24 May 12:32
Punkademics, Up the nerds!
Back Patches and Elbow Patches Zack Furness From the introduction to Punkademics: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=436 The position being taken is not to be mistaken for attempted education or righteous accusation. -Operation Ivy, “Room Without a Window” I think the moment at which I realized I was actually turning into a college professor was not on the first day I taught a class in 1999, but when I was listening to an old Operation Ivy tape about a year later and found myself wanting to sit the band’s singer, Jesse Michaels, down to have a frank discussion. Specifically, I wanted to ask him why, in a song written to both illuminate the politics of ideology (“walls made of opinions through which we speak and never listen”) and express the need for open-mindedness and self-reflexivity, would he choose to intentionally denounce the educational function of his lyrics from the outset? Not being a complete idiot nor unfamiliar with the band, I obviously realized that the song “Room Without a Window” (quoted above) was penned by Michaels when he was in his late teens, which is around the time when years of schooling and top-down authority have unfortunately succeeded at the task of turning education – or at least the compulsory, state-sanctioned version – into something from which young people want to run; I imagine all the more so for the sizeable number of kids in the late ‘80s East Bay (California) punk scene whose parents, like Michaels’ dad, were college professors. But whether the lyric intentionally gestures in this direction or is self-consciously ironic is hardly the issue. Indeed, even if the first line just sounded(Continue reading)
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