those tales. We may choose to like them because they reflect our own experiences. They may reflect our ambitions or alternate versions of ourselves that are better or worse, or just more exciting. They may inspire us to do better, or to reach for more, or they may commiserate with us when we feel we have failed. As I’ve said, they may simply open windows to experiences and lives we won’t, can’t, or don’t want to live. For me, it’s all too easy to ignore the lyrics and focus on the music, and that, of course, is missing the point.
Tags: Chuck Berry, offensive lyrics, rock music, teaching