March 6, 2025
Dear parents of our History of Rock Music students,
As the trimester concludes, I want to send you a recap of our elective and the great conversations about music and culture that we’ve engaged in.
For the first five weeks, we focused on rock’s early decades, the 1950s and ‘60s. We analyzed the recordings of Chuck Berry and conducted individual research on rock stars of the ‘50s, including Black musicians like Little Richard and Sam Cooke and white ones like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Part of this included an examination of how Black music was marketed to white teenagers, a theme that extended throughout the entire course. We spent some time exploring ways the music industry attempted to fill the vacuum left by these early rock stars: Brill Building salaried songwriters like Carole King (leading to an important discussion about gender dynamics in rock music), the manufacturing of teen idols, and the surf music trend popularized by The Beach Boys. This led us to an in-depth study of The Beatles and other British Invasion bands through another research exercise, emphasizing the specific ways they were influenced by Black American rhythm and blues.
From there, we dabbled in a number of sub-genres of rock music, from the '60s through the '90s: folk rock, psychedelic rock, glam, punk, metal, grunge, and a particularly memorable class debate about whether "soft rock" exists and, if so, which earworms qualify. Along the way, we paused for more academic discussions of the consequences of rampant drug use among celebrities, notable lawsuits over potential musical copyright infringement, and why political campaigns often mistake songs that critique America for songs that exude patriotism. We also enjoyed thematic classes in December (holiday rock) and February (voting on the "Kissy Awards" for best rock love song).
Our students also had opportunities to analyze song structures and experiment with songwriting in various styles. We studied the 12-bar blues, major and minor keys, verse-chorus-bridge patterns, and the emotive I-V-vi-IV chord progression that overtook popular music from the '80s through the 2010s. As amateur songwriters, the students worked in pairs to create and in some cases perform snippets of teen-angst blues and socio-political commentary. (A few of these were actually quite good!)
Our final project was an album review. Thank you to those of you who participated by exposing your child to music of your own childhood, encouraging them to listen to particular artists, or giving them access to your vinyl record collections. Each student selected a significant rock album, reviewing it first as a listener before conducting “rabbit hole” research and writing a second review from the perspective of a music historian. Their live presentations this week about these albums, complete with sound clips and images, inspired much interest among the group and displayed some fascinating literary criticism.
I'm sharing again our Drive folder with all the course materials so you can enjoy the music and the corresponding analytical questions. This has been such a fun class to teach. Thank you for the opportunity to work with this terrific group of kids.
Sincerely,
Mike Fishback