Archive for July 2nd, 2013

Gazing at Toad the Wet Sprocket’s New Constellation

Posted July 2, 2013 By Dave Thomer

In my memory of 1993, four albums stand out as the essential soundtrack: R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, dada’s Puzzle, and Toad the Wet Sprocket’s fear. (Anti-capitalization was apparently a big thing in 1993.) I would play my cassettes of those albums over and over on my Walkman as I rode the bus or walked to school; the CDs had a priority spot on my CD tower. If you could find the DNA of my musical taste, you’d probably see those four albums smack at the center. I followed all four artists through the ’90s and into the 21st century.

Well, in Toad’s case, I had to follow the band’s component parts into the 21st century, because the band broke up in 1998. Lead singer Glen Phillips started a solo career and did a number of side projects with other musicians. (Way back in the early days of Not News, we even had a thread on our forum about his work.) Guitarist/singer Todd Nichols started a new band called Lapdog, at first with Toad bassist Dean Dinning and then with Toad drummer Randy Guss. The four have reunited for concerts numerous times over the years, and released a compilation of re-recorded versions of a lot of their most popular songs. But there hasn’t been a full new album from the band since 1997’s Coil.

Until now.

The group decided that they were ready to write and record new material together, so they started putting together an album. They also decided they wanted to stay independent, so they would try to use Kickstarter to raise money to promote the album that they planned to release in September.

They started the campaign in early June, and backers over a certain level were promised an early download of the album when the Kickstarter met its goal, which the band expected/hoped would happen in early August.

Instead, it happened in roughly 36 hours.

So it took a couple of weeks before the band could get everything together and send out codes to download New Constellation, but in the end they delivered. And in the week that I’ve been listening to the album, I can definitely say that I got my money’s worth. I had already been streaming the title track and lead single for a few weeks, in part because its energy and exuberance were very helpful in getting me through to the end of the school year. “Get What You Want” and “Is There Anyone Out There” have a similar up-tempo catchy energy.

Many of the songs are slower, lending support for the introspection and contemplation of the lyrics. It seems like a recurring thread in Toad songs is our inability to get out of our own way. That’s a feeling I can definitely relate to, so when those lyrics get matched up with the right piece of music, it’s a beautiful thing. “The Moment” is a great example of this; I really appreciate Phillips’ reminder that “for every door you don’t kick open there’s a million more to try,” even if I sometimes mourn the truth that “for every path you follow there’s another left behind.”

There’s still time to support the Kickstarter and get the album early, along with four bonus tracks. These are definitely not throwaways; the tracks are just as good as the 11 that made the “regular” album. I particularly like “I’m Not Waiting,” with lead vocals from Nichols. And back to that theme of getting out of your own way, the deluxe edition closes out with Toad’s version of “Finally Fading,” a song from Phillips’ solo album Winter Pays for Summer. When the chorus hits, and Nichols’ and Phillips’ guitars are playing off each other as Dinning, Nichols, and Phillips sing that “the voices trailing doubt are finally fading out,” I can’t help but cheer.

Welcome back, Toad. Hope you stick around for a while.

Filed in Culture and Media

School for Society 2: It’s Gonna Take Time

Posted July 2, 2013 By Dave Thomer

Item 2: Reformers must adopt a generational time frame.

If we accept the idea that we need to change our educational system to give more students the skills and perspectives they will require in order to be active citizens in a robust democracy, then we have accepted the premise that many of the schools in that system do not prepare their students for such citizenship. If schools were already doing this, we would not need to change them. Furthermore, if people were developing these skills outside of the educational system, we would not be worried about trying to make sure the educational system can develop them. The inevitable conclusion is that many of the citizens in America today lack either the skills or the mindset to take an active role in creating and maintaining a democratic society. We can argue about the degree and how easy this would be to fix, but we have to acknowledge that the status quo is substantially lacking in significant ways.

So if this is true, how do reformers correct this? I argued that this project must be viewed in terms of generations. To be sure, there are things that we need to fix in the short term. But the process of changing an educational system and the democratic society that it supports is going to require a lot of two-steps-forward-one-step-back compromises, and sometimes one-step-forward-two-steps-back might be the best thing you can achieve in a specific situation. Reformers have to accept that they’re in it for the long haul. Partial victories should be celebrated as foundations for further progress; setbacks should be viewed as learning opportunities and motivations to keep working. Reformers need to be the change that they want to see in the world, but they can’t stop if they don’t see the world changing to meet them right away. Knowing the scale of the project and accepting the length of time that success will take can help keep the project growing. If I plant an acorn today I shouldn’t give up the project when I don’t have an oak tree by October.

In one sense, this is another easy item for a reforming school to adopt. After all, the whole purpose of a school is to teach the next generation. In Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that education (inside and outside of classrooms) is the way that a society decides which parts of itself to pass along to the next generation. A very stark example is segregated education under Jim Crow – this was a major way that the culture and attitude of segregation was passed on to the next generation, until the federal government acted to make sure that it would not be passed along any further. When people argue about what texts to read and which to leave out of the curriculum, they are arguing about what legacy we should leave to the future citizens. Anyone involved in education should recognize and embrace the stakes involved.

But even though educators will not see the full fruits of the work that they do today for years, we are also confronted every day with the immediate consequences of our schools’ successes and failures. There is an urgency to the fight against things like the excessive use of standardized tests and corporate influence over education. It is likely that a reformist school, if started from scratch, would attract staff, students, and families that are on board with the vision of the school, which will help the school community avoid conflicts on the local scale. But ideally, this would allow the school community to engage with the larger struggle about education and democracy. For example, students could study the legislative process in order to understand how the budgeting process works, and then use that insight to devise campaigns to change the school funding system.

Once engaged in the democratic process, the school community needs to be prepared for the highs and lows of that engagement. It will be very important for the staff to keep that in mind, so that students do not form unrealistic expectations of their democratic involvement. If those expectations are not met, disappointment can lead to cynicism and disengagement, which are precisely the things that a democratic reform school should not try to pass on to the next generation.

Filed in Philosophy