There are days when I swear the only thing I’m going to be remembered for when my teaching career ends is the bunny suit. But just a few days ago, while drafting my new manuscript, I realized there was something else I have an unbreakable association with in the minds of many of my colleagues.
One day, a long time ago, I was picking up my students from the cafeteria after lunch. As they were returning their trays and lining up, one little scandalized tattletale came up to me with a look of earnest distress, telling me how someone else in class had said “the K word.” Of course I had no idea what she meant. I answered with what has become a standard response to such matters over the years: “Thank you for letting me know. I will speak to them about this later.” She walked away, satisfied that justice would be carried out.
Polite society demands that some offensive words are referred to by only a first letter, since using the words themselves has become justifiably unacceptable. I’d like to propose the time has come to add another word, an actual K word, to the list of verbal taboos:
Kiddo.
Years ago, if not decades by now, while enduring a specifically purgatorial staff development session, the presenter used the word “kiddo” what I would estimate to be approximately once every one hundred seven seconds. I became so preoccupied with waiting to see when it would come up again that I began doing something I hadn’t done since my undergrad days: keeping tally marks in the upper left hand corner of the composition book I was using to take notes. (I rely heavily on notebooks such as these during staff development; either they help me organize and process the important ideas of the day, or, if I’m particularly less than engaged for whatever reason, they’re great for writing down jokes to keep myself amused.) My tallies numbered well into the dozens by the time the session had ended, and I hadn’t even started at the beginning.
Then, sometime later, that word began to spread. Like a pathogen. Maybe it just started catching on or maybe it had always been there, and it just took the frequency of that one particular session to permanently tattoo the frustration on my brain. Either way, it had become impossible to avoid and only grew progressively worse as time went on. You know how health professionals tell us not to use antibacterial soap because doing so actually aids in the development of superviruses? In my school district, “kiddo” has grown to the point of being a verbal supervirus.
So what’s my problem with this word? What is it about “kiddo” that gets me so riled up?
1) It’s meant to sound endearing, but it’s not. It’s usually intended to be a linguistic compromise for people who want to come across as professionals in a professional setting, but also want to project how they have enough warmth and familiarity regarding children to keep from seeming clinical and distant.
2) It’s degrading. Maybe only mildly so, but still. Anytime someone calls someone else “kiddo” to their face, they’re sending a message about the relationship they have with that person, and usually the person on the receiving end is either younger or less experienced. You want proof? Ask Siri. Or here, I’ll save you the time and tell you what she says: “NOUN (informal) / used as a friendly or slightly condescending form of address.” Notice how she didn't just stop at "friendly."
3) At least in the educational world that surrounds me, it has devolved into becoming a tag so generic and overused that it has lost all meaning. I’m sure you know what that’s like. If not, pick any word you can think of and repeat it to yourself, out loud, at least thirty times. Listen to yourself say it. Eventually it will start to leave a bad taste in your mouth, and you’ll start thinking things like, “What does this even mean? How did this configuration of letters ever get put together to represent any kind of a concept? Do I sound like a complete moron every time I say this word out loud? I’m starting to think I do.” Don’t believe me? Try it. Here’s a word to experiment with: Soap. Thirty times, out loud, listening closely. See how you feel about it when you’re done.
4) For too many people, it’s become a code word, something akin to teen slang. If someone chooses to refer to any plurality of children as “kiddos” instead of “kids” or “children” or even, dare I say, “students,” they are making a choice to associate themselves with a larger group who does the same thing. They’re using lazy verbal shorthand as a way to communicate they're referring to students in a professional capacity, but are still trying to maintain a dose of warmth and fuzziness in doing so.
I can’t stand the word. I just used it in a manuscript because I wanted to convey something negative about the character who says it. I refuse to watch the movie “Kill Bill Vol. 2” because it’s revealed before the end that the real name of Uma Thurman’s character is Beatrix Kiddo. Whenever I’m sitting in a staff meeting and or any kind of professional development session with people I know and the presenter uses the word, I feel several pairs of eyes looking at me, waiting for my reaction. And even if people are subtle enough about it to not turn and look at me with a big smile and try to catch my eye, I know several of them are internally laughing at my pain.
So please, everyone. For my sake, and for the sake of whatever goodness and purity there still might be in our society, let’s all agree to put the “K word” behind us.
Monday, June 26, 2017
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Album of the Week: Hi Infidelity
When I was in seventh grade, REO Speedwagon’s “Hi Infidelity” was the biggest album in the world. It stayed at number one on the Billboard album chart for four consecutive record-setting months, according to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, which I listened to regularly back then.
In a way, “Hi Infidelity” was one of the templates followed by most artists who released albums during the 1980s. It would not be inaccurate to say it was the album that gave birth, for better or for worse, to the power ballad. Songs like “Keep on Lovin’ You” and “Take it on the Run” were appreciated both because they were love songs, but also because they still rocked.
The band played with a power and ferocity that showed off their long career of playing on the road. Neal Doughty, the main keyboardist, hammered away at his piano and synthesizer solos with a speed me and my three years of piano lessons couldn’t comprehend. Guitarist Gary Richrath held the songs together with glittery melodies, explosive solos, and hammering acoustic strumming in the background throughout.
The only standard of cool that mattered in the junior high hallways was whether or not you had the REO Speedwagon tour shirt. Not the black concert t-shirt but the classic 80s concert jersey, with the tour design on a white background and black sleeves. Even the heavy metal burn-outs who populated my school bus had the band's logo sketched on the homemade grocery bag book covers of their school textbooks. I remember hearing about how the kids in choir wanted to use “Keep on Lovin’ You” in some performance, but the choir teacher shot it down because of something to do with inappropriate lyrics. To this day I don’t remember what it was that was so awful, but I think a decision like that stands as a testament to a more innocent time, when it wasn’t as necessary to release separate versions of albums with both clean and explicit lyrics.
My favorite song on the album was, and still is, the opening track, “Don’t Let Him Go.” It was supposedly a single toward the end of the album cycle, but I don’t remember hearing it on the radio until the band had crossed into classic rock territory. “Don’t Let Him Go” was all power and energy, and one of the best album openers I can think of. The off-beat cymbal splash you hear in the drum riff was something I tried duplicating many times in my bedroom, using my seventh grade band drumsticks, my practice pad, and a few of my dad’s hardcover spy novels borrowed from the living room to complete my imaginary drum set. I never quite felt like I mastered it.
I was still a few years away from my first real rock concert so I couldn’t go to the show, but I did get the LP, then recorded it onto a blank cassette so I could listen to it in my bedroom through the headphones and not irritate my parents. It wasn’t a very long album, so I was able to squeeze it onto one of the mythical 120 minute length blank tapes, where it shared space with at least two of my other junior high touchstones: “Foreigner 4” (we never called it “4,” it was always “Foreigner 4”), Styx’s “Paradise Theater,” Journey’s “Escape,” and Billy Squier’s “Don’t Say No.” Combined, those albums served as an early 80s hard rock starter kit/tutorial for an emerging music fan only months out of Catholic elementary school. They all stayed in heavy rotation on my cassette player (and loudly on the turntable when our parents weren't home) for at least eighteen months, until “Pyromania” was released and Def Leppard conquered the world.
I don’t know if music is like this anymore. I think it would be a challenge for anyone to name more than a small handful of bands who would release albums now that were essentially collections of love songs, most of which were happy, and all performed with undeniable musical talent. I don’t know of current artists that bridge genre so thoroughly the way this album did. If that’s something we’ve culturally lost, it’s really a shame.
In a way, “Hi Infidelity” was one of the templates followed by most artists who released albums during the 1980s. It would not be inaccurate to say it was the album that gave birth, for better or for worse, to the power ballad. Songs like “Keep on Lovin’ You” and “Take it on the Run” were appreciated both because they were love songs, but also because they still rocked.
The band played with a power and ferocity that showed off their long career of playing on the road. Neal Doughty, the main keyboardist, hammered away at his piano and synthesizer solos with a speed me and my three years of piano lessons couldn’t comprehend. Guitarist Gary Richrath held the songs together with glittery melodies, explosive solos, and hammering acoustic strumming in the background throughout.
The only standard of cool that mattered in the junior high hallways was whether or not you had the REO Speedwagon tour shirt. Not the black concert t-shirt but the classic 80s concert jersey, with the tour design on a white background and black sleeves. Even the heavy metal burn-outs who populated my school bus had the band's logo sketched on the homemade grocery bag book covers of their school textbooks. I remember hearing about how the kids in choir wanted to use “Keep on Lovin’ You” in some performance, but the choir teacher shot it down because of something to do with inappropriate lyrics. To this day I don’t remember what it was that was so awful, but I think a decision like that stands as a testament to a more innocent time, when it wasn’t as necessary to release separate versions of albums with both clean and explicit lyrics.
My favorite song on the album was, and still is, the opening track, “Don’t Let Him Go.” It was supposedly a single toward the end of the album cycle, but I don’t remember hearing it on the radio until the band had crossed into classic rock territory. “Don’t Let Him Go” was all power and energy, and one of the best album openers I can think of. The off-beat cymbal splash you hear in the drum riff was something I tried duplicating many times in my bedroom, using my seventh grade band drumsticks, my practice pad, and a few of my dad’s hardcover spy novels borrowed from the living room to complete my imaginary drum set. I never quite felt like I mastered it.
I was still a few years away from my first real rock concert so I couldn’t go to the show, but I did get the LP, then recorded it onto a blank cassette so I could listen to it in my bedroom through the headphones and not irritate my parents. It wasn’t a very long album, so I was able to squeeze it onto one of the mythical 120 minute length blank tapes, where it shared space with at least two of my other junior high touchstones: “Foreigner 4” (we never called it “4,” it was always “Foreigner 4”), Styx’s “Paradise Theater,” Journey’s “Escape,” and Billy Squier’s “Don’t Say No.” Combined, those albums served as an early 80s hard rock starter kit/tutorial for an emerging music fan only months out of Catholic elementary school. They all stayed in heavy rotation on my cassette player (and loudly on the turntable when our parents weren't home) for at least eighteen months, until “Pyromania” was released and Def Leppard conquered the world.
I don’t know if music is like this anymore. I think it would be a challenge for anyone to name more than a small handful of bands who would release albums now that were essentially collections of love songs, most of which were happy, and all performed with undeniable musical talent. I don’t know of current artists that bridge genre so thoroughly the way this album did. If that’s something we’ve culturally lost, it’s really a shame.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Album of the Week: Magic
Ten years ago this fall Bruce Springsteen released “Magic,” the first album he had put out with the E Street Band at full force since 1984. Barack Obama’s election was a year away and a lot of America was still coming to terms with how the world and the country had changed during the two terms of George W. Bush. While “Magic” is a very driven rock album, it’s also a pointed criticism of the actions and consequences of the Bush administration. It’s arguably Bruce’s most political album to date.
Sadly, the idea of criticizing George W. Bush as misguided and incompetent seems almost quaint now. To be fair, most of the album doesn’t really go after the man himself, but tells the stories of characters, some of them returning veterans, experiencing the confusion and disillusionment of defending a country and a set of ideals that don’t seem to follow through as expected. The title track is the only song addressing this theme directly, or as directly as you can through metaphor, bringing forth a thinly-veiled attack on the politics of distraction that are at least as present now as they were ten years ago: “Trust none of what you hear, less of what you see / This is what we’ll be.”
Even with all of that, I still think of it as a summertime album, in the most positive of ways. In fact, the first time I got behind the wheel of my car to drive anywhere after my final work day of the school year, “Magic” was the album I played. It seems to creep back into the rotation for awhile at the beginning of each summer.
The songs, regardless of the stories they tell, boil down to relationships. Much of the music follows a recognizable template used in many of Bruce’s songs, in which he will contrast the joyful bounce of a rock-and-roll party anthem with depressing, and even nihilistic, lyrics. I’ve always been able to take in this album on two levels: thinking about the political statement, and enjoying the musical tone: the storm warning siren saxophone solo by the late, great Clarence Clemons in the middle of “Radio Nowhere;” the organ part from “Living in the Future” that echoes right out of half the songs on “The River” album from 1981; the self-assured strut of “You’ll Be Coming Down;” the mid tempo warm-weather carnival romance of “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.”
Like most of Bruce’s albums — and, let’s face the facts, like most albums period — there are a few songs here that don’t carry their weight. That’s okay, though. When you take an album as a continuous piece of music instead of just a collection of songs, even the weaker moments play their roles in contributing to the overall narrative. There are three or four songs here that I don’t think I’ve ever included on any derivation of a “Best Of Bruce” playlist, but when I listen to the whole album all the way through, they’re just as essential as any of my favorites.
Like I said eariler, “Magic” came out in the fall of 2007, which, if memory serves, was within a month of when I sold my town home and bought my house, which serendipitously happened about three weeks before the housing market went underwater. Bruce and the E Street Band toured behind the album, and came to St. Paul sometime later that spring — I’m thinking March, but don’t quote me on that. My cousin John came up to the Cities and stayed with me so we could see the show. We’d bought four tickets, and the other two went to my sister Jenny and the guy she was dating, David. I don’t have the timeline locked down on this, but I think I’d already met David for the first time by then, a few months earlier at Thanksgiving. Either way I hadn’t spent much time with him before the concert, so it turned out to be another chance to get to know him better.
A few years down the road and he became my brother-in-law. Since he showed himself early on to be the kind of guy who would bring my sister to a Springsteen concert, he scored some good points with me.
It was not the last Springsteen concert we both attended.
Sadly, the idea of criticizing George W. Bush as misguided and incompetent seems almost quaint now. To be fair, most of the album doesn’t really go after the man himself, but tells the stories of characters, some of them returning veterans, experiencing the confusion and disillusionment of defending a country and a set of ideals that don’t seem to follow through as expected. The title track is the only song addressing this theme directly, or as directly as you can through metaphor, bringing forth a thinly-veiled attack on the politics of distraction that are at least as present now as they were ten years ago: “Trust none of what you hear, less of what you see / This is what we’ll be.”
Even with all of that, I still think of it as a summertime album, in the most positive of ways. In fact, the first time I got behind the wheel of my car to drive anywhere after my final work day of the school year, “Magic” was the album I played. It seems to creep back into the rotation for awhile at the beginning of each summer.
The songs, regardless of the stories they tell, boil down to relationships. Much of the music follows a recognizable template used in many of Bruce’s songs, in which he will contrast the joyful bounce of a rock-and-roll party anthem with depressing, and even nihilistic, lyrics. I’ve always been able to take in this album on two levels: thinking about the political statement, and enjoying the musical tone: the storm warning siren saxophone solo by the late, great Clarence Clemons in the middle of “Radio Nowhere;” the organ part from “Living in the Future” that echoes right out of half the songs on “The River” album from 1981; the self-assured strut of “You’ll Be Coming Down;” the mid tempo warm-weather carnival romance of “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.”
Like most of Bruce’s albums — and, let’s face the facts, like most albums period — there are a few songs here that don’t carry their weight. That’s okay, though. When you take an album as a continuous piece of music instead of just a collection of songs, even the weaker moments play their roles in contributing to the overall narrative. There are three or four songs here that I don’t think I’ve ever included on any derivation of a “Best Of Bruce” playlist, but when I listen to the whole album all the way through, they’re just as essential as any of my favorites.
Like I said eariler, “Magic” came out in the fall of 2007, which, if memory serves, was within a month of when I sold my town home and bought my house, which serendipitously happened about three weeks before the housing market went underwater. Bruce and the E Street Band toured behind the album, and came to St. Paul sometime later that spring — I’m thinking March, but don’t quote me on that. My cousin John came up to the Cities and stayed with me so we could see the show. We’d bought four tickets, and the other two went to my sister Jenny and the guy she was dating, David. I don’t have the timeline locked down on this, but I think I’d already met David for the first time by then, a few months earlier at Thanksgiving. Either way I hadn’t spent much time with him before the concert, so it turned out to be another chance to get to know him better.
A few years down the road and he became my brother-in-law. Since he showed himself early on to be the kind of guy who would bring my sister to a Springsteen concert, he scored some good points with me.
It was not the last Springsteen concert we both attended.
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