Ode to Jupiter

On Being A Rock Star

I love them I don’t care what anybody thinks I love the Beatles and I’ll always love them even when I’m a hundred and year old grandmother I’ll love them and Paul McCartney if you are listening, Adrienne from Brooklyn loves you with all her heart, I love you Paul and please come to the window so I can just see you. I saw you smoking before I kissed the limousine you looked out of but I love you I want you Paul please okay. 

I was looking through our high school’s YouTube channel when I saw a video of a visit to the school by some guy who calls himself a “Rock Star Educator”. Here’s his poster. Dr Phil "PC" Campbell.

Chase Your Dreams!

The video was terrible and boring and dystopian. Producer Credits given to the Superintendent and Principal. Shots in the library of Dr Phil talking in a circle with students hand-selected by the administration. He’s asking questions about “what would make the school better”. The results are vague platitudes like welcoming and inclusion and transparency. Let’s be real. They want transparency? Ironic, considering they know exactly what they’re doing: cherry-picking the students who will give them the soft answers they want, especially while the superintendent is directing the camera the whole time.

Cut to shots of students the gymnasium, sitting in the stands, watching the assembly. 90% of them look like they’d rather be eating their own hand.

I won’t share the video for privacy’s sake, but trust me this shit is LAME. Not to mention the subtle uncanny dystopian vibe underlying the whole video. And the kicker? You may have noticed, but this guy goes by PC.

This has to be a psy-op. At the very least, a great cosmic joke. I mean the guy goes by PC?!?!

The overall message delivered by PC? If only the school were more accepting, more welcoming. We need to improve the culture with more transparency and trust.

Here’s the Rock Star himself, wearing a Tim Pool-ass lookin’ beanie and his shirt marked be a nice human.

How do you do, fellow kids?

Ah yes, that’s what Rock and Roll is about. being nice.

I’d rather be whole than good.
- Carl Jung

I found the promo video¹ on his website and made a little remix. That should really drive some kind of point home.

Oh really, everyone is equal? The whole idea of rock star is antithetical to your so-called ideology of everyone is equal.

To be a Rock Star is to be an Icon, a Cult of Personality, a celebrated ideal at the top of the entertainment hierarchy. There’s a reason this PC guy is wearing a Pink Floyd shirt and not… some shittier band that nobody has ever heard of. Angus Young on a stage in front of 63,000 people, his fingers paying tribute to the God of Thunder… This is what it means to be a Rock Star.

But if you really want to throw away hierarchy entirely, let’s go with that. What would it look like to be an actual “educational rockstar”? What if we actually embrace his virtues of equality and transparency and welcoming. That means all the students, not just the strivers hand-selected by the administration.

What about the kids in the PALs (Pissed-At-Life) room?

Rode down the highway
Broke the limit, we hit the town
Went through to Texas, yeah, Texas, and we had some fun

What about the girl who got suspended for drinking vodka in the bathroom? The one who always seems slightly drunk and blasts Britney Spears as she stumbles through her PowerPoint homework. She’ll make a good stripper one day.

We met some girls
Some dancers who gave a good time

What about the long-haired kid who lies his head on his desk for 6 hours a day. He wears a King Gizzard t-shirt, so you ask him “Hey you like King Gizzard? They’re pretty good. Their music videos are insane.” He just looks at you and doesn’t say anything, but you hope that maybe that one little comment, that one little piece of recognition was just enough light to keep him from getting home after school and downing a whole container of his mom’s Percocets.

Broke all the rules
Played all the fools
Yeah, yeah, they, they, they blew our minds

Being a Rock Star isn’t about wearing a beanie and carrying a guitar, talking about how we all just have to be nice. It’s about letting yourself be possessed by the spirits of these broken leftovers of the system. Fuck, school is terrible and everybody is a phony.

Let yourself be possessed by these MISFITS a bit too hard, and next thing you know, you’re snorting ketamine in the stall of the faculty restroom. Oh fuck, it’s time to cover accounting class. Half the kids don’t pay attention and they haven’t even learned Excel yet. Whatever, AI will do all that shit soon enough. Plus, money is fake.

The K is kicking in and you feel that spacey dreamy feeling of Neptune in Pisces, and you think “fuck, I really want them to understand The Attention Economy”, so you put on the music video for Money for Nothing and you smash those YouTube timestamp hotkeys over and over over and over until you’re sucked into the matrix of illusions.

But I digress.

Yes, being a rock star is about feeling everything there is to feel, and channeling it through your art. Let’s consult the Socio-Emotional Learning curriculum for the full range of the human condition. That’s a good map to aim for an aspiring rock star to aim for.

But wait… it feels like there’s something missing here. While EXHILARATED and ECSTATIC and ELATED are certainly more real than whatever PC is selling, and at least the more powerful parts of the negative spectrum are represented (despair, hopeless, enraged, livid), it still feels… empty.

Ah yes, that last part of true rock stardom. You know what I mean? Watch videos of Beatlemania.

Can PC inspire the kind of love that Harry Styles does? The kind of intoxicating love that will make a teenage girl keep a cardboard cutout of him in her bedroom, or make her nostrils flare with rage as she defends him from an accusation of being “overrated”?

I guarantee you nobody’s saying this about Doctor PC

There’s a reason adolescents are forming parasocial relationships with celebrities. And “most adolescents (61.1%) thought of their favorite media figures as relationship partners, and those who did reported more parasocial involvement and emotional intensity than those who did not” ²

They want to feel something real. They don’t want vague platitudes about transparency and equality. Sure, you can just borrow the Thumos of yesteryears’ rock stars, but they will sniff out the bull shit.

So hey man, I can’t blame this PC guy. It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. And more importantly… that shit is powerful.

If you want to truly call yourself a Rock Star, you should feel reverence.

Do you fucking feel it? Watch those live performances by AC/DC or The Beatles or Elvis or Harry Styles or Travis Scott and cry…. at the magnitude of the powers that a true Rock Star unleashes.

I promise you, this is not something The Administration wants to deal with.

How do you know who’s a true rock star? To put it into the words of an 11th grade guy in Science class, who said this while watching a video about two astronomers who discovered some comet… These guys get no pussy.

Let’s re-consult that Socio-Emotional Learning chart of emotions to see if there’s a good word for this…

And I was shaking at the knees
Could I come again, please?
Yeah, them ladies were too kind

Hmmm no… none of them quite do the trick.

You've been
Thunderstruck

1. Dr PC Promo Video

2. Source: some paper about para-social relationships I can’t seem to find.