Unplugged 2 - Faking It for Making It - Authenticity in Today's Pop and Rock

About 6 months ago I happened on this article from The Faster Times while doing research and exploring for an 8th grade general music unit plan I was constructing based on composing with music software as a means of learning. The lesson I was constructing within the unit plan dealt with the blues genre - defining it, being able to identify and differentiate it from other genres, using its defining characteristics to create new, stylistically correct compositions, and noting its impact on western music and today's music.

As one of the homework assignments, the students used music-map , a free online program that organizes various artists in an organizer based on their similarity to a set "hub" artist, to find if artist they recognized were related to a set list of blues artist. The next day, one of my more passionate students, Bobby, came into class and said "We need to talk about this assignment thing." Bobby was absolutely appalled at his findinngs from his homework - or as he said, "How the hell can you even compare Ray Charles to Amy Winehouse??"





Luckily, I was hoping one of the kids would find this, and I had the music video for "Rehab" playing on the wall of the music lab in a matter of seconds. We went through the motions of our daily game, "What makes me blue?", for the song. The class begrudgingly agreed that there were blues aspects in the song - the backing brass band, some blue notes, etc. We listened again to the chorus of "Rehab" a couple more times, and then finally one of them got it -

"Wait..... is that a 12 bar blues progression? Dude."

Throughout the lesson was had listened to songs and debated their "bluesiness" with each other - starting off easier with some Big Maceo Merriweather and eventually going through The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love", and Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll".  But it was Winehouse who opened up the wormhole of the socio-political impacts on and of music.

We used the controversy over Winehouse's supposed merit as a blues artist to question not only the artist they listen to daily, but also how we interpreted said music. We discussed the aforementioned article - why do artists and listeners need music to be disguised as something else, like feeding medicine to a dog?  Is this morally right?

The discussion eventually turned to race, based off of Jack White's quote, "[music videos, quirky back story, etc] is just there to distract people from that fact that we were playing the blues. That a white boy was playing this."). We talked about the fact that blues is characterized as "black" music. If there is black music, what are its characteristics? Are they based off of cultural reflection and experiences or stereotypes, or both? If there is black music, and its played by a white musician, does that make it no longer black? Or does it make the white musician a black musician? And if there's black music, isn't there also white, yellow, brown, dyslexic, A.D.D. and dwarfism music? What are the impacts on the view of the alleged power of music and universality of music if that is true? To what extent is music "powerful" and in what ways is our categorization of it impact this?

The lesson went extremely well, as it not only served up the content, but led to a critical change in how the kids listen to their own music, and about how music actually affects them outside of the emotional realm.

I posted the article because, especially in the current climate we are in, it's a good idea to question ourselves as a society through our art in the same way my students are now questioning theirs.

Name. Reflect. Act.

MattintheBelfry