CIVL’s Aaron Levy welcomes you back to school with some loosely themed institutional education songs to rock and rap out to until the next issue!
Subtitled “Mini Maggit,” for reasons I don’t understand, part of the “Maggit” pairing on this, their cornerstone full length, is as anthemic as any of “Linkin Bizkit” etc’s rap-rock crossover era. “Stop that, quit, all that, quit / who ruined it? You did! Now grab a notebook and a pen.”
The White Stripes – “We’re Going To Be Friends”
A sweet lil ditty about a school teacher and her pupils. I’ve always been curious about what I’ve interpreted as the questionable nature of the implication that the teacher embarrasses the singer over how he “sounds funny” — but it could all be friendly teasing among close classmates and an instructor.
“I went to school with some redneck crackers / right around the time 3rd Bass dropped the Cactus Album / but I was reading Malcolm / I changed my name in ‘89, cleaning parts of my brain / like a baby nine / I took they history class serious…” This storytelling around politics is sublime.
Previously shuffled, and perhaps not the only such track on this list, no year of learning post-2020 summer can be complete without the earnest, painful, and honestly compiled history of black families in North America over the past several hundred years, and Haviah is mighty with the pen on this topic.
