Welcome to the Jungle

My nifty diagram from Thursday's lecture, captured by my valiant TA's cell phone, tells you everything you need to know about 80's pop metal. You know when a cat is frightened, and it arches its back and bushes up its tail to appear as large as possible? Same idea with, say, Guns N' Roses.

In other musicological news, today's business is trying to finish up a review I am supposed to be writing, my very first academic publication. The item under consideration is a DVD featuring a new recording of a Very Important Piece of Music, with an accompanying documentary. Thus, an expensive trip to the local Tower Classical to buy every version of the piece available, for comparative purposes. Maybe I am a lost cause to nerd-dom, but honestly, I can think of few better ways to spend a Friday afternoon then listening to endless recordings of a great piece of music!

Smells Like Teen Spirit

In preparing for tomorrow's (ed: well, technically today's) lecture on 80's metal and 90's alternative, I realized that in my last lecture, I unwittingly passed an important milestone.

On Tuesday I played my class a snippet of Michael Jackson's "Beat It", just to point out that Jackson's complex fusion of many musical genres included heavy metal, in the form of a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. Ladies and gentlemen, "Beat It" was the very first pop song I can remember. I don't believe I heard it when it first came out, as Thriller came out when I was only three. But at a very early age, probably about five, I distinctly remember hanging out with my best friend in his kitchen, and he had a cassette tape of "Beat It." We both thought it was pretty cool, and I memorized the words as best as I could. Even then, in my pre-musicological childhood, I could sense that illicit danger early Michael Jackson communicated so effectively and creepily.

As we now move further into music with which I have very deep personal connections from my youth--particularly Nirvana and Metallica--I admit I feel a little trepidation. Am I going to do this music justice? Am I going to be critical enough? Am I going to have any insights, or am I just going to sit up there and be Mr. Fanboy? I'm bringing in my guitar, mostly to demonstrate power chords and two-handed fret-tapping for the 80's metal, but I know I am not going to resist playing some Nirvana. After all, I learned how to play guitar by playing along with Nevermind for hours at a time, and I can still more or less play my way through the entire Nirvana catalogue, from Bleach to In Utero. (Unplugged too, which although clearly sub-par did introduce me to Bowie and Leadbelly.) I hope it works--I've found that some of my most effective lectures have been on music with which I very clearly did not identify, such as early hip-hop.

I considered including in my slide show a picture of me in full grunge regalia, with shoulder-length hair dyed black, but I think that might cause them to lose all respect for me.

Blank Generation

Those who know me know that I am rather passionate on the subject of Patti Smith. If memory serves, one of my first posts on this here blog thing was about seeing her in concert. (Incidentally, that same concert was recorded and released as part of the special reissue of Horses last year.) There are a lot of things that draw me towards Patti: her politics, her sex appeal, her voice, her moral authority, her guitarist. She means a lot to me also as a passion that Mary and I have shared together for many years. And as a historian, I appreciate the crucial role she played in the early stages of the NYC punk scene of the mid-seventies.

One of my favorite things about teaching is that when I am lecturing, everything I say automatically becomes true for all these undergrads. Yes, I wish they were thinking more critically, and yes, I wish that more learning here took place in smaller situations that encouraged discussion and said critical thinking, rather than me standing on a stage in front of sixty people. And I try hard not to teach music history as some sort of coherent, linear, bedtime story. We responsible teachers focus on problems of historiography, the question of "authenticity" in popular music, the ways in which music shapes our social identities.

But sometimes story-telling is necessary, and when it is, I love the fact that I get to be the one telling the story. I love telling everyone that no, neither the Sex Pistols nor the Ramones invented punk rock. It wasn't a group of obnoxious boys playing cynical three-chord rock loud and fast. It was, rather, a hallucinatory poet who invented punk rock, taking her fashion cues from nineteenth-century symbolist poets, her lyrics from the NYC spoken word scene, and the music--assisted by the indomitable Lenny Kaye--from the angry garage rock of the midwest. My students grew up thinking that punk rock is like Green Day, or--god forbid--Blink 182. The slightly more astute might know punk rock from its time in the wilderness, when it existed only in small regional underground scenes around the country. Nothing wrong with that music, but there is nothing better than playing for my students the actual music of CBGB's in 1975: Patti, Television, the Heartbreakers, Blondie, and yes, even the Ramones. I'm not sure they quite get how powerful this stuff is, how subversive it still sounds.

But I hope that just hearing the music expands their ears a little bit, and hopefully their brains a bit too. It's naive, I realize, to think that just hearing this music will change the students in some important way. That is hopelessly romantic, almost anti-intellectual. But even we pomo academics hope for such mystical accomplisments occasionally.

I Can't Get No

Man, this edumacating thing takes it out of me. I'm quickly settling into a routine with my lectures: first two hours are fine, but as I enter the home stretch of the third hour, I start to give out. My throat begins to ache, my legs feel like they are glued to the floor, and I forgo class discussion and painstaking analysis for stuttering quickie points on, say, how Keith Richard's guitar lick from "Satisfaction" isn't actually a blues riff, but an attempt to imitate the horn section of a Motown number. Write that down, kids.

Still, all and all, I'm pretty pleased. We're getting through the material, people occasionally laugh at my jokes. And I think this experience is really just about learning techniques for endurance: the importance of having water to drink, the importance of standing up straight and wearing comfortable shoes, the importance of good air conditioning.

Tomorrow I take a break from teaching for some honest to goodness dissertation research. The Getty Research Institute, located in a building on the grounds of the Getty Museum, has a wonderful library that holds the papers of several figures important to me: M.C. Richards, Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and especially David Tudor. I've worked some with the Tudor papers already, especially his scores, but now I'm going to dive into his correspondence, and that of Richards. This is no substitute for getting to the Cage papers in Chicago, but it is a good start, and as far as I can tell, I don't think many Cage scholars have looked through the Richards papers. I have an all-day appointment tomorrow, so we'll see what I dig up!

Grading, Grading, Gone!

It's been a six hour marathon, but I just finished all my grading for the quarter.

After grading sixty final papers this last weekend, we had our final exam today. I start my exams on Thursday, so originally I was going to take this evening and tomorrow to do the grading. But after further reflection, I realized that it would be very, very nice to have a day off to relax and re-group before I plunge into the ordeal, so I resolved to just start grading as soon as the final was over, and not stop until I was done.

It's now 11:30 pm, but I am done!