America's Preeminent Gutter Slang

I missed a large portion of American popular music, because I was not interested.  My youth after junior high school became methodical.  I had been taking classical piano lessons since first grade, and I wanted to play as well as my father.  I worked hard at it and playing the trumpet.  There was not much time for Rock 'n' Roll, concerts, smoking cigarettes, or drinking beer.  It was far more rewarding to me to try to excel in the field of music.  Since your opportunities were limited and the common consensus was musicians never make it, I had better try my hardest.  I did, so there was not any time for American popular music.  I was into jazz, because it was complex, interesting, and challenging to play.  Pop/rock tunes were simple and boring.  I never had a romantic crisis.  I never had an identity crisis, so I didn't need reconciliation from the pleasant words of a pop song.  I even missed the Beatles.  Luckily my awakening to the Beatles was during my thirties sitting in Chalkies' Billiard Parlor listening to their juke box.   Columbus, Ohio was a diverse place, more diverse than any other I had lived.  This is why I went there to work on my doctorate in music.  John Emche, my cooperating professor at USC-Columbia told me why he went to OSU.  It was a capital city, Cowtown, so there were gigs.  There was a "scene."  You could get playing work while you were working on your degree.  What he said was true, and my time at OSU became the best music education of my life.  It is hard to remember now being enveloped back in my hometown of Fayettenam.  It is a real challenge going backwards.  It nearly is impossible to change the clock and advance city past its limitations, limitations that have arisen because of lack of exposure to progressive ideals.  Things stay the same, and they have both at UNC and USC.  Nothing is different.  The same people are there or have died living there.  While there is new blood in Columbia and that is encouraging, for me it is old hat.  Been there, done that.  Columbus offered new musical challenges including the study of European chamber and orchestral music.  The main difference was the diversity, diversity having much broader influences from different peoples from different places.  Columbus was not a sheltered southern city steeped in its own traditions and unwilling to grow.  They were happy with things the way they were, and still they are, the way they were.  It is comical almost to have driven back through Columbia and see everything exactly the same thirty years later.  University traditions will do that.  They are good enough to persevere.  I am struggling to remember past that time and that education, and it is difficult.  When I can remember Columbus a sense of peace and tranquility overcomes me.  My anxiety to have to prove myself dissipates and I relax.  Musical creativity comes much easier in this state.  You can't force it, and that is where I have been for the last few months.  You must live in the space you are, or you will be unhappy.  Each day you will deal with the reality and limitations of your environment.  For me here it is a colloquial music education.  That is how my student teaching experience was, and it has not changed, this place.  Still it is sheltered and mired in the smegma of its own people.  What's the point?  The point is that we have to survive, and to survive we must try to be happy.  For me to be happy I deserve at least a drop of camaraderie.  Of this I have none, except for one acquaintance with which I share a professional contract.  Instead I find myself trying to define myself in everyone else's terms.  How can you not compare yourself to what is around you.  There are no composers here, and if there are they have their own circles and obligations.  I have pontificated making a stab at their world, but I am cynical.  Instead I have opted to forget myself and stew in the mash of life that surrounds me.  It is frightening.  What I see on TV is a depiction of music that is not real.  Its language aspires to bring the English language to its most uneducated form.  It glorifies contraction, short hand, slang, jargon, and seeming ignorance as music.  Even in my never-ending interest in American dialect for musical purposes, I can find to merit in this language.  The only way I can justify it simply is to say it aspires to be ignorant so that others ignorant will feel included.  It is the lowest level of capitalism not seeking to state a message, a concern, or a point-of-view.  It only is tribal and seeks to unify at the most base human level.  It may be that this also is Trump's method.  Extremism, violent terrorist sentiment has infiltrated American pop culture and is is stoking a deconstructionist movement that threatens to tear our country apart in tribal civil war.  And yet there is little concern.  We are broadcast the most ignorant images and messages on television underscored by innocuous, insipid, menial music which attempts to lull us into a blind allegiance.  Truly it is brainwashing as potent as Big Brother, but disguised as the most tepid saccharine.  During Black History Month television is littered with racist images as insulting as blackface.  Hypocrisy of race is seen on late night television each day beneath exploited images of the Little Rascals, slavery, and minstrels, yet we decry such imagery during the day.  There is nothing pure, just, or honest in the intentions of modern television.  It seeks only to exploit for its  own gain with a promise of integrity.  If I ever did find myself teaching in a public classroom in America today, the first step to educating our youth is teaching them to speak and write, and not in the gutter slang that has been created and manipulated to gain favor and revenue.  That language has no meaning and no purpose other than to devolve our children.  No parent, elected official, or clergyman has the courage to say it.