The Rebellion of the Angry and Dumb

Stanislav Chlebowski

My dad always said dangerous things to me as I was growing up. One of those was: "If you're going to rebel, do it over something big and important and make a real statement."

He knew what he was doing, of course. He trusted me to reason it out.

I used a similar tactic in the school in which I teach and serve as vice principal. The kids wear uniforms. Every year, there is conflict over untucked shirts. To my former Principal's shock, when we had class meetings about this, I did a bit of a stand-up comedy routine, satirizing a fictitious student who "was going to stick it to the man" by leaving his shirt tails untucked. He was a rebel. He was a hell raiser...etc. (Things improved after that.)

My dad was right, of course. But besides picking good things to rebel against, we should be careful about the conformity of non-conformity.

Last night, I was driving with  the radio on and the song "Fat Lip" by SUM 41 came on, and I caught this puerile, impotent little jab at conformist society:

I don't want to waste my time

Become another casualty of society.

I'll never fall in line

Become another victim of your conformity

And back down.

Oooo.

The joke of it all is -- besides the fact that this is an obvious, juvenile quip -- is that is all falls over the most conforming (lame, harmonically empty) chord progression imaginable -- the same old rock song that has been written time and again for the past thirty years. A whole three minutes of sound and fury. But, in the end, it is a rebellion of conformity. They fit in with the rest of the angry children out there, throwing spitballs when the teacher's back is turned. 

Before one rebels, one had better make sure the rebellion against one crowd is not the mere following of another. When Roger Waters wrote "Another Brick in the Wall," he was saying something. Not only was he saying something, but he was layering his lyrics over an innovative sound made by an exceptional and adventurous group of musicians. And it wasn't just a "screw you because you are older and wear a suit" statement -- it was an indictment of the insidious tactics of the Thomas Gradgrind educational system of England. You know it:

We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! teachers! leave the kids alone!

All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

I mean, it's not Seamus Heaney, but something was being said, there. (And if you are going to join up with someone else for an artistic rebellion, it might as well be Charles Dickens.)

That SUM 41 lyric sums it up for me: for most, modern rebellion has become empty ranting. It's not about an idealistic cause, anymore. It is a tantrum. If the path before us is the way of conformist society, these guys are not urging us to take out the machetes and blaze a new path; they are pushing us to walk down the same old road, but to pee on it every few feet so that others have to tread through it. 

That's what happens when you are angry and dumb and get a record contract.