Posted By BillHeise on November 2, 2009

20 years ago, when I first started teaching, I used to question my students about what sort of music they liked. And an overwhelming number of them said that they liked all of music. I found this hard to believe, and so I would question them. Do they know about opera? Did they like country music? Did they like rap? And through such questioning, I could get a sense of what sort of music that they like to listen to. Some like rap; others hate it. Some like country; others hate it.

But when I asked them the same question again, after ordering their priorities in music, they continued to tell me that they like all music. Maybe I like all of classical music, but they were not indifferent to listening to it. I reminded them that they actually didn’t listen (for instance) to classical music or to rap, but this did not change their answer. I found this fascinating.

The Varieties of Culture

There is more than one culture that my students identified with. If they were raised as a girl in the suburbs, you might have been raised listening to Britney Spears or Ashley Tisdale. If you are a rebel in the suburbs, you might listen to Insane in the Membrane. If you are from the inner city, you might be raised listening to Too $hort. If you were raised in the country, you may have listened to country music. There is no necessity to this, but by asking questions about my students’ individual experiences, I could make probable decisions about their approach to their life, and hence their approach to my class.

Four Songs

So, rather than taking their word for it, I asked them (voluntarily, of course) to bring in examples of the music they actually listen to. For my favorite songs that I learned about because my students brought in a CD are here. (I also got turned onto Beau Joques’s “Give Him Cornbread” this way).

The first is “Drop Kick Me Jesus”, a classic country song:

The second is by Ashley Tidale and is called “Not Like That”:

The third is by Cypress Hill and is entitled “Insane in the Membrane”:

And the piece de resistance, Too $hort’s…well I can’t tell you the title in polite company:

These songs tell me a lot about my students’ taste in music.

Hands-off My Privates

But this is not how my students look at music. People tend to adopt a hands-off policy about their music. Our taste in music is personal (they say). Therefore, it is partly a matter of taste which is impervious to, and outside the limits of, philosophical (or any other form) of inquiry. It is like the private language argument in philosophy. Others cannot see into the minds of others. This tends to turn up in my class in the expression: “You cannot know what I’m thinking.”

Of course, in my opinion, their position is ridiculous. My students may not know how much information to giving me when they tell me about their “infinite” tastes in music, but that does not deter me in the least from using my knowledge that they give me. Nor does it require me to use it as they see fit. It is, after all, public knowledge as soon as they express it. Once something is public, it ceases to be the property of the person who originally intended it.

Why Teachers Teach the Way They Do

By adopting this policy, grammar school teachers make sure that they secure their students’ independent selves as independent cells. This idea goes back a long way in philosophy: the idea that the individual is a self-contained entity who can make his own choices independent of the influence of others. My students tend to know this, if not unconscious level then on an unconscious level, and they tend to embrace music as an expression of their pure selves.

They are right to do so. They are still exploring the world, trying new things out. And as such, they do not like to be told of a boarding made so many decisions that have restricted their feeling that they can accomplish anything at any time.

Why My Students Offer Knowledge About Themselves

But over time, the notion that a student can accomplish anything they put their minds to will suffer serious setbacks unless they make some adjustments in their attitudes.

My students think that because they are in a writing class, and the writing classes don’t matter, they can retreat back into their own private world. After all, this is basically what we tell them in grammar school. You’re important. We want to know what you think. It’s all about you, you, you (which my students learn to hear as “Me. Me. Me”). If all you have to express is nothing more than yourself, which is being given to you by God, then what can I teach my students.

But writing is it the public expression of private thoughts. Moreover, it gives the extension of your thoughts out of the world private thoughts which only you can see into the public world, which is comprised of writers and readers. Readers have power over your expression. Maybe not ultimate power, but power nevertheless.

My students simply have not learned the difference between their private thoughts and learning to write in public for a public audience.

Listening To Bobby Dare

If one of my students tells me they like listening to Bobby Dare, I will think that they may cheat on a paper (no one thinks my class matters), but in the end they will only go so far outside of the boundaries. These students are most likely to not give me the cosmopolitan answer that they listen to everything. Such students know what they like. This causes them to be looked down upon by less provincial students. They want to shock me by their security in knowing what they like and what they don’t like.

Listening to Ashley

Just how much information I can get by listening to artists is somewhat astounding. Ashley Tisdale must think she’s pretty special. She says so, but she also says that “sometimes I’m insecure,” and that this is “something [she] can’t ignore,” as if that makes it okay to be so self-absorbed.

Fortunately, she’s accompanied everywhere by hordes of paparazzi who photograph her. Now I never heard of Ashley Tisdale, and so I cannot be accused being jealous of her fame, as she accuses other of being. I just think she’s a birdbrain idiot who is so wrapped up in her own experience that she doesn’t know (apparently) that she’s not just the girl next door. Nobody follows a girl next door round with cameras. [I suspect, based on the cheap red carpet set, that no one follows Ashley Tisdale around, either. It's simply a marketing ploy, but I’m going to let that go.]

So what that tells me is that a young girl who comes in my class and tells me that they like Ashley Tisdale is telling me that they’re somewhat sheltered, somewhat shy, and that they look to other, more famous people to fill the gaps in their own lives.

Listening To Cypress Hill

There is a pattern to listening habits of my students. Once they breakout of suburban culture, they’re likely to gravitate towards a group like Cypress Hill, who use words like “nigger” with impunity despite the fact that they are listed in Wikipedia as “the first Latino group to have platinum and multi-platinum albums, selling over 18 million albums worldwide” (Wikipedia).

If you listen to Cypress Hill, you probably want people to think that you’re a rebel against bourgeois, middle-class, white society. But there are limits to your rebellion. Declaring that you are “insane in the membrane” is not the same as actually being insane. So there’s always a divide between you and those people who actually go insane (like true artists like Van Gogh).

Listening To Too $hort

But the real rebel will go all the way into music by Too $hort, the author of the lyrics of “Let My Nuts Go,” “ I Wanna Fuck Your Sister,” “Shittin’ On Em,” and of course his lyric masterpiece which I have given you above (and folks, if you haven’t listened to it I recommend it again!).

If they like the Too $hort rap, they are probably from the inner city (kids from the suburbs don’t like the boldness of the song’s title, nor the outright sexism of the woman’s soliloquy at the end).

The Teleology of Rebellion

We suburbanites feel alienated. This causes some of us to go in search of nature that underlies our suburban existence. They are halfway measures in this quest. Some people go to clubs and wrapped themselves in fiction for a few hours. Others, like Too $hort, are considered to be “more authentic.” They are living it,” while the rest of are simply experiencing these experiences through the veil of fiction.

At the bottom is the notion that we are animals, and that we have alienated ourselves from our natural state. We are looking at the “other” to make up for our bourgeois, middle-class existence in “false consciousness.”

But that is not the only conclusion that we can reach here.

My Way Along Two Roads as They Diverge

Looking to people to fill up we ourselves cannot is the opposite of the autodidacticism and I was taught was the goal in school. I’ve never really abandoned that position, despite some very well-articulated arguments against the possibility of truly being autodidactic. I’ve done my best to be.

And when it comes to the classroom, my job as a teacher requires me to teach everyone, not just the liberals, and not just the conservatives. Everyone. So I back away from those questions into questions that yield me information but without causing anyone to quail in fear, as I did when I was in graduate school.

And the fact is that, despite my moral reservations about each of these songs, I never really listened to the lyrics as much as I listened to the music and rhythms beneath them. And I actually like each of these songs. Even Ashley Tisdale’s vapid effort. It seems to me that deciding you don’t like part of a song is not enough reason to throw out the whole song.

My students who do so are giving up a major part of their education. They are closing off avenues of inquiry before it’s time. And when they do so I still believe that they have an “infinite” taste for all sorts of music, they’re fooling themselves.

In my experience you’re better off keeping an open mind until you come to someone who’s gathered all the evidence. And since there is no person like that, I believe that the next best thing is to find a person who has the talent to try as many avenues towards the truth as is possible.

This is why I like Nina Hagen so much. It’s not that she’s reached the end, although it appears to her that she has. It is that she has the talent to explore further into the public space than others have the talent or desire to do. Sure, she looks ridiculous in her pajamas, but then that’s part of her charm. And she can sing.

The Self is Not an End Unto Itself

Nina Hagen thought all she had to was escape to the west and she would be free. But in the end, freedom was not enough.

The self is not an end unto itself. If it was, we would all be sociopaths. We need to think about ourselves in relation to others. As we grow older, we learn our limits, but we also increase our control over our immediate environment. Those students who most closely cling to their infinitude tend to be the most immature people in the class.

That does not cause me to attack them, or write them off as unteachable. People change over time, and they grow in the same say that teachers should change their apporaoch towards teaching the same subjects over time. What works in 3rd grade is not appropriate for a college student.

My job, as I saw it, was to open their minds as far as possible to new possibilities so that they did not close their minds off too soon and so weaken their chance for success after they got out of protective cocoon of college and went off into the (so-called) real world.

Categories: Personal, Philosophy, What I'm Listening to This Week
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