PropagandaRock

A Schoolhouse Rock! Retrospective

Join @shel and @junipertheory as we rewatch and review all 64 Schoolhouse Rock! songs in chronological order.


Shel might finish it here
shelraphen.com/

Originally Aired: February 24th, 1973
Written by: Bob Dorough
Performed by: Grady Tate and uncredited female backup singers

June's Review

Music 🎡🎡🎡🎡🎡🎡

6/5. I Got Six is one of the top 4 bangers ever recorded on Schoolhouse Rock!. It sounds incredible, it's got a fantastic jazz beat, it's not Bob Dorough but instead the legendary Grady Tate, and it keeps adding more and more interesting instrumental stuff as the song goes on. The trumpet when he goes "HE HAD TWELVE WIVES" is one of the best musical moments of Schoolhouse Rock!. Maybe my favorite song from them ever.

Animation πŸ“Ί πŸ“Ί πŸ“Ί πŸ“Ί

The animation is really fun, and also doesn't have a white main character! Cool Schoolhouse Rock!. Good job. I really love the touches that make it feel like a city, like a real place. Still it's kind of disconnected from itself, and I think the music really carries it.

Pedagogy πŸŽ“πŸŽ“πŸŽ“

Okay yeah this song isn't great at teaching times sixes. It's slow and not like, singable. And the aside for "how you spread it around" doesn't really make sense unless you're an adult and get what it's talking about there. However, it does repeat every single one forwards and backwards, which I like. It's more of a benefit to the music then anything, the "6 time x is (something), X times 6" gives them a great beat to end every line on. Once again this has just the BEST song.

Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯🎯

Nine bucks in 1973 would be about sixty bucks today. I'm sorry but you absolutely cannot feed 6 guys at a fancy restaurant for 9 bucks anymore. Still this is mostly a nitpick, the parts of the song that are just about times tables don't really... change.

Yikes 😬

Okay so this song is in a weird place becuase it is, aside from VERB, maybe the most actively, purposefully non-white song in all of Schoolhouse Rock! and that's part of why it's one of the coolest songs in all of Schoolhouse Rock!, imo. It... does also have the thing about That Prince Over There, The One With The Funky Hair, who has Twelve wives, which is... a weird sterotype? But also, this song has more of a narrative then most songs; it's a kid observing the world around them, and I feel like from that perspective it works a bit as "this kid is just kinda observing the weird shit they see along their walk". Still, a 1/5 for this.

Shel's Review

Music: 🎡🎡🎡🎡🎡
Animation: πŸ“Ί πŸ“Ί πŸ“Ί πŸ“Ί
Pedagogy: πŸŽ“πŸŽ“πŸŽ“πŸŽ“
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬😬

June is definitely right that this is one of the best composed songs just in terms of listenability. It's not a song you sing along in your head, knowing all the words, but it's just a damn good song. It's hard to believe that Bob Dorough is still the writer on this one? Like this is the same man who wrote Four-Legged Zoo? Grady Tate does an incredible job performing it and his sadly uncredited backup singers really carry it to a five-star rating. The animation is also quite good. It's not as complex or detailed as some of the later entries we'll be seeing but it does a really good job with what it has in a nice stylized way and syncs up with the music really well including a few subtle touches like the kids moving the balloons on beat with the music. And as June mentioned, this is the first song to feature a Black protagonist and a Black vocalist. I do think it's really funny that the song is written in the first-person perspective, as though this seemingly 6-year-old boy has the voice of a fully grown Grady Tate.

In terms of pedagogy, I actually wanna give it more credit than June did. As we get to these larger numbers in the times table, it becomes much more unwieldy to teach through catchy rhymes alone. This song instead is giving little stories to remember, some to better success than others. "I have six in my left hand, six in my right, six on my head, and you have six in your pocket, put 'em on the floor and that's 24" is super effective. The candy store story for six times seven is useless and the six times eight story goes so fast it's unclear what the numbers have to do with it. Something I think is really cool, pedagogically, about this song is that it's less focused on teaching you your sixes as it is teaching you the commutative property in multiplicationβ€”that is to say, that six time nine and nine times six are the same number. Built into the structure of the song, as well as multiple of the stories, is examples of how numbers relate to each other. We have the six hungry men versus the nine hungry men; and we also have the 36 eggs being divided into 6 boxes, which teaches the relationship between multiplication and division. It's a cool way of indirectly illustrating the relationships numbers have between each other which is very intuitive and tangible. Remember, in theory you've already memorized 2×–5Γ—, which means you already know the first half of 6×–9Γ— just by flipping the digits.

In terms of accuracy... 9 dollars downtown in Philadelphia will get you lamb over rice with both sauces and two sodas from a halal food cart off Market Street so I don't know what June is talking about with this whole inflation thing. That will certainly feed six hungry men. Maybe I'll understand it better after we get to Money Rock!

I want to highlight how our baby Grady buys "red, white, and blue" candies at the candy shop. Subtle Americana works its way into every corner of Schoolhouse Rock! in subtle ways; including the orientalist framing of our wealthy "African Prince" who has twelve wives and seventy-two children. But also, African princes have much better things to do than personally deliver sixty six barrels of oil and spice on the backs of eleven camels who presumably had to ride a boat or airplane to get to America. It paints a weird picture of African countries as so backwards that their royalty is a mere spice trader in America. I think it's worth being more critical of these subtle pieces of propaganda that might seem minor at first but will really build up as we eventually approach America Rock!.

The worldview that children learn watching this is that Africa is a place where you and seventy-one half-siblings are raised in a harem by the twelve royal concubines of a despot and America is a place where children can buy lots of candy and girls and boys live in harmony with balloons. We have to remember that the target audience for this is 6-year-olds who are learning basic multiplication and are only just barely starting to understand that a world exists outside of their own city, let alone their own country. This is what tells them what it means to live in America versus somewhere else. I think it's also a noteworthy contrast to how the homelands of white children get framed later on in other songs. The Mayflower pilgrims and Polish grannies are all civilized and quaint and worth being proud of. The African man at the five-star restaurant has twelve wives.

Next up: Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Beats to Practice Multiplication To


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in reply to @PropagandaRock's post:

late, i just learned about this blog, but honestly i don't think y'all were critical enough of the "african prince" and his twelve wives

shel's critiques are spot on in terms of the rampant orientalism but the framing of the wives is also really sexist, because how can you expect a first grader to understand the nuance of whether the prince having twelve wives is meant to be critical or aspirational? even i'm not sure, but the way the wives are shown as if they're objects or property, equivalent to the camels and the spices and all the other non-human objects in the song, is alarming!

i really think the yikes score for this song should be MUCH higher. i agree the music is a bop and the focus on non-white characters is really refreshing but that part of the song completely ruined it for me