I’d like to believe I had good taste in kids’ TV when I was a youngster. After all, I was a big fan of the cute and clever Sesame Street as well as the kind and gentle Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. On the other hand, I also liked Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs, and He-Man, so maybe it’s for the best that 6-year-old me wasn’t in charge of dispensing the Peabody Awards.
Since I have always been highly susceptible to catchy tunes, another fave of mine was Schoolhouse Rock!, a series of 3-minute animated films set to educational earworms that ran for years and years in between the longer cartoons aired by ABC on Saturday mornings. I am inclined to put Schoolhouse Rock! in the quality children’s programming column, seeing as how the series not only tried to teach young viewers about grammar, multiplication, and U.S. history, but also because the songs were written and performed by urbane jazz musicians such as Bob Dorough (a fellow Arkansan, incidentally), Dave Frishberg, and Blossom Dearie.
The Schoolhouse Rock! installment everybody knows is “I’m Just a Bill,” about how Congress passes laws. My favorite, though, was “Conjunction Junction,” which imagines “and,” “but,” and “or” as boxcars connecting words and clauses in order to keep sentences running smoothly.
I realize that ranking a grammar-related ditty above all the others is tiresomely on brand for someone whose idea of riveting reading material is the AP Stylebook. So if you’d like me to go with a less obvious Schoolhouse Rock! song, I’d choose “Figure Eight,” a rundown of the 8 times table set to the most gorgeous ballad you ever did hear.
Also good: “Three Is a Magic Number,” “Unpack Your Adjectives,” and “The Preamble.” The latter drilled into my brain forevermore the words of the introduction to the U.S. Constitution—the “We the people” bit—something schoolchildren used to be required to memorize for some reason.
Maybe they still make kids do that. I wouldn’t know; I don’t have children of my own. And thank goodness for that, because if they needed help with homework I’d have say, Listen, I don’t understand a thing about Common Core math, but if you’ll allow me to sing this lovely ballad about the number 8 . . .
When I was in high school I acquired the Schoolhouse Rock! box set containing all the songs on CD. I also got Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks, a tribute album featuring extremely Gen X bands such as Pavement and the Lemonheads performing covers of “No More Kings” and “My Hero, Zero.”
I suppose listening to these albums was one of my earliest encounters with the vertigo of pop culture nostalgia. There I was, attempting to relive in the 1990s something made in the 1970s and experienced by me in the 1980s.
Nowadays, the ‘90s themselves have become an object of nostalgia, including among people who didn’t live through the decade. Which annoys me.
I’m starting to understand how my parents felt when they’d hear me humming an Elvis song. “How do YOU know that song?” they’d say. And I’d shrug and be like, “Teddy Grahams commercial.” And they’d be like, How dare you.
Although I am reluctant to sympathize with baby boomers in this regard—given that no generation ever forced the artifacts of its youth down the throats of the rest of us quite like they did—I get it.
I feel the same outrage every time I see a teenager sporting a Nirvana T-shirt and jean shorts.
Indirect Objects 