[Teen School Girl Fucking In Jungle
Facunda Ganesh
The study of cultures should lie at the heart of the Sociology of Education. Increasingly this is less and less the case as many of that much maligned anddepleted group, sociologists of education, have sought refuge in the study ofeducation policy and education management. Meanwhile, cultural studiesdominates a field in which cultures have become disassociated from structuresand from which the social has been expelled. Rather than wring their hands,sociologists should engage with cultural studies and learn from the methodsreleased by the linguistic turn and its emphasis on texts no matter howcircumscribed that emphasis turns out to be. Moreover, cultural studies hasopened up new fields of enquiry, particularly in the field of popular cultureand sociologists, even sociologists of education, which, after all isintimately bound up with culture, need to engage with them. It is in thisspirit that I offer this sortie into the terrain of pop and rock music.
The sample drawn for analysis is best described as a theoretical sample. Suchis the volume of pop and rock songs produced during the period beginning withthe advent of rock and roll in the fifties that a representative sample wouldbe difficult to draw even if the total population, as here, is restricted toAnglo-American pop between the 50s and early 90s. The fact that only a smallfraction of pop music produced annually enters public consciousness byappearing in the charts and thereby gains crucial exposure on the radio andtelevision also makes knowledge of the entire population hard to attain. Thehistory of pop is littered with records whose release was barely, if at all,registered by anyone outside the circle of those who produced them. Thus anysample must inevitably confront the issue of its lack of representativeness. The sample drawn here is based on the compilation of British Hit Singles (Gambaccini, Rice et al. 1993). This records every single that entered the British pop charts from1952 to 1992 which was searched for titles containing key words like school,teacher and education.
The such hits are not numerous. Out of 17,296 hits, only five titles containedthe word "school." Even so, this sample remains far from representative in anystatistical sense as the representations sought do not always align themselvesneatly with the titles of the records. There have been in the correspondingperiod 47 hits associated with football. Numerically, schooling as a subjectof pop hits is roughly equivalent in popularity to songs about boxing(Gambaccini, Rice et al. 1993, 421) Slightly more songs enter the sample ifalbum tracks that did not become hits are included. This latter deficiency hasbeen partly made up from my own extensive memories of pop songs and by searcheson the World Wide Web of rock stars' home pages, databases of lyrics and thecatalogues of record stores.The textIf the issue of the sample is not problematic enough the question of what constitutes the text, the unit of analysis, also compounds the difficulties associated with this kind of research. As Frith points out (Frith 1983: 14), sociologists who have studied pop in the past have tended to analyse song lyrics whereas the impact of pop on its listeners and the meanings it produces flow from the overall sound and rhythm of a song. In this process the lyrics may play a relatively subordinate role.
As the representations discussed here come from a number of different pop genres it is only feasible to take the lyrics as the main element of thetexts. This would be an undoubted weakness if the aim of this paper was to produce a definitive reading of the songs sampled. However this would be a vain pursuit because these songs have no single meaning fixed forever in time. In addition there are no specific musicological features that pop songs containing representations of schooling have in common which would permit a musicological analysis. This is not to say, of course, that all the meanings communicated by pop songs containing representations of schooling are totally dependent upon its lyrics. It is the case, however, that the lyricsare the only element of the songs that carry traces of representations of schooling and thus the only way that such songs may be identified.
Since the onset of videos and their reproduction on television stations, including MTV which is dedicated solely to that practice, this is no longer true. The pop video has become a text in its own right (Longhurst 1995: 174-185) combining lyrics and sound with vision. However, records are still being produced and consumed by audiences without the presence of the video which means that it would be invalid to subsume the musical text solely under video. A further, and perhaps better, reason for ignoring videos is the desirability of comparing like with like over time so that a rock song from the 50s might be set alongside one from the video age of the 90s.
Despite the problems associated with the approach, lyrics form the majority of the data to be discussed. I was attracted to this topic partly through an interest in hermeneutics which requires that attention be paid to the context in which texts, in this instance the songs, were recorded and reproduced. Limitations of space prevent much attention being paid to context or to the way audiences read the songs. Instead my focus will mainly beon the formal structure of the language used. A lesser focus will be the intentionality, the illocutionary force of the songs' performers. Further attention could be paid to the intentionality of the texts' authors (where the authors do not coincide with the performers) but this seems an unnecessary level of analysis for the purposes of this paper. Pop music is a large business and the perlocutionary act, the act performed by saying/singing something is, if successful, the acquisition of money in the form of profit.
As was argued above, the lyrics of pop songs may be relatively unimportant in the way they create meaning. The text of a pop song is therefore a combination of its lyrics, rhythm and sound. As Frith points out, this causes problems for cultural theorists as concepts like "text" and "representation" are derived from literary theory and in order to apply them, music must be reduced "to songs and songs to words" (Frith 1983: 56). Accepting that limitation, I want to ask here initially, not what do pop songs about schooling mean but rather the wider question of whether pop songs can represent anything at all. The position that holds that texts, of any sort, can represent a reality external to them is of course that which is known inliterary theory as realism (Frith 1988: 112).
Analysts attached to the methods of formalism in its structuralist manifestation deny that this mirroring function is possible arguing instead that realism is an effect of language and that what seems transparent is in fact opaque. Rather than reflect a pre-given reality texts produce the means by which their readers can interpret their own experiences and even do things in the world. In Lacanian theories they also produce and fix subjectivities. Thus Bradby talks of the way that texts offer positions for the speaking subject (Bradby 1990: 343). The main consequence of this position is that meaning is sought within texts themselves without reference to the means of their production, the context in which they appear or the meanings created in the act of reading by their readers.
Restricted by space and time I cannot in this paper engage in an analysis that treats with a song's production, text and audience (Longhurst 1995: 22-25). What I shall attempt instead is not narratology as such but an analysis of the songs as narrative fiction (Rimmon-Kenan 1983) and some consideration of the context in which they were produced. How these songs were read and what meanings were constructed from them, is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.
In the beginning there was rock 'n' roll and in the 50s Chuck Berry was one of its most influential progenitors (Palmer 1996: 31) (Macdonald 1995: 70-71). In addition, as Wicke has observed, "the most intelligent and most precisely observed lyrics in rock'n'roll have always come from him" (Wicke 1990: 46). Commentaries on Berry all tend to share a realist perception that he celebrated and represented the emerging teenage culture or that he evoked the teenage experience (Wicke 1990:46; Paraire 1992: 43). In rock and roll songs, as in songs in other pop genres, references to schooling are few. One well known exception was Jerry Lee Lewis' "High School Confidential," but the lyric is very under developed; there is no coherent narrative and the only representation of school life is "rockin," "boppin" and "shakin" at the high school hop. In this song Jerry Lee Lewis creates an exciting "atmosphere" (Paraire 1992: 11) by his vocal style and by pounding his piano. The lyric is almost redundant. In Chuck Berry's songs, by way of contrast, several references to schooling appear and compared to "High School Confidential." his songs "School Days" and "Sweet Little Sixteen" are veritable disquisitions on schooling.
"'School Days" takes the form of a day in the life or the diary of a pupil chronicling all the events that occur after getting up and going to school. The language used is typically that of the everyday (Middleton 1990: 229) rooted in the here and now of schooling. Berry, like most of the singers considered in this paper, is male but the gender of the pupil is unspecified. However, the frequent use of the pronoun "you" suggests that the pupil is the writer of the song and therefore male. On the other hand the use of "you" also invites the listener to adopt the subject position of the pupil and that could be taken by anyone regardless of their gender.
"Ring, ring goes the bell" is the song's subtitle. The bell punctuates the pupil's temporal experience of school in which one event remorselessly follows another. Time markers in school, writes Adam, "bind pupils and staff into a common schedule within which their respective activities are structured, paced, timed, sequenced and prioritized" (Adam 1995: 61). Added to this clock time in the song is personal time. Time experienced by the pupil. Lessons on American history and Practical Math are followed by lunch. More lessons follow until three o'clock when school is over. Time as a resource is a prominent theme in the song. At lunch there may not even be time to eat before lessons restart. Being distracted, pressured and harassed is characteristic of the school experience represented. "The guy behind you won't leave you alone" and in the lunch room you are lucky if you can get a seat. Back in class, more problems arise. This time from the teacher who does not realise how mean she looks. Finally, at three you can lay down your "burden" and escape.
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