Recently, I was in my car, scanning radio stations in the D.C. area, looking for anything at all that was 1) in English and 2) didn't necessitate the bleeping of any words starting with "n," and I came across a classic rock station playing "A Day in the Life." Good enough, I thought. I performed that song with my high school marching band, so I'm even more familiar with it than I am with other Beatles songs. Out of habit I start to sing along. My boyfriend, who was in the passenger seat, asked, "What's this song called?" I told him. He said, "This is the Beatles? I've never heard it."
Yes, he's never heard "A Day in the Life." Meanwhile, my own mother tells me regularly that she knows how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I tried not to make a big deal out of it, since I know he's not the biggest music aficionado. But seriously? How does anyone who has ever owned a radio, or had parents with a record player, not know one of the most famous songs from one of the most famous rock albums of all time? I thought it was bad enough when my best friend said he'd never heard "Stairway to Heaven." (He immediately regretted the admission, since my mom was within earshot.)
Do I just hang out with musically challenged people? Are they in the minority? Or does my generation truly not have any concept of musical history? It got me thinking about my own musical education, and I realized the only real source I had growing up was my parents, and they might be disproportionately obsessed with their own generation's culture. My dad can tell you what guitar Eric Clapton is playing on any given song with any band he ever played with, and I've never seen him as proud of me as he was when I snagged his Allman Brothers t-shirt and started wearing it to school.
So maybe I got lucky. But what about everyone else? My American history class ran out of time at the end of the semester, so we didn't even get to the Cuban Missile Crisis, let alone Woodstock. Even playing trumpet in band, I was never taught about Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong. Our teacher made us attend a performance by Maynard Ferguson, but at the time I had no appreciation for it, probably because I had no background.
Having in the past few years discovered a great interest in indie music, I started writing about it. I got a CD few reviews in the newspaper where I was a copy editor, and last month I started writing about music for a national news outlet. But an appreciation music is not an understanding of music. A foundation in the Beatles and Ten Years After is a good start, but I had never heard a Smiths song until a few months ago. I have huge gaps even in my own musical education, and my writing suffers because of it. You have to have points of reference -- it's like hearing a cover of a song before the original.
So I've decided to remedy that. I've been looking for something to stimulate my brain since college, and this is it. I'll do short studies of prominent people and events in American culture as related to music, and I hope by the end to education other people as well as myself. As I'll be doing this mostly as a way to pass the time at work, I'll spend a lot of time with Wikipedia, but I'll supplement that information with whatever else I can find -- books, magazines, mp3s. Maybe I'll even learn to play guitar. Thanks for the inspiration, Jack Black.
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