The Music We Want

For elementary classes, I went to a Catholic school. Yes, ugly uniforms and dress-codes. We didn't have penguins teaching us, though. They were "regular" teachers, but some of them were sweet like the nun in the "Blues Brothers" movie. Some of them were sweet for real too.

Sometimes there were voiced concerns about the music we children listened to. Teachers wondered if there was an essence of sex, drugs, and violence in these songs and were they harmful to our young minds.

Of course, the answer to that was a resounding and unspoken "YES!" by us kids (after all, the songs wouldn't be any fun otherwise,) but it was our call and duty to deny the very presence of anything "unwholesome" in the music and that there were really some very basic and innocent interpretations to the lyrics.

Pleading for the innocence of some songs was not very easy. Ever try and convince a Catholic teacher that Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is not Satanic? Or that Huey Lewis and the News' "I Want a New Drug" is really a metaphor for something else? Or that when Billy Idol was singing "Dancing With Myself" he wasn't really... well...

In the end, the arguments were so strong (noisy, really) that they were simply dropped. I don't think the teachers were actually convinced of anything. I just think they knew a losing battle when they saw one. It was apparent that we were going to listen to what we wanted regardless of what was seen as impure. After all, the music the teachers listened to at our age wasn't that terribly innocent, as one bright kid pointed out.

Many of us grew up messed up, but if you want to blame the music, you just found yourself a whipping boy. No, we were messed up in our own individual and special ways and we used music to deal with some of that. More often that not, the "unwholesomeness" in music simply articulated what we were already feeling and it was good for us to know that we weren't alone with our feelings.