K. Brehony | "I
Used to get Mad at My School": Representations of Schooling in Rock and
Pop Music. |
The study of cultures should lie at the heart of the Sociology of Education.
Increasingly this is less and less the case as many of that much maligned and
depleted group, sociologists of education, have sought refuge in the study of
education policy and education management. Meanwhile, cultural studies
dominates a field in which cultures have become disassociated from
structures and from which the social has been expelled. Rather than wring
their hands, sociologists should engage with cultural studies and learn from
the methods released by the linguistic turn and its emphasis on texts no
matter how circumscribed that emphasis turns out to be. Moreover, cultural
studies has opened up new fields of enquiry particularly in the field of
popular culture and sociologists, even sociologists of education, which, after
all is intimately bound up with culture, need to engage with them. It is in this
spirit that I offer this sortie into the terrain of pop and rock music.
The subject of this paper is the way in which schooling, teachers and
teacher/pupil relations are, or more accurately have been, represented in pop
and rock songs.
Sample
The sample drawn for analysis is best described as a theoretical sample.
Such is the volume of pop and rock songs produced during the period
beginning with the advent of rock and roll in the fifties that a representative
sample would be difficult to draw even if the total population, as here, is
restricted to Anglo-American pop between the 50s and early 90s. The fact that
only a small fraction of pop music produced annually enters public
consciousness by appearing in the charts and thereby gains crucial exposure
on the radio and television also makes knowledge of the entire population
hard to attain. The history of pop is littered with records whose release was
barely, if at all, registered by anyone outside the circle of those who produced
them. Thus any sample must inevitably confront the issue of its lack of representativeness. The sample drawn here is based on the compilation of
British Hit Singles (Gambaccini Rice et al 1993). This records every single that
entered the British pop charts from 1952 to 1992 which was searched for titles
containing key words like school, teacher and education.
The such hits are not numerous. Out of 17,296 hits only five titles
contained the word 'school'. Even so this sample remains far from
representative in any statistical sense as the representations sought do not
always align themselves neatly with the titles of the records. There have been
in the corresponding period 47 hits associated with football. Numerically,
schooling as a subject of pop hits is roughly equivalent in popularity to songs
about boxing (Gambaccini Rice et al 1993:421) Slightly more songs enter the
sample if album tracks that did not become hits are included. This latter
deficiency has been partly made up from my own extensive memories of pop
songs and by searches on the World Wide Web of rock stars' home pages,
databases of lyrics and the catalogues of record stores.
The text
If the issue of the sample is not problematic enough the question of what
constitutes the text, the unit of analysis, also compounds the difficulties
associated with this kind of research. As Frith points out (Frith 1983:14,
sociologists who have studied pop in the past have tended to analyze song
lyrics whereas the impact of pop on its listeners and the meanings it produces
flow from the overall sound and rhythm of a song. In this process the lyrics
may play a relatively subordinate role.
As the representations discussed here come from a number of different
pop genres it is only feasible to take the lyrics as the main element of the texts.
This would be an undoubted weakness if the aim of this paper was to
produce a definitive reading of the songs sampled. However this would be a
vain pursuit because these songs have no single meaning fixed forever in
time. In addition there are no specific musicological features that pop songs
containing representations of schooling have in common which would permit
a musicological analysis. This is not to say, of course, that all the meanings
communicated by pop songs containing representations of schooling are
totally dependent upon its lyrics. It is the case, however, that the lyrics are the
only element of the songs that carry traces of representations of schooling and
thus the only way that such songs may be identified.
Since the onset of videos and their reproduction on television stations,
including MTV which is dedicated solely to that practice, this is no longer
true. The pop video has become a text in its own right (Longhurst 1995:174-185) combining lyrics and sound with vision. However, records are still being
produced and consumed by audiences without the presence of the video
which means that it would be invalid to subsume the musical text solely
under video. A further, and perhaps better, reason for ignoring videos is the
desirability of comparing like with like over time so that a rock song from the
50s might be set alongside one from the video age of the 90s.
Despite the problems associated with the approach, lyrics form the majority
of the data to be discussed. I was attracted to this topic partly through an
interest in hermeneutics which requires that attention be paid to the context
in which texts, in this instance the songs were recorded and reproduced.
Limitations of space prevent much attention being paid to context or to the
way audiences read the songs. Instead my focus will mainly be on the formal
structure of the language used. A lesser focus will be the intentionality, the
illocutionary force, of the songs' performers. Further attention could be paid
to the intentionality of the texts' authors (where the authors do not coincide
with the performers) but this seems an unnecessary level of analysis for the
purposes of this paper. Pop music is a large business and the perlocutionary
act, the act performed by saying/singing something is, if successful, the
acquisition of money in the form of profit.
Texts, representations and subjectivity
As was argued above, the lyrics of pop songs may be relatively
unimportant in the way they create meaning. The text of a pop song is
therefore a combination of its lyrics, rhythm and sound. As Frith points out,
this causes problems for cultural theorists as concepts like 'text' and
'representation' are derived from literary theory and in order to apply them,
music must be reduced, to songs and songs to words' (Frith 1983: 56).
Accepting that limitation, I want to ask here initially, not what do pop songs
about schooling mean but rather the wider question of whether pop songs can
represent anything at all. The position that holds that texts, of any sort, can
represent a reality external to them is of course that which is known in literary
theory as realism (Frith 1988:112). Analysts attached to the methods of
formalism in its structuralist manifestation deny that this mirroring function
is possible arguing instead that realism is an effect of language and that what
seems transparent is in fact opaque. Rather than reflect a pre-given reality
texts produce the means by which their readers can interpret their own
experiences and even do things in the world. In Lacanian theories they also
produce and fix subjectivities. Thus Bradby talks of the way that texts offer
positions for the speaking subject (Bradby 1990:343). The main consequence
of this position is that meaning is sought within texts themselves without
reference to the means of their production, the context in which they appear
or the meanings created in the act of reading by their readers.
Restricted by space and time I cannot in this paper engage in an analysis that
treats with a song's production, text and audience (Longhurst 1995:22-25).
What I shall attempt instead is not narratology as such but an analysis of the
songs as narrative fiction (Rimmon-Kenan 1983) and some consideration of
the context in which they were produced. How these songs were read and
what meanings were constructed from them, is unfortunately beyond the
scope of this paper.
In the beginning.
In the beginning there was rock 'n' roll and in the 50s Chuck Berry was
one of its most influential progenitors (Palmer 1996:31) (Macdonald 1995:70-
71). In addition, as Wicke has observed, 'the most intelligent and most
precisely observed lyrics in rock'n'roll have always come from him (Wicke
1990:46'. Commentaries on Berry all tend to share a realist perception that he
celebrated and represented the emerging teenage culture or that he evoked
the teenage experience (Wicke 1990:46, Paraire 1992:43). In rock and roll
songs, as in songs in other pop genres, references to schooling are few. One
well known exception was Jerry Lee Lewis' 'High School Confidential' but the
lyric is very under developed, there is no coherent narrative and the only
representation of school life is 'rockin', 'boppin' and 'shakin' at the High
School Hop. In this song Jerry Lee Lewis creates an exciting 'atmosphere' (Paraire 1992:11) by his vocal style and by pounding his piano.
The lyric is almost redundant. In Chuck Berry's songs, by way of contrast,
several references to schooling appear and compared to 'High School
Confidential', his songs 'School Days' and 'Sweet Little Sixteen' are veritable
disquisitions on schooling.
'School Days' takes the form of a day in the life or the diary of a pupil
chronicling all the events that occur after getting up and going to school. The
language used is typically that of the everyday (Middleton 1990:229) rooted
in the here and now of schooling. Berry, like most of the singers considered in
this paper, is male but the gender of the pupil is unspecified. However, the
frequent use of the pronoun 'you' suggests that the pupil is the writer of the
song and therefore male. On the other hand the use of 'you' also invites the
listener to adopt the subject position of the pupil and that could be taken by
anyone regardless of their gender.
'Ring, ring goes the bell' is the song's subtitle. The bell punctuates the
pupil's temporal experience of school in which one event remorselessly
follows another. Time markers in school, writes Adam, 'bind pupils and staff
into a common schedule within which their respective activities are
structured, paced, timed, sequenced and prioritized' (Adam 1995 : 61). Added
to this clock time in the song is personal time. Time experienced by the pupil.
Lessons on American history and Practical Math are followed by lunch. More
lessons follow until three o'clock when school is over. Time as a resource is a
prominent theme in the song. At lunch there may not even be time to eat
before lessons restart. Being distracted, pressured and harassed is
characteristic of the school experience represented. 'The guy behind you
won't leave you alone' and in the lunch room you are lucky if you can get a
seat. Back in class, more problems arise. This time from the teacher who does
not realise how mean she looks. Finally, at three you can lay down your
'burden' and escape.
Nevertheless, in spite of this catalogue of negative aspects of the school
day the general stance of the pupil's subject position is one of conformity. This
contrasts with that manufactured in the film 'Blackboard Jungle'. This film,
released in 1955, is a tale of inner-city schooling in which delinquency was
equated with rock 'n' roll by featuring Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock'.
Several accounts suggest that the film did not reflect a real relation but
instead constructed one (Palmer 1996) . There is no rebellion in 'School Days'.
Lessons are studied hard, fingers are worked right down to the bone, the
pupil hopes to pass. The tension between this aspiration and the 'burden' is
palpable but the song has not yet ended and its resolution awaits in the 'juke
joint' where frustrated by the day's events, 'you've gotta hear something that's
really hot'. Conformity then turns out to be less than total as, 'all day long
you've been wanting to dance' and 'with the one you love your making
romance'. This sets up a binary opposition between school where desires to
dance and make romance are repressed and leisure sited in the 'juke joint'
where those desired can be realised.
The linear narrative ends at an instrumental break which is followed by a
repetition of the chorus. This is highly significant as it signifies the separation
of schoolwork and leisure and the lyric, in an extraordinarily clever reflexive
move, refers to the way that the music is felt. Not content with repeating the
line twice in the chorus, Berry hammers it home in the song's final lines:
the beat of the drums loud and cold
rock, rock, rock 'n' roll
the feeling is there body and soul
Against the school that participates in, 'the modern world of purposively
rational labour, consumption and domination', as Habermas (Habermas 1990 :
101) puts it, is counter posed the figure of Dionysus, in whom feeling
dominates reason. This binary is set in the context of the music itself which is
all the time providing the means for that feeling to be communicated.
Although, the overt message is conformist the sub-text is subversive and at
the same moment as reflecting the school/leisure opposition Berry, through
the music, provides the means for leisure's dominance.
Among other performers Chuck Berry was also creating a vocabulary of
teenage leisure, a route map, by means of which teenagers could make sense
of the social practices of the newly constructed category of teenager. This is
evident in 'Sweet Little Sixteen' which has been subjected to an extended
critical analysis by Wicke who observes in it, the same separation between
work or schoolwork and leisure as in 'School Days'. Teenage leisure, a
phenomenon of the 50s, is explained by Wicke in the following:
Thus, for these teenagers leisure became an alternative world to that of school and the parental home; their daily lives swung between these poles. This contradictory existence also formed the background experience for rock 'n' roll, formed a basic pattern which returned time and again in its lyrics.
Referring to the Berry song Wicke (1990 : 34) wrote:
The contrast between school and leisure expressed in 'School Day' defined a genuine experience quite commonly observable in the self-awareness of adolescents, but an experience which achieved an additional dimension in the American high schools of the fifties. It was this experience which began to reflect the gaping inner contradictions of a capitalist lifestyle. The central significance which rock 'n' roll had for high school students was linked to the fact that in rock 'n' roll they could establish and enjoy the meaning and values of their concept of leisure. Their relationship with music exerted a decisive influence on rock 'n' roll. Their everyday problems determined its content.
In his reading of 'Sweet Little Sixteen' Wicke sees in it the same conformity to school as is present in 'School Day':
In 'Sweet Little Sixteen', the enthusiasm for rock 'n' roll of a sixteen-year old girl begging her parents to be allowed to go out is contrasted with the role which she must and does play again the next morning namely that of the 'sweet-little-sixteen-year-old' at the school desk. This song rests completely and utterly on the basis of traditional behaviour. Chuck Berry's 'Sweet Little Sixteen' .is not protesting or even rebelling against the need to ask permission before she goes out. She abides by the norms of the family home and begs for her little piece of freedom; cleverly using the influence a daughter has on her father so that he may defend her from motherly strictness. But then the most important thing to her is to get dressed up in lipstick and high-heeled shoes, the outward signs of being grown-up, which through and through fits with a conventional understanding of her role. And the next morning she will be the 'sweet-little-sixteen-year-old' again, doing her best in high school. This song grasps the inner connection of the contrast between leisure and school. Only the final acceptance of the norms of family, home and school make possible the leisure world which has arisen as an alternative to these, but which in its function is not nearly as alternative as it was thought. It simply provides a context in which the behaviour models which have been raised to the status of norms are made acceptable to young people so that ultimately these can also be adopted.
(Wicke 1990:47)
According to the English Jazz Musician and artist, George
Melly, 'Rock,
initially at any rate, was a contemporary incitement to mindless fucking and
arbitrary vandalism' (Melly 1972). That may well have been the case but it is a
long way from Wicke's perception of this instance of rock.
While Wicke is right to emphasize sweet little sixteen's conformity and
the strict separation of schoolwork and leisure he misses another, somewhat
subversive aspect to the song. 'They're really rockin' in Boston and Pittsburgh
Pa, deep in the heart of Texas etc.' suggests that Sweet Little Sixteen is a
universal American teenage girl with whom all the 'cats' want to dance. But
who is giving her description and telling her story? Clues include the fact that
she has 'about half a million' autographs and her wall is covered in pictures
which she gets 'one by one'. She is, in other words, that relatively new
phenomenon the teenage fan.
When asking to go out, she tells her mother, 'it's such a sight to see
somebody steal the show'. Could that somebody from whom she gets
autographs and pictures be no other than Berry himself, the authorial and
narrator's voice, the star of the show. From his lascivious phrasing of the line
'tight dresses and lipstick, she's sporting high heeled shoes' this explanation
gains added plausibility. So while appearing conformist with regard to school
the black Berry who experienced repeated acts of white exclusion is
subverting white, racist America through its teenage daughters'
sexuality.
Chuck Berry's commitment to conformity to the school route was not
however total, as the eponymous 'Johnny B. Goode' demonstrates. His hero
could not read or write so well 'but he could play a guitar like ringing a bell'
and was well on his way to stardom without the benefit of education. In Sam
Cooke's 1960 hit, 'Wonderful World' the binary is not school knowledge
versus rock but school knowledge versus love. The lyric to Cooke's song
adopted a mark scheme, a device also used in the Cliff Richard song 'D in
Love', to show how the narrator was failing in school. 'Don't know much
about History', 'don't know what a slide rule is for' sings Cooke whose
narrator perceives that he is not going to be an 'A' student. None of this
matters as long as the girl he loves to whom the song is addressed loves him
too in which case the world will be wonderful.
In the Cliff Richard song, hints of social class may be detected in its
opposition of the female 'swot' who gets 'A' in Biology but her lower
achieving, hence probably working class, male boyfriend, awards her a 'D' in
the subject of love in which he, an expert, offers to give her more practice and
who recommends, 'lots and lots and lots of homework with me'. The song is
full of humour and irony and a sense of mild critique as it debunks the grades
and sets up the opposition between school subjects and really useful
knowledge like how to achieve high marks for 'kissin' and 'huggin'.
Nevertheless, it captures the social process of evaluation that is present in all
social encounters and relations. What seems absurd is the application of
grades in this context. It is interesting to note that in 'My Perfect Cousin' a hit
in 1980 for the Irish, new Wave Band, 'The Undertones' the swot was still
being despised, this time for his prowess in 'maths, physics and bionics'.
The Critics: Schooling Opposed
As Rock 'n' roll's golden age passed and the youth rebellion it
accompanied faded. In the late 50s pop music became less raw and more
acceptable to mainstream, white audiences. Acts like the Coasters, whose
songs were written by Leiber and Stoller, sang songs with teen oriented lyrics
with a slightly satirical edge. Among these was their 1959 hit 'Charlie Brown'
in which Charlie played the 'clown' and performed pranks like filling the
auditorium with smoke. When he walked in the classroom cool and slow and
called the English teacher by the name of Daddyo these acts were performed
within a context of acts that the narrator's voice says would lead to
retribution. Charlie Brown's voice exclaims that he is being picked upon The
narrator's voice in this song homodiegetic (Rimmon-Kenan 1983). That is the
narrator appears to be involved in the events described. The narratee, the one
addressed by the narrator, Charlie Brown, is less plausible and less reliable
due to his position in relation to the narrator and so he is not believed. Charlie
Brown's transgressions were small beer compared to what was to follow.
In 1967 the Beatles' album 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'
was released in a political and social context that differed from 1959 in almost
every way imaginable. On that album the song, 'Getting Better' contains some
references to school attributed by Macdonald to John Lennon although the
song itself is credited to Lennon and McCartney and the lead vocal was
McCartney's. 'I used to get mad at my school, the teachers that taught me
weren't cool, they are holding me down, turning me round, filling me up with
your rules' (Macdonald 1995 :192). There was little of Berry's subtlety in this
articulation of many youths' negative experience of schooling. This was also a
paradigmatically realist text in that the line appears to be an authentic
representation of the narrator's experience. Against the optimism of the
chorus' 'you've got to admit it's getting better' there is counter posed the
resignation and skepticism of 'it can't get much worse'. Lennon returned again
to the theme of school in the bitter lyric of 'Working Class Hero' sung folk
style, hence giving the lyric more authenticity, accompanied only by an
acoustic guitar.
As soon as your borne they make you feel small
by giving you no time instead of it all
til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
a working class hero is something to be
a working class hero is something to be
they hurt you at home and they hit you at school
they hate you if your clever and they despise a fool
til your so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
a working class hero is something to be
a working class hero is something to be
Lennon's attitude to authority has often been explained by reference to
his unhappy childhood and to his problems in school (Norman 1981).
Something similar has also been said of Bruce Springsteen (Marsh 1987:90)
whose own schooling ended prematurely. In 'No Surrender' his lyric appears
to be autobiographical. This chronicler of post-industrial America with a
sound out of Phil Spector sang, 'well we busted out of class, had to get away
from those fools. We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever
learned in school'. The reliability of this statement is not at issue. What is
more interesting about it is the possibility that pupils may learn something
from three minute records.
In 1972 eschewing the realism of Lennon and Springsteen, Alice Cooper
achieved a number one hit with the song 'School's Out'. Thereafter, according
to the sleeve notes on the album 'The Beast of Alice Cooper', it established
itself as 'the ultimate anti-authority song for teenagers'.
Cooper's genre was Detroit hard rock and his stage act made a transition
from Glam and androgyny to Horror complete with live snakes and a
working guillotine (Palmer 1996:186). His ghoulish antics made it difficult to
take Alice Cooper's anti-school stance seriously but like other performers in
the metal genre who employed similar props the consumers expressed their
approval at the cash till. 'School's Out' was probably the most successful, in
sales terms, of all the songs considered in this sample. Popular culture has to
be taken seriously in its entirety just because it is popular and to favour
Lennon or Springsteen as more serious and more authentic than Alice Cooper
is to miss the point that what makes popular culture popular is simply its
popularity.
Unlike the lyrics of Lennon and Springsteen that have been discussed
here, the lyric of Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' is not by McCabe's criteria a
realist text (McCabe 1992). This is because the narrative tells us at one point
that,
School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces
Read literally, there could be no return to a school that had been 'blown to
pieces'. A reading supported by the final line of the song, 'School's out
completely'. Nevertheless, in the song's final verse it is suggested that this
might not be the case in the lines:
Out for summer
Out till fall
We might not go back at all
The 'might' suggests a degree of choice that the previous lines have established does not exist. It also undermines a realist reading that constructs the narrator as a school leaver relieved to be leaving school characterised by pencils, books and 'teacher's dirty looks'.
Contradiction is not entirely unexpected in a song whose processes of
production are exposed in the lines:
Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes
After the exploitation of the polysemic properties of the words 'class' and
'principles' this admission comes as something of a let down but it is
consistent with the lyric's lack of realism.
Perhaps it was this perception of the song as relatively meaningless fun
that caused it to pass unnoticed by the media. Not so the other best known
anti-school rock song, 'Another Brick in The Wall (Part 2)' a hit for Pink Floyd
in 1979. By this time, the context had changed considerably from when
'School's Out' was recorded and schooling had just been placed at the centre
of a national political debate where it still remains seventeen years on. A
Conservative government with a New Right agenda for education had just
been elected and the teacher unions were engaged in industrial action (Johnson 1991). One of the record's novelties was its use of children
from St Winifred's School choir to sing in a Cockney accent the memorable
hook, 'We don't need no education', the final word sounding like 'edukashun'.
If that were not enough to confirm the worst suspicions of those who thought
educational standards had never been lower, the hook used a double negative
and teachers were exhorted to' 'leave them kids alone'. This, its
ungrammatical construction aside, was little more than child centred
educators like A. S. Neill had been saying for years. Similarly, the sentiment,
'We don't need no thought control' was not all that far away from what
contemporary theorists' like Althusser were saying about schooling under
capitalism. The appeal for, 'No dark sarcasm in the classroom' was mild
compared to Lennon's representation of teacher behaviour and resonates
more with Chuck Berry's 'mean' looking teacher. In the song's chorus:
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
The brick metaphor can be read as a reference to a bureaucratically
organized schooling that produces uniform citizens to take their place in the
labour market/system of social relations. As a description of English
education with its much vaunted variety it is rather inaccurate but it is, after
all, how for many pupils the way the school system is experienced.
Paradoxically the growth of central regulation has made that experience more
likely now than when the song was first released.
Seen as a realist critique of schooling in South Africa, the song was
banned. Frith says of Pink Floyd, 'they were not saying anything significant
about the school system; they were providing school children with a funny,
powerful playground chant... (Frith 1983:38). In my experience not a few
teachers were also happy to chant the song nevertheless the question arises of
how Frith knows that this is the correct reading of the song or that this was
the illocutionary force of their speech act?. Skepticism about representation
can lead, as in this case to some fairly untenable conclusions, as Ricoeur
proclaims, 'discourse cannot fail to be about something' (Ricoeur 1991:148)
The song's meaning became further complicated by a video showing
hammers marching across a landscape and by the subsequent use of the song
in the film 'The Wall' which was directed by Alan Parker and appeared in
1982. But staying with the lyric, whether or not it was 'significant' it seems
indisputable that the song says something about schooling and something
critical at that. As the song ends with some fine guitar work a voice with a
Scots accent speaks the following lines:
Wrong, Do it again!
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?
You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!
The voice is unmistakeably that of a teacher but the comic irony tends to
undermine the force of the song's lyric as critique. It is a joke after all or is
it?
The ironising stance of the Pet Shop boys is but one marker of their
occupation of a different genre to Pink Floyd. Like the Lennon songs their 'It's
a Sin' gives the appearance of authenticity of the narrator/star giving voice to
personal experience. An effect heightened by the knowledge that the star is
gay and the schooling he experienced was controlled by the Catholic Church
which has something of a reputation for the inculcation of guilt in the young
that experience its socialising practices.
At school they taught me how to be
so pure in thought and word and deed
They didn't quite succeed
Sexuality and Schooling
In as much as rock texts are about leisure they are about leisure pursuits,
mainly dancing and sex (Shepherd 1991:182) and its exponents have rarely
sought to hide this either in their lyrics and performances or in their personal
lives as rock stars. Both Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis had a sexual interest
in schoolgirls. Berry went to gaol for transporting a minor across a state line
and Lewis married his thirteen year old cousin to the accompaniment of the
howls of press protest when he toured Britain. Such contextual material is
always mobilised in the process of interpretation and it is hard to read their
songs without that knowledge influencing the reading. Sex and romance,
viewed overwhelmingly from a male heterosexual perspective, constitute the
principal themes of pop and they also, not surprisingly, enter into
representations of schooling. This occurs in two ways. Firstly pop songs deal
with boy and girl relationships and secondly with teacher pupil relationships.
Two hit songs by the highly successful 60s beat group the Hollies, exemplify
the first category. The steel drums on 'Carrie Anne" a hit in 1967 gave it a
Carribbean flavour but the lyric was recognisably Anglo-American. The
narrative is organized around a games metaphor. It starts, 'When we were at
school our games were simple, I played a janitor you played a monitor'.
'Monitor' was a slightly archaic term even in the 60s and geographical location
of 'janitor' was more New York than the Manchester the group originated
from. The final line of the school based part of the relationship is, 'Then you
played with older boys and prefects what's the attraction in what their
doing?'. 'Prefects', 'janitors' and 'monitors' are all highly evocative of school
but bewilderment of the narrator at Carrie Anne's preference for 'older boys
and prefects' encapsulates so well male teenage angst unable to grasp the
meaning of status hierarchies and differential maturation rates.
The mood of 'Jennifer Eccles' is much lighter and it is modelled on a
children's playground game. The song begins:
White chalk written on red brick
our love told in a heart
it's there drawn in the playground
love, kiss, hate or adore.
Again the evocation of a red brick and thus working class school
complete with playground is highly accomplished. In American songs, the
playground gets transposed into the schoolyard such as Paul Simon's 'Me and
Julio Down by the Schoolyard' and sometimes in English songs too as in Cat
Stevens' '(Remember the Days of the) old School Yard'. Playground or
schoolyard, the reference as in the Stevens' song is a point of departure for
nostalgic reminiscence of childhood and youth.
In 'Jennifer Eccles' there is no nostalgia as the narrator is a child. Hence
the realism of the chorus which is composed of a chant like rendering of, 'I
love Jennifer Eccles I know that she loves me' accompanied by the sound of a
wolf whistle. Not even that can dispel the air of innocence and infantilism
that pervades the song. The chalk message in the playground is the only
suggestion that the school is the site of romance. The often used, heavily
gendered, figure, 'I used to carry her satchels, she used to walk by side'
signifies the space where the romance is conducted. A similar figure is used
by Buddy Holly when he sang, 'the walks to school still make me sad' in his
1961 hit, 'What to do'.
The Hollies song ends with the narrator learning, 'one Monday morning'
he has made the grade, a reference to the eleven plus examination, and his
hope that she has done the same and 'will follow me there' to the grammar
school. The transition from primary to secondary school is for many pupils a
cause of apprehension and the fear of losing friends by them going to other
schools is a common one and to have expressed this so succinctly is a tribute
to the writing skills of Clarke and Nash.
Teacher and pupil sex
These songs were neutral about the processes of schooling. They also
maintained the separation of schooling from leisure and hence sex except in
the infantalised world of 'Jennifer Eccles'. 'Teacher's Pet' was somewhat
different in that the boundaries between work and leisure became blurred. 'I
wanna be homad diplomad long after school is through' runs the chorus. The
phrase, 'teacher's pet' recurs in the song 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' a hit for
the reggae-rock band, The Police in 1980. This song contains the most explicit
treatment of teacher pupil sexual relations to date in any pop song. Two
voices are present in the lyric, that of the narrator and that of the young male
teacher whose voice is heard in the chorus:
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me.
The object of a schoolgirl's desire, the teacher experiences,
Temptation, frustration
So bad it makes him cry'
The ambiguity of the next line leaves open the question of whether the relationship progresses,
Wet bus stop, she's waiting
His car is warm and dry
Does she enter the car or is the second line simply an observation that contrasts the the respective situations of the schoolgirl and the teacher? The ambiguity is maintained in the final verse which contains the lines,
Strong words in the staffroom
The accusations fly
It's no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabakov.
Musically, intertextuality, the reference to other texts is very common in
pop songs (Frith 1983:162). Intertextuality in the lyrics is much less so but the
reference here to 'Lolita' does nothing to dispell the narrative's ambiguity.
Instead, its illocutionary force is to demonstrate that The Police were
intellectually a cut above their rivals in the music business.
Once again, no critique of schooling is mounted but in this song the
boundaries between schoolwork and sex, that in all the other songs are
carefully noted, are transgressed as are the boundaries between pupils and
teachers and those of age - 'This girl is half his age'.
Conclusion
Rock and pop music are essentially the music of youth. Since the 1950s
each subsequent generation of youth in the UK has made the transition from
childhood to adulthood accompanied by a soundtrack. Once it was more or
less unique to that generation. Now, like all texts in the era of mechanical
reproduction, the re-release of a song means that it becomes available to
another generation of youth who produce their own reading of it regardless
of its author's intentions or the context in which it was located. As so much of
the time of modern western youth is spent in compulsory schooling it is
perhaps at first surprising to realise that schooling is represented so rarely in
rock and pop. Initially the youth market in which records were sold in the 50s
was constituted by newly affluent youth who were in employment. Songs
about schooling were hardly likely to appeal to them. More significant as an
explanation for the relative absence of such songs, as I have argued in this
paper, is the binary opposition between school and leisure an opposition that
not only was represented in the songs but in part constructed by them also.
This opposition also partly accounts for the conformist nature of the subject
positions created in the songs. After school, whether it was at three o'clock, or
in the vacation or on leaving school altogether there was always the
alternative of leisure. An imaginary world of dancing and heterosexual sex.
Even when the lyric constructed oppositional subjectivities, rebels who would
bust out of class, the only alternative on offer was to join a rock band and seek
salvation in that same imaginary world of leisure. That is not to play down
the significance of the historical tendency noted here for pop lyrics to become
more critical of schooling or to raise uncomfortable issues like sexual relations
between teachers and pupils. This is a shift related in turn to a decline in
respect for former authority figures and institutions and a corresponding
move towards individualism.
Songs referred to
High School Confidential Jerry Lee Lewis
School Days Chuck Berry
Sweet Little Sixteen Chuck Berry
Endless Summer Beach Boys
Surfin' USA Beach Boys
Be True to Your School Beach Boys
Cypress Avenue Van Morrison
Its Getting Better Beatles
No Surrender Springsteen
Going Back Byrds
The Wall Pink Floyd
Eton Rifles? Jam
Boomtown Rats 'I don't like Mondays'
Teacher's Pet
Don't stand too close to me Sting
Schools Out Alice Cooper
Remember the Days in the old school yard Cat Stevens
D in Love Cliff Richard
Wonderful World (don't know much about history etc) Sam Cooke
Good Morning Little Schoolgirl The Yardbirds.
References
Adam, B. (1995) Timewatch. Cambridge, Polity.Dr Kevin J. Brehony Dept of Education Studies and Management, The University of Reading Bulmershe Court Reading RG6 1HY. k.j.brehony@rdg.ac.uk
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