In an interesting twist on more traditional arts education, Bruce Springsteen sidekick ”Little Steven” Van Zandt is pushing for new emphasis on the classics in middle and high school — that is, classic rock ‘n’ roll. Van Zandt’s foundation is announcing a new curriculum resource today. Says the USA Today article:
The plan is to distribute a 40-chapter curriculum, including teachers’ guide, lesson plans, DVDs, CDs and Web-based resources, free, beginning with the 2008-09 academic year, to the nation’s 30,000 or so middle and high schools.
Van Zandt is concerned that classic rock ‘n’ roll is less relevant and resonant with with a new generation of teens, which is partly why he’s pushing the curriculum. Says he:
”We’re trying to reach everybody, whether a musician, a rock ‘n’ roll fan or not. We’re going to make a case that this art form is so interesting that you will be absolutely compelled to listen to it, and maybe even learn how to play it.”
It’s official: I’m middle-aged.
In my first theatre job, my colleagues and I used to drive our condescending artistic director crazy by drawing pseudo-academic parallels between Chekov and Gilligan’s Island. It wasn’t hard to do. We just started with the concept of American society in microcosm and ran with it.
Now of course I realize that our theories on Schwartzian dramatic constructs as reflections of socio-economic stratification in post-cold war/pre-sexual revolution America were far ahead of their time.
1960’s TV Forever!
This does not surprise me. Good rock music is far more musically complex than people give it credit as being, and once this is pointed out it’s easy to tell the three-chord Johnnies for what they are. There is an entire hierarchy and genealogy of rock that is fascinating both culturally and musically.
And it can lead to more. My now-16-y-o son picked up an electric guitar at age 10 at a garage sale and started fooling around with it because he thought rock music was cool, and then discovered that he had quite a bit of musical talent that was not evident in the school-curriculum-required band class. Now he has taught himself to play 3 instruments, is taking music theory in school and is starting to write his own stuff. No, he will never be interested in classical music, but who says there can’t be musicality in rock as well?