And they called it (pause) Rock and Roll

I think high school is the epitome of cool.  Before grade school it's your family, and during the first few years of grade school the teacher is cool.  The teacher, imagine?  But then there comes a time, around fifth grade in my substitute teacher experience, when things change. 

When kids first begin school everything is wonderful.  The kids all like each other (well generally), they like the teacher, what they are learning is interesting and fun, and everybody tells them their work is great and they think it is.  When the little kids were drawing things, and they were close to being done, and I wanted to stretch things out so that we could make it to lunchtime without having to figure out something else for them to do, I would ask the nearest artist (some were pretty good and some were terrible) if I could show their painting to the rest of the class.  I'd hold it up and say, "Hey kids isn't this great?" and they would all ooh and aah, yes it was, and they'd all be raising their hands, show mine next, because they knew that their drawings were great too.

Around fifth grade the kid has been around the block enough times to know that his drawing is not all that great, it looks nothing like a horse, and look at Judy's drawing, that looks much better.  Some kids draw better than other kids, and now that the kid thinks about it some kids are smarter than other kids.  Some of the kids will end up asking the other kids if they want fries with that.  I think maybe this is the end of innocence that is talked about so much.

Along with that loss of innocence comes the realization that they are in a dictatorship.  Who put these teachers in charge?  None of the kids ever signed a stinking social contract.  And they are beginning to suspect that the teacher, like their parents, doesn't know everything.

Rebellion is in the air, cool is in the air.  There is an element of rebellion in cool.  Elvis was cool.  Pat Boone was not.  There is an element in the human natural that resents authority.  Mostly they go along with authority because they want to get ahead and they don't want to get in trouble, but they resent it and they kind of admire someone who stands up to it, that cock of the head, that curl of the lip, that defiant attitude. Look at the way Judy is looking at him, look at those jeans he is wearing.  I wonder if I can get my mom to buy me some like that.

Elvis wasn't really much of a rebel.  He was always polite, he was ruled by the Colonel.  When Uncle Sam called he went without a murmur and sat quietly in the barber's chair while girls across the nation wept and wailed. 

I guess it was the music.  I guess it was that (pause) Rock and Roll.  God, how straight-laced we were then, swiveled hips how shocking, hair falling across his forehead, give that man a comb.  The lyrics were basically just love songs, but maybe a little harder, rawer, maybe a little (long pause) black.

That's the rock and roll story, the white kids listening to the black kids' music, wanting to dance to it, wanting to mix races.

That got the establishment all upset, got the tongues of the politicians and the preachers wagging, and that had a lot to do with making Elvis popular.  And like a lot of people said, Sam Phillips among them I believe, here was a white guy singing black music so it was safe enough the kids could go for it.

Why blacks?  What was so cool about them?  They didn't even have any money.  Remember earlier I said that money trumps cool?  Well it does, but when you don't have any money all you have is cool, so you work on it and you perfect it, and the black cool was so much cooler than the white cool.


That's all for today.  I have stretched things to fit into the narrative, it's not quite logically correct, but close enough i think.

That bathroom thing,  It's not guys declaring something so they can hang out in the girls' locker room.  It's guys who dress and act like and think they are girls, and of course the parents are aware of it and they are the ones pushing for their boygirls to be able to go into the girl's washroom, or maybe have one of their own, it gets complicated.  I just wanted to clear up some points before i left for my madcap weekend.