Tennessee Jed

The Grateful Dead always had a folkie/Americana aspect, but in the early 1970s they leaned hard into country music, and it suited them. I found this song to be pretty cringe as a teenaged Deadhead in New York City, but it grew on me.

The tune is named for a 1940s radio Western, which sounds like it could have been the basis for Woody’s Roundup in Toy Story 2. For all I know, Robert Hunter had never been within a thousand miles of Tennessee when he wrote the lyrics, but they work okay if you don’t think about them too hard.

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Let’s ditch “The Star-Spangled Banner” and make “Lean On Me” our national anthem instead

Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire. The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of the song belittles the British soldiers as “hireling and slave.”

Is the SSB racist? Maybe, but that isn’t the main reason to ditch it as our anthem. For me, the big issue is that the SSB is a bad song: an awkward and unsingable melody with incomprehensible lyrics. Also, the War of 1812 is a weird hook to hang our national identity on. It’s stirring to imagine America overcoming tremendous odds against a better-armed attacker, I guess, but when was the last time you could accurately describe us this way? Probably 1812? Now it’s just tone-deaf. Another problem is that both the music and lyrics sound more like the cultural heritage of our opponents in that war, the British, because it’s a British melody using archaic British phrases.

So how about we make America’s national anthem sound more like, you know, America? Jody Rosen considers various alternatives to the SSB before arriving at the only correct answer: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. I learned the song as a kid from Club Nouveau’s synth-heavy version, but nothing compares to the original recording:

Now we’re talking: the song is unpretentious, communitarian, easy to sing but with room for bluesy embellishment, and gently but insistently funky. This is a song that I would sing with pride, and it represents a vision of a national community that I would want to be a part of.

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The racial politics of music education

In the face of ongoing protests against police brutality in the US, I’m seeing some music educators fretting about the relevance of their work. I believe that Eurocentric music education can validate and perpetuate white supremacy, and that our responsibility is to dismantle it. Here’s an excerpt of my dissertation in progress. I hope you find it useful or thought-provoking.

Ben Shapiro - rap isn't music

Theoretical Framework: Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is a form of critical theory that views social and political issues through the frame of race (Crenshaw, et al., 1996). CRT is premised on two central beliefs: that race is socially constructed, and that racism is deeply and broadly enmeshed within American society. “In research, the use of CRT methodology means that the researcher foregrounds race and racism in all aspects of the research process; challenges the traditional research paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the experiences of people of color; and offers transformative solutions to racial, gender, and class subordination in our societal and institutional structures” (Creswell, 2007, p. 28). The story of American popular music is inextricable from its racial conflicts, and nowhere are these conflicts more acute than in hip-hop. Continue reading

Lil Nas X and the racial politics of country music

As of this writing, the biggest song in America is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. It might also be the most interesting pop song of the 21st century so far.

“Old Town Road” defies genre categorization. Like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” it sits entangled in a vast musical rhizome. Lil Nas X calls it country-trap. It’s definitely not a rap song–Lil Nas X sings throughout, with a clear country twang. The beat sounds like hip-hop, but then, the beat of almost every slow or medium-tempo pop song sounds like hip-hop right now. The banjo suggests country, but as we’ll discuss below, that suggestion was unintended by the track’s producer. There’s a lot going on here! Before we take a look at its broader cultural significance, then, let’s take a close look at the musical details of “Old Town Road.”

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Mr Ethan, I want to hear you rap

I’m currently working with Techrow Fund to develop an afterschool music technology program called The Producer Club. We’re doing the pilot program at New Design Middle School in Harlem with a group each of sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders. Techrow had approached me to teach, but I suggested that, rather than hiring a middle-aged white dad, they should bring in some young hip-hop artists. So the instructors for the pilot are two producer/emcees named Brandon Bennett and Roman Britton, who I met through CORE Music NYC. You can read more about them and hear their music in this study of a CORE cypher. My role in the pilot is to support them, write lesson plans, and do other admin.

Brandon Bennett and Roman Britton, hip-hop educators

The Producer Club’s goal is to teach music technology, audio production, songwriting, beatmaking, and creative collaboration using a project-based approach. The participants will create a mixtape of original songs, beats and skits and release it on SoundCloud and other streaming platforms. In the course of creating their tracks, the kids will learn about microphones, MIDI, synthesizers, audio manipulation, and mixing. We’re dividing each group into two teams: Artists and Beatmakers. Halfway through the program, the teams will switch, so every participant will experience both roles.

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Separating children from their parents at the border is morally wrong

Call your representatives, especially if they’re Republicans. Demand that this stop. “But what about Obama?” He’s not the president anymore. “But what about the laws?” This isn’t a law, it’s a policy instituted very recently, which can be reversed in an instant by Sessions or Trump. “But what about illegal immigration?” No harm done by illegal immigration can possibly outweigh the harm we’re doing to these kids and their parents. “But what about the Democrats?” I don’t want to hear any ignorant both-sides-ism. We are all morally culpable, but the people who control all three branches of the federal government are the most culpable. Call them.

Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it

A gentleman named Myron Magnet, whose muttonchop sideburns have to be seen to be believed, has this to say:

What is keeping down American blacks today is not racism, oppression, or lack of opportunity. That’s over. Black Americans are now free. What holds them back is the ideology of “authentic blackness”—a black identity rooted in the urban underclass culture of hatred of authority (especially of the police, the teacher, and the boss), indifference to learning, misogyny, sex stripped of love or commitment, hustling, resentment, drug trafficking and using, tolerance of lawbreaking, and rage, rage, rage, the hallmark of keeping it real. That’s the message rap hammers home constantly with its mind-numbing rhythm.

I have heard this idea voiced by many conservatives. There are many different ways to demonstrate that racism is alive and well, and that black people who resent authority are well motivated. The clearest proof is America’s horrifying prison system.

Pager 2007 p 21
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This Is America

If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog, then by now you’ve probably seen the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” If you haven’t seen it, watch now. Be warned that it’s upsetting.

Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, is best known as a comedian, a writer, and an actor. He’s an intelligent and creative guy, but he’s wasn’t a likely candidate to make the most political music video of the decade. I’m not going to write about the video, because plenty of other people who know more about it have done so already. Instead, I want to talk about the song itself, which is fascinating in its own right. It was produced by Glover and Ludwig Göransson, who, aside from his work with Childish Gambino, is mostly known for scoring films and TV shows (including Community, which is how he met Glover.)

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Teaching whiteness in music class

Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem.

Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post.

Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton, 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge. Meanwhile, musicians with a hip-hop background find their skills and knowledge to be of little value to institutional gatekeepers. Kendrick Lamar is a good enough musician to merit a Pulitzer Prize, but he would not be accepted into most undergraduate music education programs (Kruse, 2018).

Biz

Why is it so important that music education embrace hip-hop when students are already immersed in it outside of school? There are three main reasons. First, if music educators wish to foster students’ own musical creativity, then students must be free to create in the styles that are meaningful to them. Second, while many young people enjoy listening to hip-hop, few know how to produce it. Third, and most important, music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. The Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value. While the white mainstream loves hip-hop, America showers the people who created it with contempt (Perry, 2004, p. 27), and sometimes violence. By affording Afrodiasporic musics the respect they deserve, we will teach students to similarly value the creators of those musics.  Continue reading