I’m
a teacher in my real life—or is it the other way around? And one thing
I hate, that makes me squirm with embarrassment is when teachers
try to teach by co-opting popular songs and parodying the lyrics, or the
video,
to bring home their curricular goals in a way the kids “will really
understand.”
It’s just embarrassing, in the same way your parents were
embarrassing when they yelled at you in front of your friends or tried to get
down on your level by dropping a bit of slang. You know, to show you they were
on your level. Ugg…it’s like every mom is Marge Simpson, too clueless to have a
clue, or Homer; too dumb to know how dumb he is acting.
Teachers love parodies, love trying to really reach the
kids in ways they will understand. Hey, why don’t we take Shakespeare and rap
the lines. Shakespeare would approve—after all, he was just using language in
new ways, too…Oh, I know it well: desperate to reach these twitter net numbed
little vacant oxygen abusers, we resort to making horse’s asses of ourselves.
But, for a phenomenal paycheck…ahhhbullshitchoo!
Point is, school and…almost anything else good in my life
never mixed. Strange, in a cosmic way, that I became a teacher. But, I still
get the chills when a teacher ditches their dignity to teach a lesson to kids
in language they can understand…just reminds me too much of that disaffected
little Walkman and MTV numbed oxygen abuser I was not so long ago.
OK, I’m whining…Here’s a case in point, though I have to
admit: If any of my teachers looked like this, I might have given the whole
school thing another chance…
Annnnndddd.....then, there’s this….
Stop…just stop. You might grow up, but you never grow up too
much to not be embarrassed.
Yeah, OK…I’ll stop…
So, this month’s theme is math. Math. The subject I
struggled with the most all the way up until I graduated…from college. Math was
my preeminent anxiety from grade school on—I had tutors, I failed courses, I
did summer school. Once, on the SAT, I did so poorly on my math that my Math
score was 100…this was when the top SAT score was only 1400. I got an 800 total…That’s…pretty
bad.
In high school, I liked music, and writing, precisely
because they were as opposite of mathematics as could get: freedom minus
rigidity, enjoyment divided by anxiety equaled a shitty GPA and lowered expectations.
The last day I ever had to take a math class was one of the happiest days of my
life. I remember walking out of Rawl Hall at East Carolina University,
thinking: I will never take another f#$%ing math class again. It was a great
feeling, like I’d suffered something for longer than I thought I could and
walked out with all parts—limbs and sanity—in tact. I had worked really hard,
to be honest and at the end, I knew I wasn’t going to let my relationship with
mathematics end with my slinking away to nurse my wounds and regret the fight I
hadn’t put up. I worked hard that semester, harder than I’d ever worked and
ended the semester with a B-…the highest grade I’d ever scored in any math
class. F#$k math. I’d won.
What does this have to do with music? Nothing, other than
hating the sciences and the numbers was probably the catalyst for my love of
music, and if it was nothing else, it was a precious escape.
One of the first bands I became truly obsessed with in my
alternate, music-oriented education, was The Doors. It makes sense in many
ways: The Doors are kind of a “gateway” band into serious music for a lot of
teenage boys; Morrison was an incorrigible class clown, in school and out (I
know this—part of the right of passage of being a Doors fan was to read No One Here Gets Out Alive, Danny
Sugarman’s bio); the music was dark enough to be an antidote to a lot
of the classic rock that got spun as voice of the generation stuff; and on a
personal level, Morrison, much like me at the time, wanted to be and considered
himself above all, a poet. I wasn’t a student when I was 16 and 17—I would have
accepted any label other than that. Poet was good—the idea was cool and writing
poetry got me more than a few girls. Playing guitar helped, too. I suppose that
is an equation that still works.
The Doors were a great band to get into—there was plenty of
mythology to dig, a real fabled aura around the shamanistic Morrison, and
musical sound that was often a dark opposite to the flower power, ‘come on
people, smile on your brother’ stuff that was a primer for the 60s rock
explosion. Hendrix did it better, of course, but he was solo artist, in a
sense. The Doors were a group and thus presented a more unified system of
disorder. And while Morrison in particular can be almost cringe-inducing when I
go back and listen (L’America?) some
tracks, like their first hit, Break on
Through, and others— The Whiskey
Song, Love Me Two Times, When the Music’s Over— cook with some kind of
other spirit, blues-influenced, incendiary, dark and magisterial—when the Doors
were on, they were stunningly good—rock n roll dredged through the dirt. I
loved that sound when I was young; it represented a true rebellion, an
antidote, if you will, to all the forces in life working to keep me stifled in a
classroom.
So, in honor to my wayward days, my wasted youth, all the
tests I failed, all the desks I carved “The Doors” into, all the dreams I had
about blowing it up and blowing it out, I choose The Doors, “Five to One.” This
explosive chant and stomp reads like a child’s rhyme, but it burns with a
controlled fury that takes aim at the listener or anyone who might not dig what
Morrison was pushing. I love John Densmore’s pounding, military drums; Robby
Krieger is at his bluesy best when he rips off the solo, and Ray Manzarek’s
fuzzed out keyboard line fills in as a static-infused bass, crackling with
serious mojo, far advanced and way modern for its time. As for Morrison—he says
it all here. Talking about hippies crawling across the floor, flowers in hand,
he sets himself in firm opposition to the flower power ethic of peace and love,
then goes on to engage in what, to me at the time, was as a pure a middle
finger in the face of my teachers, the cops, my folks, as many authority
figures as I could find to be pissed off at:
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're takin' over
A little light on the true rebellious
capital, I realize, but at the time, that was all I needed: a little stomp, a
lot of anger and either a stepping stone to something better, or just a nice,
fist sized stone through any ready window.