Photo by: Tom Couture
Taking place at the University of Dayton in Dayton, OH, from November 6 to 8 will be the awesome Metal and Cultural Impact: Metal's Role In the 21st Century lectures. The event recently announced via their Facebook page their most recent addition, Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick, who will be speaking at the event on November 8 with a presentation about his program, Louder Education. If the name sounds familiar, Metal Injection has spotlighted the program with two seasons worth of awesome interviews with bands. You can watch those here.
I'd explain the lecture to you, but I'll let Skolnick do the talking on this one. After all, he wrote it up!
"Education and rock’n’roll have long had a complicated, somewhat contentious coexistence. From Alice Cooper’s anthem 'School’s Out' to Pink Floyd’s recording of children defiantly singing 'We don’t need no education,' rock in the 70s was rife images of disenchanted youth rising up against parents, teachers and educational institutions. Hard rock and heavy metal built upon these examples in the 80s and beyond. Indeed, it is the all too oppressive, creativity-stifling environment of too many school systems and the psychologically crippling social experiences accompanying them that cause youngsters to make a seemingly overnight Kafkaesque transformation from cute, cuddly cherubs one day to Slayer t-shirt clad malcontents the next.
Louder Education represents the concept that education and rock needn't be mutually exclusive. Coined by guitarist Alex Skolnick, the term was first used as the title of a web series centered on a New York after-school music program, THOR (co-hosted by Alex and THOR founder Chris Harfenist and produced/broadcast by us). Louder Ed’s latest configuration is Alex’s lecture and musical demonstration showing that instead of shunning students’ interest in music – metal and otherwise – parents and teachers should embrace it. The presentation includes, but is not limited to, the following components:
- The anti-school imagery found in rock, while often misinterpreted, does not represent a rejection of learning (many of its biggest instigators, including Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd’s members, are highly intelligent, well spoken and learned people). Rather it is an encouragement of independent thinking and a questioning of conformity.
- Youths are consistently fed the image of “the musician” as a slacker lacking in both intelligence and impulse control (admittedly not helped by certain artists’ behavior). Instead, the focus needs to shift to musicians such as Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson (a pillar of Britain’s business community), Queen’s Brian May (Astrophysics PhD, university chancellor), Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello (Harvard grad/activist) jazz musician Vijay Iyer (Physics PhD, Harvard professor), Henry Rollins (writer, activist), Frank Zappa (late composing genius/social critic) and others who successfully combine sound with smarts.
- Scholastic topics abound in rock music, especially heavy metal. Take literature, for example. What better way to stimulate students interest in Mark Twain, Samuel Coleridge and Ernest Hemingway than through such songs as, respectively, 'Tom Sawyer' (Rush), 'Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner' (Iron Maiden) and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' (Metallica)?"
Sick! I hope this is recorded or at least posted about extensively as coverage so we can see how this whole thing unfolds. Metal is gettijng up there in age and it'll be very, very interesting to see how three days worth of speaking fleshes out to cover the topic. Scholastics be damned, metal deserves a spot in the classroom! The post also says there will be a website launched soon for the event, so we'll keep you posted as we know more!
