As is often true with research, you are left with more questions than answers if you are a truly good researcher and one thing you learn when you do research is that the questions you had at the outset were often NOT the questions you should have been asking in the first place. I teach music education research courses at Northern Illinois University and this is one of the maxims I explain to my students, all of whom are novice researchers and are totally flummoxed sometimes by how twisted and torturous is the researcher's route to a final understanding.
So I started out with a simple mission: to learn about rock music and rap enough that I felt competent to edit and write a music teacher training text aimed at methods teachers, as am I, who prepare college students who are planning to teach music in the public schools. In my case, my special area is "general music" which is taught in elementary schools mainly, Grades K-5 -- and in middle schools as "exploratory" courses in the arts and technology.
The very first thing I found out, that I did not expect, was the sheer staggering volume of rock music. We're talking thousands, maybe millions, of pieces of music. How to sift through that? How to decide what music should be in the text, knowing that only a tiny fraction of the total genre can possibly be included? rankem.com is a website where anyone can rank rock bands and solo artists on a scale of 1 to 10 or something like that in terms of the quality of their performances and their music (assuming they write their own original stuff). When you join rankem.com, they tell you that there are 400,000 rock bands and rappers & solo artists to be ranked. 400,000. And that's not all of them. I got through 10 and gave up the first time. I take my time and try to consider every aspect of each artist/band -- probably not a very efficient way to go about it. I'll keep working on it. Of course, I don't know anywhere close to 400,000 anyway. So most of them I skip over.
So my first task was to back-pedal. I first of all began consulting other texts that have been written and asking experts -- people who know music and who have been listening to rock music for a number of years. And I got a pretty good sense of "classic" rock bands that need to be included. Groups who started out in the 60's and 70's. That seems pretty easy, actually.
Where it gets muddy is beginning in the mid-80's up to the present day mainly because of the lack of perspective one gets after a certain amount of time has passed. So the text is going to focus quite heavily on "classic" rock -- blues-based -- Beatles and Led Zeppelin, KISS, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith -- that kind of thing. And then the Seattle movement -- Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Metallica originally -- and possibly some brief mentions of alternative and post-alternative and alternative-metal and post-progressive and so on -- Indie groups.
I believe this will be a realistic perspective and amount of information to include.
The next thing that happened, and that I did not expect, was to fall so vioilently and passionately in love with the music. Not with all of it, I confess. But -- the most surprising was my wild love affair with heavy metal and grunge. In the beginning, the first time I listened to Sad But True of Metallica, I had to turn it off because I thought it harsh and violent and discordant. Can you imagine??? Sad But True sounds quaint and "classic" to me now. I, who now enjoy listening to Throwdown and Seether and Opeth and death metal even. It was a total shock to me, to find out that one needs to develop "ears" for rock music just as one needs to develop ears for John Coltrane's music or atonal music or Ligeti or Whitacre or late Stravisnky. We in classical music trivialize rock music to the point where I am truly disgusted by it.
The result of the latter situation is that music educators -- both at the K-12 level and in higher education schools of music -- have lost credibility with our students who KNOW the value and quality of this music and have known it -- since childhood in most cases. We are so outdated. We've turned our field into a field of dinosaurs. I hope it's not too late and that my text is the cutting edge of a very widely accepted trend.
But before that can happen, our students need to be educated in and about this music. I find my students really know very little about rock music beyond their favorite artists or perhaps music their parents played around the house when they were growing up. They don't know ABOUT it at all. Very little of the history and nothing at all about how to play it or re-create it (learning how to play covers) or how, God forbid, to TEACH it to young people.
Most of all, they do not see the parallels between rock music and classical music -- and there are TONS of those. They are-- as I was -- completely misled by the performance practice -- the sound and style -- and do not hear the underlying melodic and harmonic structures, the formal organization, the metric and rhythmic traditions. So the technology drives the rock music genre and music educators need to know that the technology is one layer of meaning -- not the only layer.
