There’s always something a little bittersweet about Labor Day weekend. Sure, it’s a nice, long weekend, but for many of us, it also marks the start of school. So to celebrate (or to serve as a final distraction) before you are forced to focus, we’ve been providing you with a back-to-school mix over the last few weeks. As you consider your collections, putting the finishing touches on your own compilations, today your music-guide Greg helps you answer the essential mixtape question: “Does it belong on the mix?”–ed
THE CANDIDATE: Dead Kennedys, “Jock-O-Rama” (1985)
TRIVIA: By the “Frankenchrist” era, Jello & co. were taking their satiric straight razor to deep universal concepts much more lofty than simply being too drunk to fuck and/or rubbernecking at crushed little kids who adorn a boardwalk. “Jock-O-Rama” plays almost like a punk rock opera- the Kennedys’ “Tommy.” The flipside to 1950’s bubblegum anthems to The Big Game (and starting with sentimental 50’s-style chimes), this is an epic of moaning cult-like chants and reverence towards “beer-bellies of all ages coming to watch the gladiators bleed.” American high schools are “under the thumb of the Beef Patrol,” and Jello’s not gonna let it slip by unscrutinized.
Unlike Sting or even David Lee Roth, it’s difficult to imagine an inadvertent slobberer like Jello Biafra being popular in any high school context whatsoever. Unlike Cobain, it’s easier to imagine him attempting to be well-liked, and this adds extra authenticity to a scabrous Fight Song that’s more anti-school spirit than pro. Following a peppy cheerleader chant of “Beat ‘em up, beat ‘em up, rah rah rah!,” the school’s star quarterback grotesquely paralyzes himself in the name of the game and of blind, slavish high school popularity. And outside of his immediate family, nobody really seems to care. We close on a Shakespearean note when the rioting classmates head off to pick up some brew at 7-11 but wrap their car around a telephone pole instead.
BEST LYRIC: “Pep rally in the holy temple and you’re forced to go / Masturbate en masse with the favored religious cult.”
DOES IT BELONG ON THE BACK-TO-SCHOOL MIX?: Absolutely.
THE CANDIDATE: The Police, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” (1980)
TRIVIA: Well, you know. In 1974-76, before he had officially become Big Feathered Mr. Sting, our narrator had his cross to bear as English teacher Mr. Sumner who taught Chaucer to comely UK schoolgirls while secretly holding the identity of a tantric sex demigod. These frustrating crossroads are documented in the not-so-one-sided schoolgirl crush odyssey, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me.” Mr. Sumner has denied that the song is autobiographical. Despite being one of many Police songs to receive more than its share of airplay over the past quarter-century, the lyrics are emotionally incisive without specifically revealing where the burgeoning affair leads, leaving it only at “Temptation, frustration, so bad it makes him cry / Wet bus stop, she’s waiting, his car is warm and dry,” then with petty, unfounded rumors that define high school as much for its teachers as its students.
LYRIC I NEEDED EXPLAINED TO ME WHEN I WAS, LIKE, 17: “It’s no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.” (A clever line despite “Nabokov” being mispronounced, it was all but obliterated in the wildly unnecessary, Stewart Copeland-free, drum-machine-laden, Police swan-song remake “Don’t Stand So Close To Me ’86,” whose lyrics specify “That FAMOUS book by Nabokov,” which ruins the line with its presumptive attitude. You had to go there, didn’t you, Sting?)
DOES IT BELONG ON THE “BACK TO SCHOOL” MIX?: If we were going strictly for lyrical relevance, fer shur. But the smoldering pseudo-reggae can be a bit of a momentum-murderer. Also, if you put anything Sting-oriented on there, people will probably make fun of you.
THE CANDIDATE: Vincent “Alice Cooper” Furnier, “School’s Out” (1972)
TRIVIA: The hit that made “Billion Dollar Babies” and Alice Cooper’s ongoing nine decade career possible, “School’s Out” has become a montage classic, played over quick-cutting clips of students torching the contents of their lockers in every depiction of irreverent schoolkids from “Dazed & Confused” to “The Simpsons” (Groundskeeper, Willie, drove his tractor through the wall of Springfield Elementary to this song). But despite its omnipresence, the song has never regained the rawness it had when Alice Cooper donned a mortarboard and devilish lycra bodysuit and performed it on “The Muppet Show” in 1978 (during one of few sequences where he wasn’t acting as middleman in a Faustian deal to sell Kermit’s soul to Beelzebub. And no, I’m not making that up). [LINK!]
Statler: “So, that was Alice Cooper.”
Waldorf: “You should see his sister… James Fennemore.”
Both: “BWAAAAAH HEH HEH HEH HEH”
EPIC LYRIC FAIL: At one point, Cooper can’t even think of a word to rhyme, and ACTUALLY ADMITS IT.
DOES IT BELONG ON THE “BACK TO SCHOOL” MIX?: This is a “Back To School” mix and “School’s Out” is a song about school being out. That would make no sense.
THE CANDIDATE: Nirvana, “School” (1989)
TRIVIA: In a 1993 interview with rock journalist Jon Savage, Kurt Cobain remembers Aberdeen, Washington’s Weatherwax High School: “I was a scapegoat, but not in the sense that people picked on me all the time. They didn’t pick on me or beat me up because I was already so withdrawn by that time. I was so antisocial that I was almost insane. I felt so different and so crazy that people just left me alone. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had voted me Most Likely To Kill Everyone At A High School Dance.” (In Michael Azerrad’s excellent band bio, “Come As You Are,” Kurt also expresses disgust toward his classmates who “watched ‘Happy Days.’”)
LYRICS: Through a crushing hurricane of garage-fuzz, “School” has only three phrases throughout it: “Wouldn’t you believe it, it’s just my luck,” “No recess,” and “You’re in high school again.” But this proves to be all Kurt needs to invoke high school memories: over the course of a half-dozen repetitions, he turns “you’re in high school again” from a snide threat to an open-throated cry of bloodcurdling nightmare fuel. To many whose school days (or, for that matter, post-school days) weren’t any more idyllic than Kurt’s, his frenzied tone speaks volumes.
DOES IT BELONG ON THE “BACK TO SCHOOL” MIX?: Yes, for its sheer terror and panic alone.
THE CANDIDATE: Van Halen, “Hot For Teacher” (1984)
TRIVIA: More a showcase for Eddie Van Halen’s tweedlin’ gee-tar than anything else, a great 80’s pop-metal concept is almost rendered useless by David Lee Roth’s lazy, deluded cokey-nostrils. “Hot For Teacher” could easily be considered sheer filler from the “1984” album, surrounded as it is by party anthems along the lines of “Panama,” “Jump,” and even “I’ll Wait” (which will be eternally thought of as a synth-driven “heartbreak montage” song from a 1980’s James Spader vehicle, even if it was never technically featured this way). But “Hot For Teacher” was salvaged by an ambitious, gloriously silly music video in which its demonstratively hot teacher thrashes around in a “Phys. Ed” sash in a strobe-lit classroom. It’s the video that gave us an overly hairsprayed 9-year-old version of Roth that completes his lyrics and gesticulations for him, “Animal House” style recaps of what the band members have been up to since graduation, foil glitter, dapper disco-ball choreography, eerie fish-eye lenses, and of course, the tremoring underdog Waldo, who croaks out “AWW MOM. YOU KNOW I’M NOT LIKE OTHER GUYS — I’M NERVOUS AND MY SOCKS ARE TOO LOOSE,” in an inexplicable, croaking John Wayne-esque overdub. (Full disclosure: the director of this video, Jerry Kramer, is now the Vegasite ad-agency boss of a friend of mine; as a result, I have probably asked her enough elated, raving questions about his “Hot For Teacher” involvement to make me impossible to rationally communicate with.)
BEST NON SEQUITUR: “Ah got mah PEEEEEENCILLLL!”
DOES IT BELONG ON THE “BACK TO SCHOOL” MIX?: Not really, but if we’re going for a multimedia assault, the video is just about as perfect as it gets for Back-To-School Time.
THE CANDIDATE: The White Stripes, “We’re Going To Be Friends” (2001)
TRIVIA: Lately, Jack White has leaned more towards experimentation with marimbas, bagpipes, blistering songs expressing undying affection to one’s own disillusionment, and Brendan Benson. None of these are bad things. Say what you will about Meg’s windup drumming, history will say that the White Stripes were among the best bands of the Bush Decade, whether it’s an imaginative diagnosis or not. Now that the Stripes’ albums carry a wider emotional complexity and songs awash in heartbreaking defeatist irony like “Martyr For My Love For You” and “Little Cream Soda,” it sheds extra light on their earlier work, specifically the songs written with a childlike purity. This song about finding an unchallenged best friend on the first day of school and together experiencing the wonders of “nouns and books and show and tell,” is one of their sweetest ever- a quiet nursery chool tune so kid-friendly that I recently put it on a mix CD for my three-year-old niece. Of course, if that kind of sincerity is too gingivitis-inducing for you, it’s also worth noting that Jack n’ Meg performed this as their second song on a 2002 Saturday Night Live episode hosted by current G.O.P. Presidential candidate John McCain.
BEST LYRIC: “We don’t notice any time pass, we don’t notice anything / We sit side by side in every class / Teacher thinks that I sound funny, but she likes the way you sing.”
DOES IT BELONG ON THE “BACK TO SCHOOL” MIX?: Yes. As the sincerest song among all we’ve considered (and possibly the only one whose lyrics actually include the phrase “back to school”), it gets special attention as the final track on the CD.
