Ed. note: After seeing this thread about a student’s unhappy experience with a class on rock and roll, I started a discussion with Seamus McGee, who has academic experience of his own in this area. He shared the following thoughts.
I’m curious about the department through which the course is offered, because that would strongly affect the approach. To be honest, most of these complaints seem trivial, but that’s only because I don’t have a sense of the larger methodological approach for the course, and so I don’t know if the complaints are grounded on the kinds of expectations that might be legitimate to have for this kind of class. Assuming it’s some general history of rock class, I don’t think the history of the formation of the Pistols is particularly important, even though it’s more complicated than either the student or professor seem to realize. On the other hand, it would be extremely important in a course taught through a different field, like, say, cultural studies, where most scholarship on punk takes place. I honestly don’t know why you’d want to spend much time on Zappa, though at the same time using Bizarre as your example for indie labels’ move into major label relationships doesn’t seem like a very good choice to me, although again, it depends on why and how you’re discussing that issue (i.e. whether you care about the politics of indie labels, which you usually wouldn’t for this kind of class).
Continue reading A critique of Rock School