Yo, Miss! (No. 38)
Another New Year
I wanted to wish you all a happy new year.
2024.
An election year where the fate of our democracy is at stake.
I spent the last week of 2023 trying to unplug a bit and not do much work.
However, if you follow me on social media, you might have seen that a video I posted right before break went viral: me playing the “We Are The World” music video for my students and asking them if they could identify the artists.
It turns out that most of the students could not identify most of the performers:
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I did not expect the video to get so much attention. In fact, I expected TikTok to disable the video for copyright issues. However, people had a lot to say about the fact that these particular Gen Z students were not familiar with artists such as Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. For the record, they could identify Michael Jackson just by his loafers, socks, and glove.
Here is a little history behind the song. Produced by Quincy Jones, the song would go on to sell more than 7 million copies and raise more than $60 million dollars in famine relief in Africa.
When reading some of the comments, I realized that my video also triggered nostalgia for a time when there was more of a shared common popular culture. Now it is infrequent when we have a moment that breaks through our individual pods or micro groups. For the most part, we are each relegated to our own personalized information and entertainment silos. In addition, younger people would often be forced to listen to their elders’ music at home or in the car. Now everyone can just put on headphones and tune out everything and everyone else.
As a result, we have become increasingly more tribal and disconnected, politically, culturally and generationally.
Of course there are advantages to having access to more diverse sources of news and entertainment. There has always been a consistent lack of diversity in the news and entertainment world as a result. However, the loneliness epidemic and overall disconnected nature of current day society could benefit from more unity.
Some fun related history: Mass media has existed for a little over a century in the United States. The first commercial radio broadcast was November 1920 when Pittsburgh’s KDKA reported election returns. By the way, here’s a great lesson that has students explore the debate in the 1920s over if radio was a blessing or a curse.
It is interesting to explore the relatively recent history of mass media and also interrogate how it can both connect and disconnect us as a society.
My Two Recommendations of the Week
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Thank you so much for all your support over the past year. I started my newsletter here in the fall of 2023 and I am so appreciative for those of you who read my posts and content across all the platforms. I am simultaneously excited and nervous for this new year, but mostly hopeful. Drop me a note about what brings you hope in the coming year.
I struggled myself to recall several of the artists in the video, though I knew them when I was a kid. I largely left the styles of music they represented behind when I embraced heavy metal. Speaking of which, Ronnie James Dio orchestrated a similar relief effort with artists from the metal world. There were a small number of participants in that endeavor that I did not recognize either, then or now. Fame is fickle and fleeting. Never too early for people to learn that.
I hope they identified Springsteen.. 1984 was a great year for music (it was that year's American Music Awards after thing where "We Are The World" was recorded).and 1994 was a great year for movies. And we are marking anniversaries for both. But we need to save democracy. That is our #1 priority.