It Makes Me Wonder Why All the Amateurs Have Come to Education
Posted: 06/17/2013 5:27 pm
I'm a little late to this party. I was clued into this 2012 video of a Kennedy Center Honor's performance of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." I'm not normally sentimental about videos that get passed around. Perhaps the stakes were higher because the late John Bonham's son made a surprise performance on drums. Surviving members of the band, watching from the balcony, were noticeably emotional about the performance. The viewer could not help feeling a little bit of that as well.
The performance itself was unbelievable. Here you had musicians and artists in a moment of perfection, watched by the elder creators of a nearly perfect masterpiece in song that has affected generations, and more to come. I then imagined of all the amateur wannabes who think that sitting in line outside a basketball arena in Wichita for two hours, belting out an awful cover of Whitney Houston, makes them an artist.
Perhaps not for musical legends like Led Zeppelin, but it must be annoying for some established artists to force making nice with new cohorts of winners and runners-up from the innumerable talent shows. Musical bandwidth is also trafficked heavily by once and future reality TV stars who, exploiting new audio technologies, are able to release recordings only slightly better than an inept yodeler with laryngitis.
I must say that this definitely has something to do with education. As an educator myself, it always does, am I right? I don't claim to be the Led Zeppelin, or even the Miley Cyrus, of education, but I think I've earned the title of professional. I wistfully imagine legends