August, Track 6: Rockin’ the Suburbs

The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings will be more focused on the songs than others, and this is all vague enough in general that we didn’t know exactly how it was going to go. We’ve been finding out. Today, we’re onto Track 6.

Side A

1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey

Side B

6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale

If you use Apple Music, a good friend and reader has put together a playlist of Tracks 2 through 11 here.

***

The joke, in part, was on me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand that the song wasn’t serious. Obviously, the song wasn’t serious. But there was a reaction inside me to the song’s opening lines, early in high school, that said, Yeah, they *don’t* know what it’s like to be male, middle class, and white.

There’s an ignorance to much of suburbia. It’s one of its defining characteristics, right? If you’re a suburban kid, it looks like the stereotypical towns you see on TV. It looks like the towns around you. It looks so generic in places that it just looks like itself. So you assume that it’s the norm, because it’s presented as the norm, and for the parts of society whose voices are most easily heard, it is the norm. The suburbs run a lot of things. They’re the wealthiest, they’re growing the fastest, they’re the targets of commercial and political campaigning. It follows logically, then, that a lot of suburban people, especially those growing up in the suburbs, think their world is the world, and everything else is the different. The ignorance follows, often despite one’s best efforts. It’s just so easy. It’s easy, in suburbia, to know little about the non-suburban world, and easier still to think of the non-suburban world not as one full of lives just as deep and rich and significant as yours but full of lives that only exist in relation to your visits to them, or exist just in stereotypes and caricatures, even in some of the most well-meaning, compassionate views.

The curriculum in my sophomore year English class in high school was off the rails. It was a mess. It worked well for me, overall—I had free reign to do a lot of reading and thinking and creative exploring—but it was a mess. Well-intentioned, with probably some good seeds, but a teacher ill-equipped to guide students on this cultural-awareness/process-based/individualized-and-self-driven approach to reading and writing and public speaking. It was a running joke in the school. It had been a running joke for nearly a decade when I encountered it. It might still be a running joke.

In the fall in this curriculum, we did a unit on empathy and sympathy, which is a good vocabulary lesson and a good lesson for mostly white, mostly well-off suburban kids but was, again, not something the teacher was particularly equipped to handle. The core of the unit was that each student had to pick what I would now call a marginalized community and learn about their experience, but this was not how it was presented. It was instead presented in some phrasing like, choose a race or a class or women and present on…how they’re discriminated against? The last part wasn’t clear. It wasn’t clear what we were supposed to be talking about. We were supposed to interview someone of our chosen “race or class or women,” we had to make a PowerPoint about our chosen “race or class or women,” and if I recall correctly, the few non-white kids couldn’t study their own race (we didn’t have a great idea of who was poor, so any prohibition on self-examination there was unenforceable, and I think women could talk about women). One kid, who was ostensibly studying the African-American experience, walked up to the teacher and said, “I don’t know who to interview,” to which she said, slowly, “I think you could think of someone,” and motioned with her eyes towards the only Black student in class, who was watching the exchange twenty feet away with a facial expression probably best described as, “over this shit.” This was the same teacher who had us watch the second episode of The Office once, the one where the Scranton office of Dunder Mifflin undergoes a racial diversity seminar that, due to Michael Scott’s um…antics, goes awry, and we all walked out of class when the bell rang and said to each other, “Holy crap, [teacher] does a lot of the same things Michael Scott was doing.”

Anyway, for my chosen “race or class or women,” I wanted to research middle-class white people. I was hopped up on anti-affirmative action rhetoric. I’d read something about how the middle class was getting screwed. I completely in error thought of myself as middle class (my family, I would realize in the coming years, was far from that category’s upper bound), and I thought the world was being made too hard for folks like me.

I think the realization of how wrong I was with that perception of barriers came rather slowly, and came over the next few years, and is still coming, but in the meantime, the teacher told me that middle class people were too normal but that I could research upper class people but that since they weren’t discriminated against, my presentation would more just be talking about the upper class. I made a PowerPoint with a couple McMansions on it. I got an A+ that quarter.

There are places within white suburbia that have it hard. Suburbia, despite its monolithic inclinations, is not a monolith. Issues facing middle class families exist, and affirmative action, as we’ve written on this site before, is imperfect. There are also individual hardships—grief, trauma, anxiety, disease—that beset anyone, suburbanites included. But on a cultural level, speaking quite generally, male, middle class, white suburbanites have it pretty easy.

Which is what makes this song hilarious.

And which makes this song all the funnier when I remember blasting it out the windows of a 2001 Ford Taurus on the seven-minute drive to my good public high school, often speeding, never with any fear or reason to fear consequence for my disregard for traffic law (this last part isn’t funny, actually—illustrative, but not funny).

The story with the song is that Ben Folds saw bands like Korn and Rage Against the Machine rocking out and said, “You guys are losers,” and decided to write a song making fun of the fury of white suburban males. How angry they all were. How little reason there was to be so angry. I used to listen to it early in those high school years, in the August portion of those high school years, when the air was hot and the windows were down and there wasn’t much to do except blast satirical (semi-satirical, for me at the time) angst out the windows of a Ford Taurus on your way wherever you had to go. Ben Folds, from a burned CD. Screaming about the suburbs.

***

Enjoy. The second version’s clean enough to have been on CBS, but also gives you a visual expression of the fury.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMveyhTJmoA