R&R History Lesson - GRUNGE

ESSENTIAL QUESTION

What was Grunge and where did it come from?

OVERVIEW

"There's a feeling of burnout in the culture at large. Kids are depressed about the future."

-- Music critic Simon Reynolds, 1992, about Generation X

The pre-Grunge era of the early 1980s was a time of media saturation, but many young people did not see themselves or their concerns accurately reflected in the slick music videos offered by MTV or in other mass media. The resulting alienation and apathy helped pave the way for the emergence of a new sound that became known, simply, as Grunge.

Sometimes called the “Seattle Sound,” Grunge began in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early 90s. The Grunge generation grew up on Heavy Metal, Punk, and Hardcore, drawing on elements of each to define its sound. The resulting aesthetic combined the droning, distorted guitar tones of Metal, the alienation and anti-authority attitude of Punk, and the edgy, physical stage shows of Hardcore. Like Punk, Grunge was full of anger, but with a dose of angst, self-deprecation, and depression added to the mix. And though the intimacy and spontaneity of live performances often gave it a similar feel to Punk, Grunge was more musically complex. More varied instrumentally, Grunge also accentuated dynamic shifts that evoked the frustrations of youth. Grunge musicians tended to reject the latest fashions and projected a feeling of indifference that was reflected in everything from their lyrics to their disheveled appearance. Adopting a thrift-store look, artists embraced lumberjack-style apparel -- most notably flannel shirts -- while pushing back against the exaggerated masculinity it often implied.

In its early years, Grunge was largely a localized phenomenon, emerging out of the club scene in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle had been deeply affected by the economic recession of the early 1990s, when unemployment was at a high and Starbucks did not yet have the ubiquitous presence it does today. Grunge, with its dour visuals and indifferent lyrics, seemed to encapsulate the grey and depressed mood of the region at the time. As the 90s progressed, the commercial success of groups such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam catapulted the Grunge sound into a national spotlight for which its creators and adherents were largely unprepared.

Today's Lesson:
You will be working to create a  three-paragraph review of early Grunge music. The class will watch several music videos together, and students will be given a set of documents that they will use as source material for their review.

VIDEOS

• Black Sabbath, “Paranoid” (1970), example of Heavy Metal
• Black Flag, “Rise Above” (1981), example of Hardcore Punk
• Mudhoney, “Touch Me I’m Sick” (1988)
• Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)
• Pearl Jam, “Alive” (1991)

Procedure:
1. Carefully review the following handouts: Handout 1: Document Set; Handout 2: Discussion Questions; Handout 3: Graphic Organizer, and Handout 4: Music Review Template.

2. Use the discussion questions in Handout 2 to help you analyze the documents in Handout 1. As you do so, you should take notes, using the graphic organizer in Handout 3. It is not necessary to fill in every bubble on the graphic organizer; conversely, they should feel free to create additional categories and bubbles. 

Rock and Roll Lesson 5/19/15 - New Wave Day II

1. View a clip of Jerry Lee Lewis performing "Great Balls of Fire." 
2. Answer the questions below.  

• In what ways does this early Rock and Roll performance prefigure New Wave music?
• In what ways does the fashion, the delivery, and the music itself prefigure New Wave?

3.  View the 1956 clip of Connie Francis performing "Little Blue Wren." Make notes as they watch and listen.  Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire" came out the following year, in 1957.  

Compare the two clips, and answer...

• How is the instrumentation different in the two songs?
• How is the vocal style different?
• How are the performers' personalities different?
• How could the style of Jerry Lee Lewis' song be considered a reaction to the other song's style?

4.  Based on the two clips, what connection can you make between early Rock and Roll and New Wave music? 

5.  Play the clip of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive." 

6. Based on the clip, make a list of things in the song, "I Will Survive" that are elements which New Wave rebelled against. 

PUNK ROCK ALBUM COVER PROJECT

1. Please read Handout 4: Guidelines for Designing Your Album Cover. 
2. Using construction paper; crayons, markers, or colored pencils; scissors,  old magazines, etc., use he materials, as well as the information in your ocument sets and the understandings gained from them  to create an original album cover for a fictitious Punk Rock band in the 1970s. 
3. Students may use any additional materials they have to complete the assignment.

PUNK ROCK DBQ

Procedure. 

1.  Please click on  Handout 2: Punk Rock Discussion Guide and Handout 3: Punk Rock Document Set.  You will use the documents to  help you answer the questions.   

• Music
  • “Virtuosity” is defined as having great technical skill. For which of the bands in the videos is virtuosity more important?
  • According to the interview with Bono, what was Punk Rock’s attitude toward virtuosity? Does he believe you need to be a virtuoso to make Rock and Roll?
  • Look at the track listings from two different albums. What do you notice about the lengths of the songs? How does the length of the songs on the Clash’s 1977 album reflect what Bono is talking about?
  • Does the music created by the virtuosic artists convey the same message as the music performed by the other groups? How might their messages differ?
• Audience
  • What do you notice about the performers’ interactions with the audience in the two videos? Is the audience involved? What distinguishes the audience from the performers?
  • How would you describe the role of the audience in this picture of Led Zeppelin?
  • How would you describe the role of the performer in this picture of Rick Wakeman?
  • Who do you think was going to the performance? Watch the clip of the "Sex Pistols Discussing the Music Scene" and speculate as to how they might react to such a concert.
• Social Context
  • According to the Graham Parker video, what was the outlook in Britain in the late 1970s? What are some of the specific words Parker uses to describe the general situation?
  • What do you imagine the situation of young people in particular in this period would have been? What words do you think would best describe their outlook on life?
  • Why might young people turn to music to express themselves in this type of situation? If you had been living in this situation, how might you have gone about expressing yourself through music, even if you didn’t have any money or musical training?
  • Do you think a young person living in this situation would have been more likely to attend a Stadium Rock concert or a Punk Rock show? Why? Do you think that one of the performances in the videos best represents the social and political events of the time? If so, which one and why?
  • What do you imagine the music you would have made in this situation would sound like? (Note the words Parker uses to describe two album titles from this period, which include the words “howling” and “anarchy.”)
  • Can Punk Rock be considered a form of protest music? If so, what were the people who created it and listened to it protesting?
  • How might Punk Rock have been empowering to young people in this time and place? Think about the role of the audience, the sound of the music, and the “DIY” attitude of Punk.
• Album Covers
  • How are the two sets of album covers different?
    Elton John (1975) and Meat Loaf (1977)
    The Sex Pistols (1977) and The Clash (1977)
  • Which covers seem to better represent the idea of virtuosity? The idea of “DIY”? Why?
  • What message do you think the Sex Pistols and the Clash were trying to convey with these album covers? (Note: “Bollocks” is British slang with multiple meanings, but is generally taken to mean “nonsense” or “rubbish.”) Did they make them because they couldn’t afford professional artists to design their covers? What other reasons might there be?
  • Which album cover do you find most appealing, and why?
  • Why do you think the Clash decided to use this cover for their 1979 album London Calling? Compare it to this this cover from a 1965 Elvis Presley LP. What message do you think the Clash were trying to convey about their music? About how they saw themselves fitting in to the history of Rock and Roll?
     

History of R&R Lesson 5/11/15 - PUNK ROCK

ESSENTIAL QUESTION

How was Punk Rock a reaction both to the commercialization of Rock and Roll and to the social climate in late 1970s Britain?

OVERVIEW

"It's a call to arms to the kids who believe that rock and roll was taken away from them. It's a statement of self rule, of ultimate independence."

--Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols

"That’s a very, very great place to be as an artist, when your imagination is your only limitation. It’s not your ability to play like a virtuoso, it’s not your ability to have your family pay for piano lessons when you’re a child, or to have a well-trained voice or to have gone to creative writing classes. Punk Rock was about three chords, four if you were lucky, five if you were decadent -- and having something to say."

--U2’s Bono on the influence of Punk Rock

By the mid-1970s, the live performances of many successful Rock and Roll bands had moved to larger and larger venues. “Stadium Rock” invited tens of thousands of fans to sit and watch bands perform, often from a great distance, and often accompanied by elaborate staging, massive banks of equipment, sometimes extravagant costumes, and virtuosic solos. Bands such as Led Zeppelin, Journey, Queen, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer led the field, commanding increasingly hefty ticket prices along the way.

The reaction against this trend began in Britain with the Pub Rock movement, which summoned a return to the raw sound of Rock and Roll and a move away from a growing commercialism. Musicians such as Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Joe Strummer (later of the Clash) played in bands that appeared in small pubs where they could easily interact with their audiences — much as the Beatles had done in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. The Pub Rock movement helped pave the way for the emergence of Punk, which put audience participation back at the center of the whole enterprise.

Like Pub Rock, Punk provided an aggressive retort to Stadium Rock and the commercial elements of 1970s Rock and Roll. Bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash performed at small, dingy clubs in which the divide between artist and spectator all but disappeared. Audience members often dressed as “punks” and were indistinguishable from the performers themselves. They were no longer spectators worshipping their idols from afar, but active participants whose collaboration was essential to the whole project. So-called "slam-dancing" even found the boundary between stage and dance floor shattered as fans moved amongst the bands.

At the same time, Punk was rooted in the bleak economic and social mood of Britain in the mid-1970s. Unemployment was high, particularly for young people, and a seemingly endless series of strikes led to a “winter of discontent” in 1978. Anger at government policies boiled over into the streets.

The message of Punk was thus anti-mainstream, anti-establishment, anti-commercial, and very angry. As did early Hip Hop in the United States, Punk Rock embodied a “Do-It-Yourself” or “DIY” attitude. Many bands were self-produced and self-recorded. The message was simple: anyone could go out and form a band and make music. Punk put Rock and Roll back in the hands of a young, working-class population, and it did this at a moment when they had something to say.

Procedure: 

1.Play the short clips of live performances fromEmerson, Lake & Palmer, "Nutrocker" (1971), the Sex Pistols, "Pretty Vacant" (1976) and the Clash, "Garageland" (1977).  Explain to students that "Nutrocker" is Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Rock version ofThe Nutcracker Suite by classical composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

2. Based on the clips, please complete the worksheet

3. Answer the following questions in your notebooks. 

• Why would a Rock and Roll band want to perform a version of a Classical composition?  What does this suggest about how they seem themselves as artists?
• Do the artists in the Sex Pistols and Clash videos seem to view themselves the same way?  Why or why not? 
• If you had to describe each performance in a single word, what would it be?
• What do you think are the main differences between the first performance and the second two? 

DISCO PART IV

Today's Lesson:
1. Carefully read the Handout, "Saturday Night Fever." 
2. Answer the questions that follow...

• How does Ebert describe the political and musical atmosphere of the 1970s? What does he suggest Disco music and dancing provided for young people in this environment?
• Why might Disco have been particularly appealing to people from working-class backgrounds? What did it provide them that they might not have found in their everyday lives?
• What does Kael suggest about what Disco dancers got out of dancing? What does she mean by “the need to be who you’d like to be"?
• Look at the last sentence of the Kael quote. What is Nirvana? What is Kael saying not simply about the characters in Saturday Night Fever but about why Disco was so popular with young people in the 1970s?

2. WATCH the movie trailer for SNF
3. Answer the following questions...

• What does Tony tell his father about when and where people say positive things about him?
• What word is used to describe Tony when he is on the dance floor?
• How are the people at the disco dressed? What kind of atmosphere does the disco offer?
• Based on what you have seen in the trailer, why do you think this movie was so successful? Why did it help to make Disco music, and the kind of dancing it encouraged, so popular?

DISCO - PART III

1. CLICK on Handout 1: Social and Economic Conditions in the 1970s. I
2. Based on the documents, complete the chart on page 4, and answer the discussion questions
1. Overall, what do the documents suggest about social and economic conditions in the 1970s
2. How might these conditions have helped make Disco music more popular? 
3. In this type of environment, why might many young people have wanted to “escape” to the disco?
4. How did American attitudes toward women and gay people appear to be changing in the 70s? 
5.  Think back to the performers you saw in the video of Disco hits earlier in this lesson. How might what you saw in those videos show the influence of the Women’s and Gay Rights Movements? Think particularly about the performers, the way they were dressed, and the ways they expressed themselves.

May 5, 2015: DISCO PART II

1. Play the video of the Village People on The Merv Griffin Show performing their hit song "YMCA." The Village People were named for New York City's Greenwich Village, an area with a large gay population and where the modern Gay Rights movement began in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots.
2. In your notebooks, please answer the following: 
   • According to the discussion, what is the attraction of a disco?  
   • Why might some people like this atmosphere more than others?
   • How would you describe the costumes and gestures of the Village People in their performance? 
   • How does the success of the Village People as a Disco band reflect the influence of gay culture on the Disco genre? 
   • Can you identify elements of this influence in any of the other videos viewed in this lesson?  Be as specific as you can.

Today's Lesson 5/1/15 - The Rise of Disco

ESSENTIAL QUESTION

How did Disco relate to the sentiments and social movements of the 1970s?

OVERVIEW

The rise of Disco in the 1970s had an enormous cultural impact on the American audience. It was the music they heard on the radio, the music they danced to. It affected fashion. It affected club culture. It even affected film.

Disco's roots were multiple. It had connections to R&B and Funk, but it was also born out of the urban gay culture in New York City. But no matter its roots, it quickly moved into the mainstream with a string of best-selling hits by artists from Donna Summer to the Village People. The phenomenally successful 1977 film Saturday Night Fevertook Disco's commercial popularity to surprising heights. The film’s soundtrack produced numerous  Top 10 hits and the album sold over 15 million copies.

The vibrant sound and energetic dance moves of Disco provided young people with an escape from what film critic Roger Ebert called “the general depression and drabness of the political and musical atmosphere of the seventies.” The economic prosperity and countercultural exuberance of the 1960s had faded. By the mid-1970s, crime rates soared and the combined “Misery Index” of unemployment and inflation reached new highs.

With that as the backdrop, the lure of Disco proved particularly powerful for working-class youth. AsThe New Yorker’s Pauline Kael noted in her 1977 review of Saturday Night Fever, the film and Disco itself centered on “something deeply romantic: the need to move, to dance, and the need to be who you’d like to be. Nirvana is the dance; when the music stops, you return to being ordinary.”

But almost as powerful as the embrace of Disco was the backlash against it. For those who grew up with three-minute songs, bands playing instruments, and the raw aesthetic of early Rock and Roll, Disco was part of a new problem. Ultimately, Disco's rise helped to foster the fragmentation of the 1970s and changed the shape of popular music culture.

PROCEDURE: 

1. Examine the cover of Newsweekmagazine from April 2, 1979, and answer the following questions: 

• What is Newsweek? What does the title of the magazine suggest about what it covers?
• What does this cover suggest about the popularity of Disco? Was it perhaps more than just a style of music? How would you describe the mood of the cover?  

2. Read the following quote: 

Everyone here knows that 1979 will go down in history as the year Disco became the biggest thing in pop since Beatlemania and possibly since the birth of rock & roll.”

-- Music critic Stephen Holden, quoted in Ralph Giordano, Social Dancing in America, 2007

3. Based on the quote, and what you know about music, as well as history, answer the questions that follow: 

• What is a discotheque? What do people do at a discotheque?
• Why might a particular style of music come to be known as “Disco”? What does the name imply about the purpose of the music?
• What does the quote say about how popular Disco was in 1979?
• Under what kinds of historical circumstances do you think people would be drawn to music that makes them want to dance? Times of prosperity? Times of economic hardship?

4.  Please view the following videos of songs that were major Disco hits in the 1970s: Peaches and Herb, "Shake Your Groove Thing"; Sylvester, "Mighty Real"; and Donna Summer, "Love to Love You Baby."  Answer the questions below, in your notebooks.  

1. • How would you describe the music? Is it fast or slow? What instruments are used? What kind of beat does it have?
   • How does these performers look different from, for instance, the Beatles performing "She Loves You"?
   • How are the performers dressed? What words would you use to describe their appearance?
   • Who are the performers? Describe them in terms of gender, ethnicity, etc.
   • What are the people listening to the music doing? What kind of mood do they seem to be in? How would you describe the style of dancing they are doing?
   • Why do you think many of these people have come to the disco to hear the music and dance? How might this music provide them with an escape from the issues that they face in their daily lives?