’I Used to Get Mad at My School’: representations of schooling in rock and pop music

Abstract

This article draws upon theories from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies and literary theory, to analyse representations of schooling in rock and pop songs. The songs selected cover a period from the beginning of rock V roll in the 1950s, to Britpop and the present. It is argued that schooling is overwhelmingly represented as the antithesis of leisure and that in the 1960s conjuncture the representations of schooling became more and more critical. Even so, the resolution to the perceived oppression of schooling takes place at an imaginary level of fantasy. Other features of these representations are discussed, including the challenge provided in pop and rock songs to the notion of schools as spaces where relationships, romantic and/or sexual, do not take place. The way in which temporal aspects of schooling are represented and the division between clock time and time as experienced is discussed. The formal analysis is located within a larger project of ideology critique and its strengths and weaknesses are signalled.