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/

PropagandaRock
@PropagandaRock

Originally Aired: September 15th, 1973
Written by: Lynn Ahrens
Performed by: Lynn Ahrens

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵🎵🎵🎵
Animation: 📺 📺 📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬

Happy New Year! We're back! Welcome to Grammar Rock! Things are going to get much more exciting from here on out. Production quality goes up, concepts become more complicated, we start getting a few iconic recurring figures, and shit gets way more into the propaganda. This is the big debut for Lynn Ahrens, whose name we will start seeing as often as Bob Dorough if not more so. She writes a lot of the most iconic Schoolhouse Rock! songs as well as the most fucked up ones. But A Noun is a Person, Place or Thing? Iconic, delightful, charming.

The music is really catchy and that iconic chorus line of "A noun is a person, place or thing" can't help but pop back into your head whenever you're trying to remember what a noun is. I think it's just fun to listen to. As a kid I really liked it musically. I also think that when they speak over the song it doesn't feel as out of place as it did during Multiplication Rock!. I love the part where she clarifies that her best friend "took an early ferry" in case you were wondering why he was on Liberty Island before Lynn gets there. Lately "I find it quite interesting" has been a good echolalia for me. I'm bewildered by "Oldie goldies if you know what I mean" as if this is some sneaky innuendo. Maybe she put ASMR Bisexual Roommate Does Your Makeup on the drug store record machine.

The animation is fine. It's nothing special but it's not ugly. It doesn't feel overly sparse like My Hero, Zero did and the character design is much more coherent and feels less like a newspaper strip. Pedagogically I think it's really well-done. It's such a clever way to demonstrate sentence structure. Tell a story, then highlight all the nouns in the story. Genius.

I have a bachelors degree in Linguistics so I'm going to be scrutinizing Grammar Rock! quite closely. This one loses a point for accuracy because it gives an incomplete definition of nouns that feels honestly quite restrictive. As a child, you'd think only tangible things are nouns. The song is called "a noun is a person, place, or thing." Not "A noun is part of speech which represents any object, such as a person, place, thing, concept, state, and more." I think that it makes sense to keep it simple for children, but that they could have at least mentioned that music is also a noun, to give at least one example of a non-tangible noun. They say "any thing that you can show" because it rhymes, but actually it's also every thing that you can't show; and this I think does matter since I think it's easy for a kid to think that being a noun is a property of the thing itself and not simply a matter of its role in a sentence. Still.... nothing is wrong just incomplete.

I want to highlight that everyone in this song is white. Nobody is Black in our definition of "Person, Place, or Thing." I also want to point out the trend of patriotic American imagery appearing constantly in Schoolhouse Rock! even when it's unrelated. It was very subtle before, but it's going to pick up over time. Going to the Statue of Liberty is here. On its own, it's nothing. But the pattern we'll start to see is that every song wants to situate you in America. You are in America and that should be on your mind. And yet, only one yikes point? The grading curve is very skewed by what is to come.

June's Review

Music 🎵🎵🎵

Okay, I'll be real, the music here is good, it's just not my thing. Not big on this sort of folk music, it was never my style. It's done really well, the singing is great, it's fun to listen to, the lyrics are funny and the way it repeats teaches the material; it just ain't my thing. 

Animation 📺 📺 📺

Yeah, it's just fine. The new production values show in the colors but it's really just like, whatever. I don't think there's anything super special here.

Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓🎓🎓

I agree with Shel! This teaches nouns real well, especially the way it repeats the nouns in each section of the song each time. Like, if I was doing a school lesson to a kid about nouns, that might be how I'd do it: read a short story and then go through and pick out all the nouns.

Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯🎯

Well, I was gonna give it 5/5 because I don't know jack shit about grammar. That's a good point though about it just being tangible objects! 

Yikes Factor 😬😬😬

It took me years to notice this because it goes by so fast and I'm not really someone who listens to old 60s rock. Literally, I didn't notice it until I watched the cartoon over and over again to get pictures for the dumb "most smashable character" poll I did, and Shel didn't notice it at all here but. This fucking cartoon. When it's retelling the third story and goes "And every person you can know (the Beatles, the Monkees, Chubby Checker) it shows images of them all on screen, and when it gets to the third one we get

WHITE CHUBBY CHECKER

Ingrained on the parts of the songwriter who simply grabbed names she had heard? The animators actively trying to erase a guy's race? Who knows, but either way, it's bafflingly weird and cursed. WHY.Elevates it to a 3/5 once you notice it and no one ever does.. EXCEPT ME.

Up Next: A song that kicks so much ass. I love to listen to it. So look forward to it!


tvwolfsnake
@tvwolfsnake

you may have enjoyed lynn ahrens' other work without knowing it! collaborating with composer stephen flaherty she's written lyrics and (often) book for a bunch of musicals, and also the don bluth anastasia movie. (flaherty and ahrens did collaborate once on schoolhouse rock, but that post's a long way away!)

one of those musicals is ragtime, an adaptation of e.l. doctorow's portrait of turn of the century america. it's been too long since I've seen ragtime to say whether reading her work on it in context of her work on america rock is absurd or fitting—basically all I remember is the emma goldman song, I'm sorry—but either way it's a wild connection.

other musicals: once on this island, seussical, and lucky stiff, a decent musical farce which has the dubious distinction of having arguably the worst film adaptation of any musical.


PropagandaRock
@PropagandaRock

This is fascinating given the horrifying songs she'll write about American History. Also I loved Seussical.


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in reply to @PropagandaRock's post:

christ, I never noticed white chubby checker before... feel like this must've been accidental but I have no idea what the hell this implies about the way the workflow on schoolhouse rock worked

the noun team absolutely phoned it in compared to the other parts of speech, extremely hype for what's coming up next in part because I've always thought verb was hot

loses half an accuracy or pedagogy point for this imo:
"in the middle of summer it started to snow" - verb form
"anything that you can show, like a statue, a ferry, or snow" - not how it was used in the story!!
more like... 'anything that you can show, like an L and this ratio'

"Liberty" actually very briefly shows up on the noun-o-meter at 2:40 lol, so they did manage to sneak in one abstract concept, but yeah, definitely a weakness of this one.

I had no idea who Chubby Checker was lol, I was too busy trying to figure out if the Monkees were real to even consider him, but uh, yikes.

in reply to @PropagandaRock's post:

I couldn't read through this C.V. without noticing Once on this Island because my high school did a production of it.

Once on this Island is a musical adaptation of The Little Mermaid but the sea witch is replaced by the gods of Hatian vodou set in the French Antilles.