Noise Complaints
Uptown funk, Beltway punks: on a loud, rude, obnoxious, and (disturbingly) correct generation
So this week, my son's band played the Apollo. Theater. In Harlem. My kid played the Apollo.
Ok. I'd love to go on and tell you that our 11-year-old is a new member of the JBs, helping Soul Brother Number One set it off. Or that he backed the next Jackson 5, Isley Brothers, Ne-Yo, H.E.R., or Dave Chapelle. But the fact is, he’s merely a surprisingly adept trumpet player in the MS-104 Symphony Orchestra, in one of twelve Manhattan public schools selected to perform at Monday's tenth Manhattan Borough Arts Festival. Which actually seemed perfectly miraculous by this show's end.
I'm not saying that these youngest musicians in the house didn't crush their grade-appropriate arrangement of Tchaikovsky's stormy Marche slav. I am saying that being there in that sacred venue to see this middle-school crew appear on a bill with an ominous gospel choir from Talented Unlimited — alums: Angela Bofill, Laurence Fishburne, Yasiin Bey (FKA Mos Def), Gene Anthony Ray (aka Leroy from Fame) — a vicious salsa band from Esperanza Prep, plus the expected heavy-hitters from La Guardia and Professional Performing Arts School, made me proud not only of him but of this city, its kids, its teachers, and public educators around the country. And to value their leadership at a time like this.
Before I explain what I mean, I should make it clear that I hate kids as much as the next middle-aged person.
Not only has our small apartment been filled with the plangent/deranging sounds of someone learning a brass instrument for the past two years, but lately I'm often dumbfounded by the stuff coming out of this kid's mouth. Not technical fouls exactly — no f-bombs, s-bombs, or other incendiary devices. Just a level of dismissive, casual disrespect — "Shut up," "Will you stop?" blank-faced mean-mugging — that it's very hard to square with someone I'm a foot taller than, have 60 pounds on, and whose iPad use I'm legally allowed to withdraw at any time.
Even if I'm rehearsing something dads have told their sons since the Eisenhower administration, I say it wholeheartedly here: If I said some of the shit my kid tells me to my parents, I wouldn’t have been redirected, co-regulated, or made to feel seen and/or heard. I’d have been put to death.
Somehow despite this built-in resentment, I’ve been able to put up with sanctimonious, know-it-all, virtue-signaling college students since they were called Millennials. But something shifted with Generation Z and I don’t think it was just co-producing another addition to its ranks.
The people coming of age in what we graspingly call a poly-crisis — Trump, Covid, racial justice protests, climate — seem to have grown up faster, perhaps picking up on what a name like “Generation Z” says about their elders’ views of their long-term prospects. And in the past six months, these same people have watched a visible campaign by a U.S-backed country that they've only known as a violent apartheid state erase women, children, and civilians from an area that's being as atomized as any major city in Syria or Yemen was, but with powerful domestic forces arrayed against expressing outrage about this. And in case you haven't noticed, they’ve gotten kind of loud about this.
While I've resisted an almost daily call to write any more than I have about these protests, seeing all those wild-ass, disciplined, rowdy, brilliant kids perform this Monday night put things in a new perspective. And one thing it really drove home was the fundamental difference between teachers and people who work in education.
The signal example for all this, from right here in New York City, is Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik.
I don’t want to make too big a deal about her. But it does seem worth asking how else the last few months in this country would have gone if this one university administrator from one campus in one city had come up through the ranks of education — instructing, teaching, guiding, or somehow working directly for students — rather than helping run the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It’s worth asking if this fundamentally different orientation might have enabled her to see the House Committee on Education and the Workforce as the neo-McCarthy hearings that they are and just…I dunno, give them a time-out. Or at least do pretty much anything but what she did do, which helped set in motion something that now looks like either a spring awakening or a slow-motion, nation-wide car accident.
Shafik obviously knew the score going in. She'd watched House Republicans coax her counterparts at Harvard and Penn into answering bad-faith, do-you-still-beat-your-wife questions — clumsily and legalistically — with intent of getting them pilloried in the media and, ideally, fired.
I guess that this entitled administrator — and by "entitled," I mean she has a literal title, "Peer of the Realm," given by Queen Elizabeth 2 — thought that she could manage these people the same way the head of a foundation manages a surly donor: nod, placate, look chastened, indulge even the most childish line of questioning, and then bounce, peace-out, back to the Upper West.
She did show amazing dedication to this tack. She told lead inquisitor Elise Stefanik how many Columbia students had already been suspended for exercising their First Amendment rights. She assured her that one potentially Hamas-sympathetic professor had been fired. And when Stenanik identified another scalp she wanted — that of a tenured faculty member already under review — Shafik couldn’t have delivered a better illustration of the phrase "threw him under the bus" if she had dragged the guy out onto Broadway and tossed him under a northbound M60.
When she got back to her campus after promising a radical media-hungry GOP cell a vengeful crackdown on her students and faculty, Shafik confronted a encampment that protestors said would remain there until Columbia divested from Israel. So this non-teacher turned anti-teacher wound up assigning the whole country a curriculum for the remaining school year: a bracing lesson in old-school, top-down, state-backed repression the rest of us ignore at our peril.
First, she wrote an open letter to the NYPD, asking them to come onto the private university grounds for the first time since 1968, and arrest anyone who didn't leave, for trespassing on the campus they attend. The cops came, hauled protestors off, cleared the quad. What happened next is something I've seen in person several times, at several peaceful protests, especially those involving a lot of black and Latino people.
A peaceful protest is underway, cops show up in riot gear, mistake the protestors for an opposing football team who forgot their equipment, hear their unshouted "hut-hut!," and turn the peaceful protest into something else.
That's always the intent, and it's so unmistakable and has been in practice for so long that I now assume that, in every video I see of violence at a protest, the inciting incident didn't make the final cut.
Anyway, you know the rest: the NYPD cleared the first encampment, a more agitated group set up another one on a different lawn, faculty members walked out in protest of the administration’s initial crackdown, and what had been one peaceful protest at one university spread to campuses across the country and became what’s now looking, domestically at least, a lot like this generation’s Vietnam War.
Thousands of arrests. Viral videos of extreme police violence at universities, especially in those states, like Texas, where they like to drive that message a whole lot harder. Centrist media signing off on the repression, while conservative media claiming it doesn’t go nearly far enough. (Between April 18 and April 30, the NY Post ran 150 stories on Columbia's protests alone.)
At this point in such articles, you'd probably read about the same three or four same antisemitic shouts that a few ugly off-campus dipshits managed to lodge into every subsequent news cycle, and we'd spend the remainder of this piece weighing one potential meaning of a pro-Palestinian slogan against each other, sifting through definitions of the word “genocide.”
And behind all this, we’d be musing on whether most participants in this sustained, nationwide university-based protest movement are mentally competent enough to distinguish between a people, many of whom are among their ranks, and a government of flagrantly corrupt, religious-fundamentalists that has politically boxed itself into continuing to murder tens of thousands of children, women, and elderly civilians, displacing and starving more, and seem to be moving onto the next phase of a systematic process some Jewish critics have identified as liquidation.
All of which translates into something like: “Sssshhhhhhhh!”
If you get as confused about these protests as I do, and as the media lately seems to prefer we be, it’s helpful to know that most actual educators at universities across the country aren't calling cops on students, and many are walking out with them. For one very smart and artful consideration of the experience being shared at universities across the company, I recommend Indiana University prof and podcast co-host Phil Ford in this anguished but inspiring episode of Weird Studies.
For another contrast, see Rachel Weber, who teaches part-time at U Mass and belongs to Jewish Voice for Peace, and recently told The Nation that students had been "stonewalled, vilified, betrayed, and punished by the administration since October for demanding that their tuition money not be spent on genocide. Their arguments are well-researched and well-articulated." As opposed to yet another administration using ye olde "outside agitators” trope to discredit the protests, when as she said, "the only outside agitators, the violent actors, were the police."
Recently, university presidents like Wesleyan’s Michael Roth and Northwestern’s Michael Schill have found principled resolutions with protestors at their schools. Not that this prevented Elise Stefanik from accusing the latter Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors with “unilateral capitulation to the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, antisemitic encampment,” despite his refusal to divest from Israel. (“I really am offended by you telling me what my views are," Schill told one member of the GOP cell.)
So to the recently departed Steve Albini's dictum “If the dumbest person is on your side, you're on the wrong side," let's add the following: If Mike Johnson, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton come to your campus demanding that you bring in the National Guard and stage your own Kent State 2, ignore them. Join every possible media effort to make it even more thunderously obvious that the party of very-fine-people-on-both-sides, Soros-funds-BLM, and Jewish space lasers is less than sincere in their opposition to antisemitism.
While I have my qualms with NYC Schools Chancellor David C. Banks, it does sound like he and his fellow public-school administrators knew how to handle the soundbite-seeking GOP hacks like so many PTA Karens. “This convening, for too many people across America in education, feels like the ultimate gotcha moment,” Banks told the committee. “It doesn’t sound like people who are actually trying to solve for something that I believe we should be doing everything we can to solve for.”
You have to love the algebraic usage of "solve for" in this context. It’s also a nice corrective to statements like one from our hapless mayor, the ever enigmatic Eric Adams, who obliged a local Fox News channel’s request that he discredit Columbia protestors as "outside agitators.” See if you can follow this:
“If you have one bad professor educating 30, 40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions, you don’t need 50 bad professors speaking to 50 students,” Adams told the reporter. He then added: “If it’s one, if it’s two, it’s 20, that is what we need to be focusing on."
So let’s see..50 times 50, divided by 30, carry the two —— well, you get the idea.
One thing that Adams and the other law-and-order folks have right: protests are effing annoying. They're loud, disruptive, chaotic, filled with pushy, self-righteous people who aren't open to debate and whose public march or sit-in attracts a guaranteed array of opportunists, saboteurs, and people with offensive or inscrutable signs. If I'd kept my photos of all the stupid signs we saw protesting the imminent invasion of Iraq I'd post them and, who knows, maybe the incalculable loss of life, money, American legitimacy, unity, and security that war brought would sit a bit easier knowing a few crackpots and conspiracy theorists also opposed it.
In case you haven't heard, New York is not the chillest city these days. What with all the law-flouting criminals, insane rents, and Manhattan's steady conversion into the regional branch of Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian banks. In the summer of 2020, we lived across the street from the one-three precinct, which had recently been the NYPD academy and was the command center during the September 11 attacks, and which that summer was a point of conflict between the agents of conservative authority and protestors mobbing Third Avenue during the first BLM protests.
Chants, yells, helicopters, clashes. It was loud, scary, hot, and not the most kid-friendly environment. I wrote a piece called "Defund the Dementors" about trying to explain all this to an 8-year-old Harry Potter fan, and, let's say, failed honorably.
My head is still ringing from that summer, and probably will for the rest of my life. And since it looks like we might be queueing up another one like it, I'd like to do a better job helping my kid through this one. And I get the sense that will mean building greater tolerance for noise, disruption, and chaos.
You know this whole thing has spun you out if you're a Columbia linguistics professor and, to open your NYT column condemning the protests' education-stifling effects, you complain that they prevented you from sharing with your tender charges John Cage's provocative 4'33", whose title ay self-respecting middlebrow knows stands for four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
"I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building."
Apparently he’s walked this fit of pique back a bit since, but it's still worth asking what spring busted inside this prof’s head that he’d imply that the Zen Buddhist Cage, who embraced chance in composition and supported progressive causes his entire life, wouldn't consider this hypothetical use-case to be among the best ones 4'33" ever had. Why would a linguist on record decrying hyper-sensitive campus speech policing turn around and write a column literally telling these punks to get off his lawn?
It’s worth asking how to avoid falling into the same trap.
But once again, it was a seriously beautiful night Uptown this Monday.
After a finale that filled the Apollo’s balconies and aisles with quickly but well choreographed teenaged dancers, and the stage with two gospel choirs, prodigy saxophonists, keyboardists, and percussionists who somehow turned Tina Turner’s ‘80s power ballad “The Best” into a song of soaring, aching sweetness, the whole house emptied out onto the sidewalk.
This large, diverse crowd of kids, teachers, parents, conductors, and outside agitators — mostly strangers to each other — spilled out of the Apollo and onto the 125th Street sidewalk. Throngs stood or swayed, hugging each other, crying, screaming, taking selfies. It was clear and cool but the sidewalk radiated a bit of warmth from one of the first hot days of the year.
I had to push back through a static mosh-pit to get back into the lobby to find the kid, only to learn that he'd already snuck out with a bandmate. He refused to pose for a photo, and actually yelled at me for trying to get a shot of him in front of the Apollo's stage door, where we reassembled to — contrary to my vigorous pleas to take the Downtown B — climb into an effing yellow school bus.
The kids in that bus had been in that theater all day for tech rehearsals, and apparently hadn't consumed anything but Jolly Rangers and borderline-illegal energy drinks. I crammed myself in between two instrument cases, fought off whatever PTSD those green leather seats triggered, and the bus pulled out onto 126th Street and headed toward FDR Drive.
A male saxophonist who was about 85% kinky hair was conversing with a female violinist beside him at a volume you'd use to call to your climbing partner before they belay you up a wintry peak in the Himalayas. A half full bottle of Snapple rolled spinning under my seat, and I kind of half-kicked it back in the direction it came from. Whichever DSM-5 designation applies to delirious, deli-stimulant-cranked, pre-adolescent prima-donnas, that’s what was talking, yelling, singing, and laughing all across town.
They were so effing loud that they drove all thought from my brain as we pulled onto FDR South.
I rode with hands pressed against my ears as we sped down FDR Drive, street lights flashing, seatbacks pounding, ears ringing into the night — every so often, reminding myself how often these kids will surprise you.