Blackboard Jungle

October '92 was the quincentennial of El Descubrimiento De America and for most of the month my eighth grade social studies teacher rhapsodized piously about Cristobal Colon's capricious seafaring.  This  stonewall straggler of the rapidly distressing Italian section of town (called “The ‘Burg” long after the last German speakers departed) gave off amperes of tribal pride as he recounted the Genovese (this is long before a unified Italian state) navigator's struggle to convince Reina Isabel de (brand spanking new) Espana that silken Asia was closer than it appeared on scientifically accurate maps. Though hoarse from bocce-ball victory maduros and stooped by scoliosis, my teacher proved to be a consistently arresting orator on par with the majority of my later college professors.

In his company, we took on the appearance of greenhorn cadets. We followed as he diverged from his gushing heroic hymnals to praise civilization itself, in his mind an alabaster monument honoring the same European gallantry that oversaw its construction. His unrepentant milieu once rewarded his love for military adventurism with a teaching position, so he served this post through several demographic earthquakes, imploring his entirely Black and Puerto Rican captive audience to venerate the West  as a static megalith dozing atop a legibly crested foundation of official history. This, he theorized, conditions the wayward soul to graft a much needed sense of purpose onto a deracinated and thus aimless guttersnipe existence.

In spite of our perceived wretchedness we were inspired to decipher the subtext of his rhetoric -- that we are, at best, star-crossed benefactors of enlightened  condescension -- and wage a woefully disorganized campaign to subvert his wickedness. We saw no challenge more noble than to break him and his stories down. Our mutiny was a fount of inarticulate vitriol and half baked contrarianism gleaned from mimeographed five percenter mysticism, cheaply bound pseudo-historical conspiracy tomes, Do The Right Thing, the chapped and flaking recollection of a Young Lords/Black Panthers alliance tossed about in barbershops, and the crackling dubs of X-Clan tapes. By late November our teacher found himself muted and neutered, a nervously dispossessed colonial sentry looking forward only to pensioned obsolescence.

The youthful mind can be rightfully likened to an arena housing dueling utopian and scientific philosophies or personified as a vicious carouser pursuing refinement through selective decay. Once awakened to the vainglorious intersection of egoism and collectivism, it revels in the elegantly gloved evening time murder of stagnant ideologies. Youthful epiphanies are dumb smart in their intensity and smart dumb youths brandish a metabolism that only accelerates when challenged by dispiriting neglect. Our teacher's suggestion that we lacked a history older than our last defeat in battle or our first recorded baptism provoked us to construct defiant alternate prequels and epilogues. This fan fiction was in effect a looming middle finger meant to cast a dismissive shadow on the Leaning Tower Of Pisa and the hurtful assertion that the exodus of Italians, Jews, and Poles from our city's center left the place a hot jungle mess.

The staggering contradictions inherent to our rebellious dalliances with feuding slogans, symbols, and ideologies were lost on us. Our hasty denunciation of a mostly congenial and genuinely concerned instructor required us to selectively suspend our heaven-sent common sense. This allowed us to claim the moral and logical high ground even while swearing that Africa was really the hot jungle mess part of Asia or envisioning our degraded surroundings as ground zero for a return to unrecorded or intentionally obscured Afro-Asiatic splendor. The validity of our claims was less important than the actions we undertook to refute or at least disparage the official version of history. Once we became aware of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's success in locating and documenting the contributions of Afro-lineal peoples to the history of the Americas after he was ridiculed by an overtly racist history teacher, you frankly couldn't tell us shit.

In this exact spirit, we adopted Leaders Of The New School's rabble rousing "Teachers Don't Teach Us Nonsense" (over the more juvenile hit single "Case Of The P.T.A.") as an anthem. We were  amused to hear Busta Rhymes cram a well reasoned plea for critical thinking into the same verse that houses a half-grunted call for uncivil disobedience. The rappers of LONS articulate a set of understandable grievances, including a lack of instruction directly applicable to viable employment opportunities, but their message is not wedded to a particular critique or strategy, only centered on the visceral thrill of resistance. The song resonated because one of the voices playing the tyrannical sneering administrators in between verses identifies himself with an Italian surname; years later I read the liner notes carefully enough to recognize that the name belongs to the song's engineer.

"Teachers Don't Teach Us Nonsense" celebrates the moment in which the young brain acts as a receiver of multiple squelched transmissions without the benefit of filters or equalizers or any means to modulate messages in advance of their adoption. Another type of transcendent moment, the one that occurs immediately after the realization that history is bunk and prior to the scramble to reinvent self, is beautifully rendered on YZ's "When The Road Is Covered With Snow," from his overlooked '91 "EP" release. Forgoing the nationalist polemics of his brilliant hit single "Thinking Of A Master Plan," the Hightstown, NJ native depicts the Eurocentric narrative as a deathly snow blanketing a road of Black achievement in need of immediate clearing. For the majority of the song he zeroes in on the fleeting instance in which the previously enslaved mind breathes free of the burden of a historicized grudge, a frozen nanosecond rarely appreciated in youth but vital to the project of extinguishing those lingering, unreflecting past selves.

Leaders Of The New School "Teachers Don't Teach Us Nonsense"

YZ "When The Road Is Covered In Snow"