"I used to get mad at my school": Representations of schooling in rock and pop music.

Paper to be presented at the British Education Research

Association's Annual Conference, Lancaster 1996

Dr Kevin J. Brehony, Dept of Education Studies and Management, The

University of Reading, Bulmershe Court, Reading RG6 1HY.

Telephone: 01734 875123 x4873. Fax: 01734 352080.

e-mail: k.j.brehony@rdg.ac.uk

Draft only not to be quoted without the consent of the author

The study of cultures should lie at the heart of the Sociology of

Education. Increasingly this is less and less the case as many of that

much maligned and depleted group, sociologists of education, have

sought refuge in the study of education policy and education

management. Meanwhile, cultural studies dominates a field in which

cultures have become disassociated from structures and from which the

social has been expelled. Rather than wring their hands, sociologists

should engage with cultural studies and learn from the methods released

by the linguistic turn and its emphasis on texts no matter how

circumscribed that emphasis turns out to be. Moreover, cultural studies

has opened up new fields of enquiry particularly in the field of popular

culture and sociologists, even sociologists of education, which, after all is

intimately bound up with culture, need to engage with them. It is in this

spirit that I offer this sortie into the terrain of pop and rock music.

The subject of this paper is the way in which schooling, teachers and

teacher/pupil relations are, or more accurately have been, represented in

pop and rock songs.

Sample

The sample drawn for analysis is best described as a theoretical sample.

Such is the volume of pop and rock songs produced during the period

beginning with the advent of rock and roll in the fifties that a

representative sample would be difficult to draw even if the total

population, as here, is restricted to Anglo-American pop between the 50s

and early 90s. The fact that only a small fraction of pop music produced

annually enters public consciousness by appearing in the charts and

thereby gains crucial exposure on the radio and television also makes

knowledge of the entire population hard to attain. The history of pop is

littered with records whose release was barely, if at all, registered by

anyone outside the circle of those who produced them. Thus any sample

must inevitably confront the issue of its lack of representativeness. The

sample drawn here is based on the compilation of British Hit

Singles(Gambaccini, Rice et al. 1993). This records every single that

entered the British pop charts from 1952 to 1992 which was searched for

titles containing key words like school, teacher and education.

The such hits are not numerous. Out of 17,296 hits only five titles

contained the word 'school'. Even so this sample remains far from

representative in any statistical sense as the representations sought do not

always align themselves neatly with the titles of the records. There have

been in the corresponding period 47 hits associated with football.

Numerically, schooling as a subject of pop hits is roughly equivalent in

popularity to songs about boxing (Gambaccini, Rice et al. 1993 : 421)

Slightly more songs enter the sample if album tracks that did not become

hits are included. This latter deficiency has been partly made up from my

own extensive memories of pop songs and by searches on the World

Wide Web of rock stars' home pages, databases of lyrics and the

catalogues of record stores.

The text

If the issue of the sample is not problematic enough the question of what

constitutes the text, the unit of analysis, also compounds the difficulties

associated with this kind of research. As Frith points out(Frith 1983 :14,

sociologists who have studied pop in the past have tended to analyse song

lyrics whereas the impact of pop on its listeners and the meanings it

produces flow from the overall sound and rhythm of a song. In this

process the lyrics may play a relatively subordinate role.

As the representations discussed here come from a number of different

pop genres it is only feasible to take the lyrics as the main element of the

texts. This would be an undoubted weakness if the aim of this paper was

to produce a definitive reading of the songs sampled. However this would

be a vain pursuit because these songs have no single meaning fixed

forever in time. In addition there are no specific musicological features

that pop songs containing representations of schooling have in common

which would permit a musicological analysis. This is not to say, of

course, that all the meanings communicated by pop songs containing

representations of schooling are totally dependent upon its lyrics. It is the

case, however, that the lyrics are the only element of the songs that carry

traces of representations of schooling and thus the only way that such

songs may be identified.

Since the onset of videos and their reproduction on television stations,

including MTV which is dedicated solely to that practice, this is no

longer true. The pop video has become a text in its own right(Longhurst

1995 : 174-185) combining lyrics and sound with vision. However,

records are still being produced and consumed by audiences without the

presence of the video which means that it would be invalid to subsume

the musical text solely under video. A further, and perhaps better, reason

for ignoring videos is the desirability of comparing like with like over

time so that a rock song from the 50s might be set alongside one from the

video age of the 90s.

Despite the problems associated with the approach, lyrics form the

majority of the data to be discussed. I was attracted to this topic partly

through an interest in hermeneutics which requires that attention be paid

to the context in which texts, in this instance the songs were recorded and

reproduced. Limitations of space prevent much attention being paid to

context or to the way audiences read the songs. Instead my focus will

mainly beon the formal structure of the language used. A lesser focus will

be the intentionality, the illocutionary force, of the songs' performers.

Further attention could be paid to the intentionality of the texts' authors

(where the authors do not coincide with the performers) but this seems an

unnecessary level of analysis for the purposes of this paper. Pop music is

a large business and the perlocutionary act, the act performed by

saying/singing something is, if successful, the acquisition of money in the

from of profit.

Texts, representations and subjectivity

As was argued above, the lyrics of pop songs may be relatively

unimportant in the way they create meaning. The text of a pop song is

therefore a combination of its lyrics, rhythm and sound. As Frith points

out, this causes problems for cultural theorists as concepts like 'text' and

'representation' are derived from literary theory and in order to apply

them, music must be reduced, to songs and songs to words'(Frith 1983 :

56). Accepting that limitation, I want to ask here initially, not what do

pop songs about schooling mean but rather the wider question of whether

pop songs can represent anything at all. The position that holds that texts,

of any sort, can represent a reality external to them is of course that

which is known in literary theory as realism(Frith 1988 : 112). Analysts

attached to the methods of formalism in its structuralist manifestation

deny that this mirroring function is possible arguing instead that realism

is an effect of language and that what seems transparent is in fact opaque.

Rather than reflect a pre-given reality texts produce the means by which

their readers can interpret their own experiences and even do things in the

world. In Lacanian theories they also produce and fix subjectivities. Thus

Bradby talks of the way that texts offer positions for the speaking subject

(Bradby 1990 : 343). The main consequence of this position is that

meaning is sought within texts themselves without reference to the means

of their production, the context in which they appear or the meanings

created in the act of reading by their readers.

Restricted by space and time I cannot in this paper engage in an analysis

that treats with a song's production, text and audience(Longhurst 1995 :

22-25). What I shall attempt instead is not narratology as such but an

analysis of the songs as narrative fiction (Rimmon-Kenan 1983) and

some consideration of the context in which they were produced. How

these songs were read and what meanings were constructed from them, is

unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.

In the beginning.

In the beginning there was rock 'n' roll and in the 50s Chuck Berry was

one of its most influential progenitors(Palmer 1996 : 31) (Macdonald

1995 : 70-71). In addition, as Wicke has observed, 'the most intelligent

and most precisely observed lyrics in rock'n'roll have always come from

him (Wicke 1990 : 46'. Commentaries on Berry all tend to share a realist

perception that he celebrated and represented the emerging teenage

culture or that he evoked the teenage experience(Wicke 1990 : 46,

(Paraire 1992 : 43). In rock and roll songs, as in songs in other pop

genres, references to schooling are few. One well known exception was

Jerry Lee Lewis' 'High School Confidential' but the lyric is very under

developed, there is no coherent narrative and the only representation of

school life is 'rockin', 'boppin' and 'shakin' at the High School Hop. In this

song Jerry Lee Lewis creates an exciting 'atmosphere'(Paraire 1992 : 11)

by his vocal style and by pounding his piano. The lyric is almost

redundant. In Chuck Berry's songs, by way of contrast, several references

to schooling appear and compared to 'High School Confidential', his

songs 'School Days' and 'Sweet Little Sixteen' are veritable disquisitions

on schooling.

'School Days' takes the form of a day in the life or the diary of a pupil

chronicling all the events that occur after getting up and going to school.

The language used is typically that of the everyday(Middleton 1990 :

229) rooted in the here and now of schooling. Berry, like most of the

singers considered in this paper, is male but the gender of the pupil is

unspecified. However, the frequent use of the pronoun 'you' suggests that

the pupil is the writer of the song and therefore male. On the other hand

the use of 'you' also invites the listener to adopt the subject position of the

pupil and that could be taken by anyone regardless of their gender.

'Ring, ring goes the bell' is the song's subtitle. The bell punctuates the

pupil's temporal experience of school in which one event remorselessly

follows another. Time markers in school, writes Adam, 'bind pupils and

staff into a common schedule within which their respective activities are

structured, paced, timed, sequenced and prioritized' (Adam 1995 : 61).

Added to this clock time in the song is personal time. Time experienced

by the pupil. Lessons on American history and Practical Math are

followed by lunch. More lessons follow until three o'clock when school

is over. Time as a resource is a prominent theme in the song. At lunch

there may not even be time to eat before lessons restart. Being distracted,

pressured and harassed is characteristic of the school experience

represented. 'The guy behind you won't leave you alone' and in the lunch

room you are lucky if you can get a seat. Back in class, more problems

arise. This time from the teacher who does not realise how mean she

looks. Finally, at three you can lay down your 'burden' and escape.

Nevertheless, in spite of this catalogue of negative aspects of the school

day the general stance of the pupil's subject position is one of conformity.

This contrasts with that maufactured in the film 'Blackboard Jungle'. This

film, released in 1955, is a tale of inner-city schooling in which

delinquency was equated with rock 'n' roll by featuring Bill Haley's 'Rock

Around the Clock'. Several accounts suggest that the film did not reflect a

real relation but instead constructed one (Palmer 1996) . There is no

rebellion in 'School Days'. Lessons are studied hard, fingers are worked

right down to the bone, the pupil hopes to pass. The tension between this

aspiration and the 'burden' is palpable but the song has not yet ended and

its resolution awaits in the 'juke joint' where frustrated by the day's

events, 'you've gotta hear something that's really hot'.Conformity then

turns out to be less than total as, 'all day long you've been wanting to

dance' and 'with the one you love your making romance'. This sets up a

binary opposition between school where desires to dance and make

romance are repressed and leisure sited in the 'juke joint' where those

desired can be realised.

The linear narrative ends at an instrumental break which is followed by a

repetition of the chorus. This is highly significant as it signifies the

separation of schoolwork and leisure and the lyric, in an extraordinarily

clever reflexive move, refers to the way that the music is felt. Not content

with repeating the line twice in the chorus, Berry hammers it home in the

song's final lines:

the beat of the drums loud and cold

rock, rock, rock 'n' roll

the feeling is there body and soul

Against the school that participates in, 'the modern world of purposively

rational labour, consumption and domination', as Habermas (Habermas

1990 : 101) puts it, is counterposed the figure of Dionysus, in whom

feeling dominates reason. This binary is set in the context of the music

itself which is all the time providing the means for that feeling to be

communicated. Although, the overt message is conformist the sub-text is

subversive and at the same moment as reflecting the school/leisure

opposition Berry, through the music, provides the means for leisure's

dominance.

Among other performers Chuck Berry was also creating a vocabulary of

teenage leisure, a route map, by means of which teenagers could make

sense of the social practices of the newly constructed category of

teenager.This is evident in 'Sweet Little Sixteen' which has been

subjected to an extended critical analysis by Wicke who observes in it,

the same separation between work or schoolwork and leisure as in

'School Days'. Teenage leisure, a phenomenon of the 50s, is explained by

Wicke in the following:

Thus, for these teenagers leisure became an alternative

world to that of school and the parental home; their daily

lives swung between these poles. This contradictory

existence also formed the background experience for

rock'n'roll, formed a basic pattern which returned time and

again in its lyrics.

Referring to the Berry song Wicke wrote:

The contrast between school and leisure expressed in

'School Day' defined a genuine experience quite commonly

observable in the self-awareness of adolescents, but an

experience which achieved an additional dimension in the

American high schools of the fifties. It was this experience

which began to reflect the gaping inner contradictions of a

capitalist lifestyle. The central significance which

rock'n'roll had for high school students was linked to the

fact that in rock'n'roll they could establish and enjoy the

meaning and values of their concept of leisure. Their

relationship with music exerted a decisive influence on

rock'n'roll. Their everyday problems determined its content.

(Wicke 1990 : 34)

In his reading of 'Sweet Little Sixteen' Wicke sees in it the same

conformity to school as is present in 'School Day'.

In 'Sweet Little Sixteen', the enthusiasm for rock'n'roll of a

sixteen-year old girl begging her parents to be allowed to go

out is contrasted with the role which she must and does

play again the next morning namely that of the'sweet-little-

sixteen-year-old' at the school desk. This song rests

completely and utterly on the basis of traditional behaviour.

Chuck Berry's 'Sweet Little Sixteen' .is not protesting or

even rebelling against the need to ask permission before she

goes out. She abides by the norms of the family home and

begs for her little piece of freedom; cleverly using the

influence a daughter has on her father so that he may

defend her from motherly strictness. But then the most

important thing to her is to get dressed up in lipstick and

high-heeled shoes, the outward signs of being grown-up,

which through and through fits with a conventional

understanding of her role. And the next morning she will be

the 'sweet-little-sixteen-year-old' again, doing her best in

high school. This song grasps the inner connection of the

contrast between leisure and school. Only the final

acceptance of the norms of family, home and school make

possible the leisure world which has arisen as an alternative

to these, but which in its function is not nearly as

alternative as it was thought. It simply provides a context in

which the behaviour models which have been raised to the

status of norms are made acceptable to young people so that

ultimately these can also be adopted(Wicke 1990 : 47).

According to the English Jazz Musician and artist, George Melly, 'Rock,

initially at any rate, was a contemporary incitement to mindless fucking

and arbitrary vandalism' (Melly 1972). That may well have been the case

but it is a long way from Wicke's perception of this instance of rock.

While Wicke is right to emphasize sweet little sixteen's conformity and

the strict separation of schoolwork and leisure he misses another,

somewhat subversive aspect to the song. 'They're really rockin' in Boston

and Pittsburgh Pa, deep in the heart of Texas etc.' suggests that Sweet

Little Sixteen is a universal American teenage girl with whom all the

'cats' want to dance. But who is giving her description and telling her

story? Clues include the fact that she has 'about half a million' autographs

and her wall is covered in pictures which she gets 'one by one'. She is, in

other words, that relatively new phenomenon the teenage fan.

When asking to go out, she tells her mother, 'it's such a sight to see

somebody steal the show'. Could that somebody from whom she gets

autographs and pictures be no other than Berry himself, the authorial and

narrator's voice, the star of the show. From his lascivious phrasing of the

line 'tight dresses and lipstick, she's sporting high heeled shoes' this

explanation gains added plausibility. So while appearing conformist with

regard to school the black Berry who experienced repeated acts of white

exclusion is subverting white, racist America through its teenage

daughters' sexuality.

Chuck Berry's commitment to conformity to the school route was not

however total, as the eponymous 'Johnny B. Goode' demonstrates. His

hero could not read or write so well 'but he could play a guitar like

ringing a bell' and was well on his way to stardom without the benefit of

education. In Sam Cooke's 1960 hit, 'Wonderful World' the binary is not

school knowledge versus rock but school knowledge versus love. The

lyric to Cooke's song adopted a mark scheme, a device also used in the

Cliff Richard song 'D in Love', to show how the narrator was failing in

school. 'Don't know much about History', 'don't know what a slide rule is

for' sings Cooke whose narrator perceives that he is not going to be an 'A'

student. None of this matters as long as the girl he loves to whom the

song is addressed loves him too in which case the world will be

wonderful.

In the Cliff Richard song, hints of social class may be detected in its

opposition of the female 'swot' who gets 'A' in Biology but her lower

achieving, hence probably working class, male boyfriend, awards her a

'D' in the subject of love in which he, an expert, offers to give her more

practice and who recommends, 'lots and lots and lots of homework with

me'. The song is full of humour and irony and a sense of mild critique as

it debunks the grades and sets up the opposition between school subjects

and really useful knowledge like how to achieve high marks for 'kissin'

and 'huggin'. Nevertheless, it captures the social process of evaluation

that is present in all social encounters and relations. What seems absurd

is the application of grades in this context. It is interesting to note that in

'My Perfect Cousin' a hit in 1980 for the Irish, new Wave Band, 'The

Undertones' the swot was still being despised, this time for his prowess in

'maths, physics and bionics'.

The Critics: Schooling Opposed

As Rock 'n' roll's golden age passed and the youth rebellion it

accompanied faded. In the late 50s pop music became less raw and more

acceptable to mainstream, white audiences. Acts like the Coasters, whose

songs were written by Leiber and Stoller, sang songs with teen oriented

lyrics with a slightly satirical edge. Among these was their 1959 hit

'Charlie Brown' in which Charlie played the 'clown' and performed pranks

like filling the auditorium with smoke. When he walked in the classroom

cool and slow and called the English teacher by the name of Daddyo

these acts were performed within a context of acts that the narrator's

voice says would lead to retribution..Charlie Brown's voice exclaims that

he is being picked upon The narrator's voice in this song

homodiegetic(Rimmon-Kenan 1983). That is the narrator appears to be

involved in the events described. The narratee, the one addressed by the

narrator, Charlie Brown, is less plausible and less reliable due to his

position in relation to the narrator and so he is not believed. Charlie

Brown's trangressions were small beer compared to what was to follow.

In 1967 the Beatles' album 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'

was released in a political and social context that differed from 1959 in

almost every way imaginable. On that album the song, 'Getting Better'

contains some references to school attributed by Macdonald to John

Lennon although the song itself is credited to Lennon and McCartney and

the lead vocal was McCartney's. 'I used to get mad at my school, the

teachers that taught me weren't cool, they are holding me down, turning

me round, filling me up with your rules'(Macdonald 1995 :192). There

was little of Berry's subtlety in this articulation of many youths' negative

experience of schooling. This was also a paradigmatically realist text in

that the line appears to be an authentic representation of the narrator's

experience. Against the optimism of the chorus' 'you've got to admit it's

getting better' there is counterposed the resignation and scepticism of 'it

can't get much worse'. Lennon returned again to the theme of school in

the bitter lyric of 'Working Class Hero' sung folk style, hence giving the

lyric more authenticity, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar.

As soon as your borne they make you feel small

by giving you no time instead of it all

til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

a working class hero is something to be

a working class hero is something to be

they hurt you at home and they hit you at school

they hate you if your clever and they despise a fool

til your so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

a working class hero is something to be

a working class hero is something to be

Lennon's attitude to authority has often been explained by reference to his

unhappy childhood and to his problems in school(Norman 1981).

Something similar has also been said of Bruce Springsteen(Marsh 1987 :

90) whose own schooling ended prematurely. In 'No Surrender' his lyric

appears to be autobiographical. This chronicler of post-industrial America

with a sound out of Phil Spector sang, 'well we busted out of class, had to

get away from those fools. We learned more from a three-minute record

than we ever learned in school'. The reliability of this statement is not at

issue. What is more interesting about it is the possibility that pupils may

learn something from three minute records.

In 1972 eschewing the realism of Lennon and Springsteen, Alice Cooper

achieved a number one hit with the song 'School's Out'. Thereafter,

according to the sleeve notes on the album 'The Beast of Alice Cooper', it

established itself as 'the ultimate anti-authority song for teenagers'.

Cooper's genre was Detroit hard rock and his stage act made a transition

from Glam and androgyny to Horror complete with live snakes and a

working guillotine(Palmer 1996 : 186). His ghoulish antics made it

difficult to take Alice Cooper's anti-school stance seriously but like other

performers in the metal genre who employed similar props the consumers

expressed their approval at the cash till. 'School's Out' was probably the

most successful, in sales terms, of all the songs considered in this sample.

Popular culture has to be taken seriously in its entirety just because it is

popular and to favour Lennon or Springsteen as more serious and more

authentic than Alice Cooper is to miss the point that what makes popular

culture popular is simply its popularity.

Unlike the lyrics of Lennon and Springsteen that have been discussed

here, the lyric of Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' is not by McCabe's criteria

a realist text(McCabe 1992). This is because the narrative tells us at one

point that,

School's out for summer

School's out forever

School's been blown to pieces

Read literally, there could be no return to a school that had been 'blown to

pieces'. A reading supported by the final line of the song, 'School's out

completely'. Nevertheless, in the song's final verse it is suggested that this

might not be the case in the lines,

Out for summer

Out till fall

We might not go back at all

The 'might' suggests a degree of choice that the previous lines have

established does not exist. It also undermines a realist reading that

constucts the narrator as a school leaver relieved to be leaving school

characterised by pencils, books and 'teacher's dirty looks'.

Contradiction is not entirely unexpected in a song whose processes of

production are exposed in the lines,

Well we got no class

And we got no principles

And we got no innocence

We can't even think of a word that rhymes

After the exploitation of the polysemic properties of the words 'class' and

'principles' this admission comes as something of a let down but it is

consistent with the lyric's lack of realism.

Perhaps it was this perception of the song as relatively meaningless fun

that caused it to pass unnoticed by the media. Not so the other best

known anti-school rock song, 'Another Brick in The Wall (Part 2)' a hit

for Pink Floyd in 1979. By this time, the context had changed

considerably from when 'School's Out' was recorded and schooling had

just been placed at the centre of a national political debate where it still

remains seventeen years on. A Conservative government with a New

Right agenda for education had just been elected and the teacher unions

were engaged in industrial action(Johnson 1991). One of the record's

novelties was its use of children from St Winifred's School choir to sing

in a Cockney accent the memorable hook, 'We don't need no education',

the final word sounding like 'edukashun'. If that were not enough to

confirm the worst suspicions of those who thought educational standards

had never been lower, the hook used a double negative and teachers were

exhorted to' 'leave them kids alone'. This, its ungrammatical construction

aside, was little more than child centred educators like A. S. Neill had

been saying for years. Similarly, the sentiment, 'We don't need no thought

control' was not all that far away from what contemporary theorists' like

Althusser were saying about schooling under capitalism. The appeal for,

'No dark sarcasm in the classroom' was mild compared to Lennon's

representation of teacher behaviour and resonates more with Chuck

Berry's 'mean' looking teacher. In the song's chorus,

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

the brick metaphor can be read as a reference to a bureaucratically

organized schooling that produces uniform citizens to take their place in

the labour market/system of social relations. As a description of English

education with its much vaunted variety it is rather inaccurate but it is,

after all, how for many pupils the way the school system is experienced.

Paradoxically the growth of central regulation has made that experience

more likely now than when the song was first released.

Seen as a realist critique of schooling in South Africa, the song was

banned. Frith says of Pink Floyd, 'they were not saying anything

significant about the school system; they were providing school children

with a funny, powerful playground chant...(Frith 1983 :38). In my

experience not a few teachers were also happy to chant the song

nevertheless the question arises of how Frith knows that this is the correct

reading of the song or that this was the illocutionary force of their speech

act?. Scepticism about representation can lead, as in this case to some

fairly untenable conclusions, as Ricoeur proclaims, 'discourse cannot fail

to be about something'(Ricoeur 1991 : 148)

The song's meaning became further complicated by a video showing

hammers marching across a landscape and by the subsequent use of the

song in the film 'The Wall' which was directed by Alan Parker and

appeared in 1982. But staying with the lyric, whether or not it was

'significant' it seems indisputable that the song says something about

schooling and something critical at that. As the song ends with some fine

guitar work a voice with a Scots accent speaks the following lines,

Wrong, Do it again!

If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?

You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!

The voice is unmistakeably that of a teacher but the comic irony tends to

undermine the force of the song's lyric as critique. It is a joke after all or

is it?

The ironising stance of the Pet Shop boys is but one marker of their

occupation of a different genre to Pink Floyd. Like the Lennon songs

their 'It's a Sin' gives the appearance of authenticity of the narrator/star

giving voice to personal experience. An effect heightened by the

knowledge that the star is gay and the schooling he experienced was

controlled by the Catholic Church which has something of a reputation

for the inculcation of guilt in the young that experience its socialising

practices.

At school they taught me how to be

so pure in thought and word and deed

They didn't quite succeed

Sexuality and Schooling

In as much as rock texts are about leisure they are about leisure pursuits,

mainly dancing and sex (Shepherd 1991 :182) and its exponents have

rarely sought to hide this either in their lyrics and performances or in their

personal lives as rock stars. Both Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis had a

sexual interest in schoolgirls. Berry went to gaol for transporting a minor

across a state line and Lewis married his thirteen year old cousin to the

accompaniement of the howls of press protest when he toured Britain.

Such contextual material is always mobilised in the process of

interpretation and it is hard to read their songs without that knowledge

influencing the reading. Sex and romance, viewed overwhelmingly from

a male heterosexual perspective, constitute the principal themes of pop

and they also, not surprisingly, enter into representations of schooling.

This occurs in two ways. Firstly pop songs deal with boy and girl

relationships and secondly with teacher pupil relationships. Two hit songs

by the highly successful 60s beat group the Hollies, exemplify the first

category. The steel drums on 'Carrie Anne" a hit in 1967 gave it a

Carribbean flavour but the lyric was recognisably Anglo-American. The

narrative is organized around a games metaphor. It starts, 'When we were

at school our games were simple, I played a janitor you played a monitor'.

'Monitor' was a slightly archaic term even in the 60s and geographical

location of 'janitor' was more New York than the Manchester the group

originated from. The final line of the school based part of the

relationship is, 'Then you played with older boys and prefects what's the

attraction in what their doing?'. 'Prefects', 'janitors' and 'monitors' are all

highly evocative of school but bewilderment of the narrator at Carrie

Anne's preference for 'older boys and prefects' encapsulates so well male

teenage angst unable to grasp the meaning of status hierarchies and

differential maturation rates.

The mood of 'Jennifer Eccles' is much lighter and it is modelled on a

children's playground game. The song begins:

White chalk written on red brick

our love told in a heart

it's there drawn in the playground

love, kiss, hate or adore.

Again the evocation of a red brick and thus working class school

complete with playground is highly accomplished. In American songs,

the playground gets transposed into the schoolyard such as Paul Simon's

'Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard' and sometimes in English songs

too as in Cat Stevens' '(Remember the Days of the) old School Yard'.

Playground or schoolyard, the reference as in the Stevens' song is a point

of departure for nostalgic reminiscence of childhood and youth.

In 'Jennifer Eccles' there is no nostalgia as the narrator is a child. Hence

the realism of the chorus which is composed of a chant like rendering of,

'I love Jennifer Eccles I know that she loves me' accompanied by the

sound of a wolf whistle. Not even that can dispel the air of innocence and

infantilism that pervades the song. The chalk message in the playground

is the only suggestion that the school is the site of romance. The often

used, heavily gendered, figure, 'I used to carry her satchels, she used to

walk by side' signifies the space where the romance is conducted. A

similar figure is used by Buddy Holly when he sang, 'the walks to school

still make me sad' in his 1961 hit, 'What to doÕ.

The Hollies song ends with the narrator learning, 'one Monday morning'

he has made the grade, a reference to the eleven plus examination, and

his hope that she has done the same and 'will follow me there' to the

grammar school. The transition from primary to secondary school is for

many pupils a cause of apprehension and the fear of losing friends by

them going to other schools is a common one and to have expressed this

so succinctly is a tribute to the writing skills of Clarke and Nash.

Teacher and pupil sex

These songs were neutral about the processes of schooling. They also

maintained the separation of schooling from leisure and hence sex except

in the infantalised world of 'Jennifer Eccles'. 'Teacher's Pet' was

somewhat different in that the boundaries between work and leisure

became blurred. 'I wanna be homad diplomad long after school is

through' runs the chorus. The phrase, 'teacher's pet' recurs in the song

'Don't Stand So Close To Me' a hit for the reggae-rock band, The Police

in 1980. This song contains the most explicit treatment of teacher pupil

sexual relations to date in any pop song. Two voices are present in the

lyric, that of the narrator and that of the young male teacher whose voice

is heard in the chorus:

Don't stand, don't stand so

Don't stand so close to me.

The object of a schoolgirl's desire, the teacher experiences,

Temptation, frustration

So bad it makes him cry'

The ambiguity of the next line leaves open the question of whether the

relationship progresses,

Wet bus stop, she's waiting

His car is warm and dry

Does she enter the car or is the second line simply an observation that

contrasts the the respective situations of the schoolgirl and the teacher?

The ambiguity is maintained in the final verse which contains the lines,

Strong words in the staffroom

The accusations fly

It's no use, he sees her

He starts to shake and cough

Just like the old man in

That book by Nabakov.

Musically, intertextuality, the reference to other texts is very common in

pop songs (Frith 1983 : 162). Intertextuality in the lyrics is much less so

but the reference here to 'Lolita' does nothing to dispell the narrative's

ambiguity. Instead, its illocutionary force is to demonstrate that The

Police were intellectually a cut above their rivals in the music business.

Once again, no critique of schooling is mounted but in this song the

boundaries between schoolwork and sex, that in all the other songs are

carefully noted, are transgressed as are the boundaries between pupils and

teachers and those of age - 'This girl is half his age'.

Conclusion

Rock and pop music are essentially the music of youth. Since the 1950s

each subsequent generation of youth in the UK has made the transition

from childhood to adulthood accompanied by a soundtrack. Once it was

more or less unique to that generation. Now, like all texts in the era of

mechanical reproduction, the re-release of a song means that it becomes

available to another generation of youth who produce their own reading

of it regardless of its author's intentions or the context in which it was

located. As so much of the time of modern western youth is spent in

compulsory schooling it is perhaps at firs surprising to realise that

schooling is represented so rarely in rock and pop. Initially the youth

market in which records were sold in the 50s was constituted by newly

afluent youth who were in employment. Songs about schooling were

hardly likely to appeal to them. More significant as an explanation for the

relative abscence of such songs, as I have argued in this paper, is the

binary opposition between school and leisure an opposition that not only

was represented in the songs but in part constructed by them also. This

opposition also partly accounts for the conformist nature of the subject

positions created in the songs. After school, whether it was at three

o'clock, or in the vacation or on leaving school altogether there was

always the alternative of leisure. An imaginary world of dancing and

heterosexual sex. Even when the lyric constructed oppositional

subjectivities, rebels who would bust out of class, the only alternative on

offer was to join a rock band and seek salvation in that same imaginary

world of leisure. That is not to play down the significance of the

historical tendency noted here for pop lyrics to become more critical of

schooling or to raise uncomfortable issues like sexual relations between

teachers and pupils. This is a shift related in turn to a decline in respect

for former authority figures and institutions and a corresponding move

towards individualism.

Songs referred to

High School Confidential Jerry Lee Lewis

School Days Chuck Berry

Sweet Little Sixteen Chuck Berry

Endless Summer Beach Boys

SurfinÕ USA Beach Boys

Be True to Your School Beach Boys

Cypress Avenue Van Morrison

Its Getting Better Beatles

No Surrender Springsteen

Going Back Byrds

The Wall Pink Floyd

Eton Rifles? Jam

Boomtown Rats 'I don't like Mondays'

Teacher's Pet

Don't stand too close to me Sting

Schools Out Alice Cooper

Remember the Days in the old school yard - Cat Stevens

D in Love. Cliff Richard

Wonderful World (don't know much about history etc) Sam Cooke

Good Morning Little Schoolgirl The Yardbirds.

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