For several years in my early twenties, I played drums in a rock band. I loved playing drums. The performances themselves were exciting and cathartic. We were a tight, well-rehearsed act. I was personally close with most of the band. Despite being the least technically skilled of the three backing musicians, my parts were fast and showy, and if I'm going to show off, doing so from a concealed position at the back of a room is a pretty nice way to go.
That said, it was, on the whole, it was an intensely disappointing experience. The music was not very good. We were essentially the backing band for a solo project, charged with interpreting and performing irritatingly and uninterestingly counterintuitive music that the bandleader composed on, if not for, his computer. The bandleader, for his part, meant well, but he was a privileged, anxious person, and this frequently made him hard to work with. Among other things, the way he treated his backing band taught me some unsalutary lessons about what my work is or isn't worth, lessons I've struggled to unlearn in the years since.
It is worth noting here that, unless your band is exceptionally successful, touring in a rock band is hard. All you do is carry stuff around and exert yourself and drive, drive, drive, and then you summon the energy to adequately convivialize with a bunch of strangers on whose kindness you are actively depending to survive, and also you’re eating and sleeping like absolute shit. Our three-week tour might be the straight-up hardest I've ever worked in my life, including the years I lived on a farm. Despite that, you’re lucky at the end if you break even.
In recent history, the difficulty of touring has been mitigated through participation in the decentralized cultural apparatus of punk houses, DIY spaces, co-ops, and college venues, among other semi-institutions, sustaining independent music in North America. But between the advent of streaming, the broad capture of the internet by social media and advertising, the absurd cost of rent in major cities, crackdowns following the Ghost Ship fire, etc., this infrastructure has become generally hollowed-out and difficult to access—not that a “DIY ethic” really interested our bandleader, whose ambitions were fundamentally commercial.
The whole thing was weird and hard and lonely. I have fond memories of playing, and I don't really regret performing with that band, but I wish I hadn't contorted the rest of my life around it, and I wouldn't go back.
Maybe two years before I quit, I was at a gathering following a memorial service for my grandmother. Because my grandfather is a sociopath, the service had been fraught and deeply emotionally unhelpful; surreally, the gathering was being treated like a lunch party. So I was already solidly dissociated when a wealthy-looking older woman whom I couldn't recall having met before started talking to me. She asked me, in that particular way that real adults with real lives ask this question, what I did. I said I was a music teacher in Rhode Island and played music with a band. “Oh that's wonderful my son played guitar growing up now you say you've been on tour now how was that” and on and on: a familiar interaction. I was giving my semi-rehearsed spiel when, randomly, she cut me off and said, as if summarizing what I had been expressing, “Just living the dream.” This struck me as so divorced from how the experience I was explaining felt that I just stopped and stared at her for a few seconds. Still, she wasn't wrong.
It is worth stating near the outset that rock music is, as a rule, stupid. The tradition of recorded rock music has given us a rich archive of deep artistry and genuine beauty, one which probably taught me how to care about being alive. But it is, at root, a profoundly silly thing. It's so silly, in fact, that it can be hard to imagine why or how the “rock band” as a social form could possibly “matter,” especially now that widespread, powerful music production software has rendered the independent musician an isolated figure (sorry—an auteur), hunched over a macbook in their lonely bedroom, diligently sculpting visual representations of digital representations of sound.
But for a certain kind of young person at a certain point in history the idea of starting a rock band seemed a genuinely mystical one. For my part, it is hard to think of concepts outside of the familial as formative to my sense of the possibilities of sociality. Seen through the gauzy filter of envy and admiration, the rock band seemed to collect and synthesize so much that is good in life—friendship, discipline, transcendence, beauty, physicality, ritual, intensity, collective action—into an entity famously greater than the sum of its parts. Like popes or married women, the Ramones assumed new names. James Hendrix was a guitar player, but his band made him an experience. There are the Beatles, and then there is The Beatles. Consider the igonominy of the “solo career”: apart from the nuclear family (and maybe team sports), what other post-1980s USAmerican context has ever privileged a collective entity over an entrepreneurial individual?
As an adolescent, I read and reread Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, a book which describes the sublimation of the hedonistic, vacuously celebritous mainstream rock music of the 1970s and '80s into a handsome and salutary register of hard work and earnest ethics and diet-anarchist political economy. The book winningly hagiographs the careers of some of the straight-up coolest bands ever: from the working-class modernist Minutemen to the high-cultured urbanite scuzzballs in Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth. I still owe much of my politics to the sweetheart puritanism of Fugazi. Playing in a band meant existing at the nexus of everything exciting: knowing about avant-garde art I'd never heard of, living in big cities I'd never been to, hating corporations but also actually doing something about it, hanging out with your buds all the time, either smoking a ton of weed (Dinosaur Jr., Butthole Surfers) or taking a Principled Stand against smoking any weed (Minor Threat), making insane noises come out of large amplifiers, saying mysterious things in interviews...who wouldn't want to be a part of whatever it was that allowed all this to happen?
As it turns out, I didn't. One night, after my actually-existing rock band had settled firmly into disappointment but years before I'd finally quit, I was in Brooklyn for a show. (The band was based out of NYC, but I drove down from Rhode Island because I couldn't afford NYC rent.) My girlfriend at the time, a lifelong Brooklynite, also lived in the city. We were hanging out at some crowded Crown Heights bar when she asked me, in general terms, how I felt about the band.
I babbled and dithered for a while until I suddenly realized: I am doing what I’d always wanted to do. I’m playing in a rock band in the city I’d always believed to be the epicenter of culture. At the time, the band’s two most promising industry connections hadn’t yet been shooed off the scene for being sex pests; “success” seemed, while still unlikely, possible. Wasn't this where I wanted to be?
But I knew better. By the late 2010s, the media apparatus surrounding “independent music” seemed designed specifically to forestall the possibility of a truly alternative cultural infrastructure. This was the era where pseuds like Holly Herndon and Brendon Stosuy were treated as leading representatives of independent musical culture and thinking, all the while securing their MoMA PS1 bags by laundering, respectively, theory-damaged private-college nihilism and brainless posi-vibes self-help grindset MLM crap into a self-serving pyramid scheme: “do it yourself” not as aspirational collective ethos but as an injunction from above. Figures like this, working in tandem with corporate institutions like Pitchfork and comic-book villains like Daniel Ek, successfully expropriated the cultural capital independent musicians had accrued through resisting regular capital, then took all the regular capital, too. The dreamy title promise of Our Band Could Be Your Life was probably always a fiction, but its loss still stung. “Independent music” was, by the time I was an “independent musician,” nothing more than a slightly more-educated, substantially less-lucrative wing of the culture industry, and the culture industry did what it always did: elect, like the Calvinist God, the winners, then tell you over and over that the winners they picked are the best, and you think they're the best now, too, don't you? You wish you were them, don't you? (Their band could be your life.)
And so, sitting there in that crowded bar, thinking about all of how much love I'd devoted to this stupid idiot art form, surrounded by people making ten times as much as I ever had working jobs with titles like “creative director” and “project manager”—there at this high-top we were sharing with strangers, to my shock and embarrassment I straight-up burst into tears. Because I realized, suddenly and forcefully, that I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t want to contribute to that psychospiritual alienation, that feeling that all the good stuff was happening somewhere else. I didn’t want to win, because I didn’t want it to be something one could win. It hadn’t felt good to be on the outside, but I didn't want to be on the inside.
I felt this way both because the inside was artless financialized garbage divorced from the true good and beautiful, yes, but also because the lesson of rock music, or at least punk music, is that you can make an inside wherever you are. What had been so activating about rock music to me were not merely its formal qualities, but the fact that it could, and did, happen where I was: in my bedroom and my weird friend Michael's basement, in the digital eight-track recorder I got as a combination Christmas-and-birthday gift, in the little room I got piano lessons in after school and the high school band room and the makeshift stage at the local YMCA, in my CD player and at the record store thirty minutes away and on my car stereo and through my iPod. Because of this, rock music, for me at least, was like most music for most of human history: something people made for themselves. Music lived in opera halls, yes, it also lived in drawing rooms and living rooms and churches. Good daughters learned piano so families could have music in their houses. Before the advent of recording technology, music was sung not merely by distant celebrities months or years prior, but by us, in the present tense. Recorded music is an echo of this, a ghost: a splendid one, to be sure, but a ghost nonetheless.
I don't think this died with recording, to be clear. Not only has the live show proven an enduring institution, but recorded music itself has found ingenious ways of incorporating this present-tense energy into the recording process both aesthetically and culturally. If a bunch of smartasses from Queens who could barely play their instruments can make immortal contributions to the canon of popular American song, why can't you? When a venue reneged at the last minute on their promise that a show would be all-ages, Fugazi moved the concert to a shut-down grocery store. Guided by Voices wrote some of the greatest pop songs in history and recorded them in a Dayton schoolteacher’s living room. The best Liz Phair record is still her demos. The glory of the rock band is the democratic glory of the popular arts. The first song I ever played on guitar was “Seven Nation Army”; the second was a song I wrote. My song, obviously, wasn't anything special. What was special is that I felt I had permission to write it.
The movie School of Rock was released in October of 2003, when I was ten years old. I have probably seen it five or six times since, never really of my own volition; it was a canonical last-day-before-break high school movie. The occasion of this review is seeing it at a monthly movie night in a friend of a friend's backyard.
I want to be very clear: this movie is, like rock music—especially the rock music its title points towards—stupid. The Sarah Silverman character is a comically Huge Fucking Bitch; one hopes, but can’t quite be sure, that the movie knows what it’s doing here. The canon of rock music Jack Black's character loves is both implausible (I cannot imagine someone, especially back in 2003, who knows as much about post-punk as his music history blackboard demonstrates unironically adoring AC/DC) and strangely well-observed, at least in part due to the hilarious fact that Jim O'Rourke worked on the movie. (This whole article is worth reading—I had no idea before reading it, for example, that the guy from Shudder to Think wrote the rival band’s battle-winning and utterly cornball ballad.) I don't really know what was going on with Richard Linklater’s direction, but all the performances are pitched just past the point of plausibility in a way that might not be “good,” but kind of rules.
That said! More of it than you would think has held up well. There's some really clever writing. (The double entendre at the parent-teacher conference remains an all-time punch line.) The montage in the middle, set to the perfectly weird late Ramones single “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”, is the Platonic ideal of a training montage. I can very, very easily imagine being annoyed by Jack Black, but I think this is the movie he was made for; on its own terms, his performance strikes me as basically undeniable.
The thing that always jumps out at me when watching this film as an adult is something very important to its success, such as it is: it is oddly, genuinely sweet. The movie is filled with structural clunkers—the fat Black girl has an amazing voice, but she's shy about being “ugly”; the ultra-swishy gay boy puts sequins on everything; the east Asian pianist is a nerd dork with a stereotypical accent; several of the girls are assigned to be “groupies”—but, at least to my sensibility, these bombs are more-or-less defused by film’s surprising tenderness. The shy girl gets over it pretty quick to become the best backup singer. The gay-ass kid's final outfits are pitch-perfect Angus Young schoolboy pastiche. The pianist is led to the correct and excellent realization that every great rock music keyboardist is a massive fucking dork. Jack Black's protests that being a groupie is actually about a kind of unsexual and essential pastoral support are so committed that you almost believe him.
Watching it this time I realized, maybe not for the first time, something very obvious: it is 100% a children’s movie. For my part, when I saw it as a kid, it drove me completely insane. It is mildly embarrassing to relate how intensely I responded to it, even though I was literally ten. But it was unbelievably exciting. It was so fucking cool. I still remember how amped I was on the drive home. In my memory, which I think I believe, I ran upstairs as soon as we got back to our house, brought my $200 Fender Squire-and-amp combo I'd also gotten as a birthday-slash-Christmas gift (how much of my music “career” is owed to my parents’ guilt about my birthday’s unhappy proximity to Christmas, who can say) down to the living room and plugged it in and played some power chords and my parents, bless their hearts, were happy about it.
A lot of the stupider things about the movie become more sympathetic when you realize it’s rooted in a child’s idea of the adult world. Jack Black is a kid’s idea of a bummy loser. Sarah Silverman is a kid’s idea of a buzzkill grown-up (which also explains the hilarious detail that she works as the “assistant to the mayor.” For whom but children could the idea of “the mayor” signify adult dignity?) Mike White is a kid’s idea of a nebbishy sellout. The fifth graders, for their parts, are maybe the most plausible fifth graders ever committed to camera. As a friend and fellow teacher pointed out, even though Jack Black spends the whole film doing morally dubious, literally illegal things, from a pedagogical perspective he’s a fucking incredible teacher: he’s engaging and funny and honest and speaks to his students like equals and believes very very strongly in them, and they can tell. As an adult, it's extremely funny that he insists on being the frontman and singer of a band full of fifth-graders, but as a kid it made total sense: it would be weirder if he weren't in the band, and his weird naive egoism makes his climactic last-minute audible, when he decides they’re going to perform the guitarist’s song instead of his, that much more affecting, a climactic conferral of dignity.
One of the things I really love about “School of Rock” when considered as a children's movie is how unconcerned it is with all that Disney Channel movie crap about “being yourself.” Every fucking children’s book and movie when I was a kid told a very specific story about “being yourself”: one in which the protagonist was always exceptional, always, in some way, genuinely better than everyone else: a closeted superhero or unrecognized big-brain genius or Harry Potter or whatever. The problem was that society, for one reason or another, makes them repress how exceptional they are— at least until Act 3, when they stop being afraid of their amazing unique brilliance and save the world and everyone claps and cheers and loves them for it. As best as I can tell, the moral of this story is twofold: (a) that it takes being the best to deserve love, or at least to deserve having a story told about you, and (b) if you're the best but other people don't recognize that you're the best, it's because they're stupid idiots.
This story sucks not only because it links human worth to flukish and socially-legible “talent,” though it does, but because being exceptional is a bullshit goal. As a kid, I was exceptional for one or two “good” reasons and a bunch of bad ones. (This is just to say, in my case at least, that if I'd been born ten years later I would've been clocked as autistic by the time I was three; instead, I figured I was just an annoying and unwieldy weirdo— which, to be fair, I also was.) Authority figures melodramatically praised me for the one or two ways in which I was the good kind of exceptional and punished me for the rest, and, as best as I can tell neither treatment was particularly helpful.
It was all fucking horseshit. I knew this from the jump and have believed it ever since. In memory, at least, that it was all horseshit was my first political intuition— specifically, the feeling of sitting in my own reading group in kindergarten, feeling the envy and approbation of those who were just learning, as was developmentally appropriate, to read, and knowing in my bones that none of us chose any of this. I call this a political intuition because it necessarily invalidates the concept of meritocracy, of the hierarchy of human worth that grounds mainstream American politics. Like everyone else, I had randomly woken up for the first time ever a few years earlier, and now I spent my days getting driven somewhere, told to do stuff, and then driven home. The arbitrariness of everything was reinforced a few months later when I fell off the monkey bars and broke my femur: a formative whoopsie.
In any case, by middle school it was all a moot point. I got a better grade when I took seventh-grade English in fifth grade than when I took it again in seventh grade, and I was so annoying all the time that I set the school record for detentions. So I knew that being the secret ultimate chosen-one genius superhero was a stupid goal—both because the allotment of what counts for talent during any given slice of history is utterly unrelated to what in us makes us worthy of dignity, but I also knew it was horseshit because I was a big Fugazi fan by the time I was in fourth grade, and they'd taught me all about how shitty society was, and how individualist consumerism was stupid, and what rape culture was, and how the soul was a strange, wild thing, and, like, who the fuck wants to be a solitary magical genius in a world that contains a rhythm section like Joe Lally and Brendan Canty? You can’t go that hard by yourself.
Hopefully obviously, none of this is to say that it’s wrong to desire to live authentically and with integrity. I just think the exceptionalist story misses a couple of things. For one, I think you can only achieve that kind of integrity through, alongside, and with others—specifically, others you’re not trying to dominate or surpass. But also, I think the Disney Channel concept of “being yourself” erases the fact that you can change. In those kinds of stories, the skills that make the protagonists valuable exist already, perfect little gems of talent, and bringing them into the world is just a matter of screwing up the courage to take them out of your pocket and show others the thing you had all along. This is not what happens in School of Rock. The film’s students do tap into something like “authentic” existence, but that’s not, or not only, because being in a rock band lets them “be themselves.” Being in a rock band allows them to become something they weren’t before, something they couldn’t have been on their own. They change: they become cooler and more self-assured, less willing to put up with the arbitrary cruelty of authority, more discerning in their sensibilities, more attuned to the possibilities of a collective endeavor. And while “natural talent” plays a part in it—only one student is the lead guitarist—the movie depicts everyone in the class as genuinely essential to the band's success. Another beautiful thing the band as a social form models is the fact people doing different things, with different talents, can come together to make something more than they could on their own. School of Rock broadens that ethos to encompass everyone in the room. Rock music serves as a counterpoint to the idea that the only way you can escape dull conformist acquiescence is through some kind of isolated heroic Randian excellence. There’s another way: by making something beautiful with your friends.
The fantasy of the rock band, especially the independent rock band, is the fantasy of change, the fantasy of community, the fantasy of growing up and gaining basic control over your world, of creating things you care about with people you love. It’s a fantasy that links you to a heritage of rebellion: there’s a way of saying “fuck you” to the world that’s a kind of love for the world, and people have said it before, together, and you can say it, too. It’s big and dumb and truly transcendent and I don’t know if any part of it is still alive—I hope it is—but I’m glad I got to be there when it was, or at least right afterwards. The version of it I wanted ended in disappointment for me and for the world both, but the possibilities it revealed are still there, if diffusely, elsewhere; they still orient me. I genuinely cannot tell if the American children’s film School of Rock is what a professional movie-watcher would call a “good movie,” but it is a movie that makes broad and ridiculous gestures towards a broad and ridiculous thing that meant more to me than I can say, and ultimately it’s just kind of nice to know that it’s still out there, pointing.