What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Music is full of great advice to smooth your path through life. Take Kenny Rogers in The Gambler
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold’ em, know when to walk away, know when to run’
That’s pretty solid advice for any area of life, not just playing cards for money.
Meatloaf had some great advice that always made me laugh in the Jim Steinmann song Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through when he pointed out
You can’t run away for ever, but there’s nothing wrong in getting a good head start.
That could work in a variety of situations.
However, there is one song that is packed with brilliant advice. Sunscreen by Baz Luhrmann is simply brilliant and it is a song I always go back to. Where I have had the chance I have introduced it to my students at all levels and at most of my workplaces.
Where do I start with this brilliant song? Every line is great advice and the older I get, the more I realise how true every word is. These words come from a speech written by Mary Schmich called ‘Advice like youth, probably just wasted on the young’! Originally written in 1997 it was taken to the top of the UK charts in 1999. So, here are my ten favourite pieces of advice from this great piece of reflective writing.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. (Even as someone who never had power or beauty, I can still see that they have faded!)
Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. (I am getting better at this but it’s taken over 5 decades!)
Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself. (This is so true but society will not acknowledge it.)
Remember the compliments you receive; forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. (Great advice but impossible to follow as my brain will only see insults as truthful, whereas compliments are flannel as my Dad would have said!)
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t. (I fell into my career, but I’m glad I did. At 60 I don’t know what I want to do next, but I know I want to find out.)
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance; so are everybody else’s. (It’s like the people who ‘hit a century’ or ‘hit a home run’ (delete as appropriate to your sporting background) and refuse to acknowledge that their parents or their private school hit the first 80 runs or started them off at third base!)
Do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly (Possibly updating it to do not follow influencers on Social Media!)
Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you
Should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. (I included that because it’s the one piece of advice I tried to follow but couldn’t. Very few of my friends from when I was young had any interest in staying in touch. When I realised that this was the case, things got easier.)
Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old– and when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders. (I don’t need to fantasize. This is absolutely true. The world has never had worse people in power around the globe.)
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. (I have always tried to follow this because I hope people will be patient with me.)
What things give you energy?
This is actually quite a difficult question these days as people seem to focus on what saps their energy, and I am very adept at doing that.
So, the first thing that gives me energy is novelty. When I have something new to focus on it gives me a lift. When I was teaching full time I got energy from lessons that required me to do something different. When I was teaching art and design students this summer, something I hadn’t done for about 15 years, I had a fantastic time and my energy levels in the nine weeks were way above those I had for my previous job which had ended only a month earlier.
The second factor comes from the opportunity to learn something. It can be learning in any context, whether it be something academic like Popular Culture or practical like gardening or working around the house. That always energises me.
The third factor is the support of my family. When I have that I can raise enthusiasm for anything. Without my wife I wouldn’t have tried many of the things that have filled my life with energy. I continue to do so to this day thanks to her inspiration.
What’s your all-time favorite album?
First of all, that is an impossible question to answer. For someone who is as steeped in music as I am, how on earth can I choose one? I always find it tricky to do a Desert Island Discs challenge for that reason. I truly believe that if you can answer that question you are either someone for whom music is an insignificant element of your life or you are choosing an album based on your current mood.
So, I will be answering this in my own way by looking at favourite albums from my formative years, musically speaking.
My First Albums
For Christmas 1974 I received a cassette player/recorder and my first two albums. The linked article is one of my absolute favourites and reflects my feelings on playing the two of them back to back as I had done on that Christmas morning as a 9 year old. It is genuinely an excellent read and I recommend clicking the link! Suffice to say, the old magic was still there. The two albums were Parade of Disney Hits which covered films from their first feature film Snow White to their ‘latest’ Robin Hood, and Keep on Wombling which included perhaps the finest Christmas song ever made ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’. As they were my only albums for about 18 months you can guess how often they got played!
Looking Back to the Greats
The first album I bought for myself was Elvis’ 40 Golden Greats in salmon pink vinyl, which I still have, and it was the January after his death on 16 August 1977, the first celebrity death that really hit home for me. When I got the album I found so many great tracks to listen to for the first time. My favourite track at the time was probably In the Ghetto and I’ve been an Elvis fan ever since. Not long after I bought The Beatles 1962 – 66 (the red album) which covered their Pre Sergeant Peppers output. Track after track after track just enthralled me and my friends who were similarly discovering them for the first time. My favourite track on this album was In My Life.
Changing Tastes
Three albums totally changed my musical landscape in the early 1980s. First was Regatta De Blanc by The Police which was simply mind blowing. The track Message in a Bottle just spoke directly to me and from then on I was a massive fan of them. Next was Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf, an artist I discovered on the only occasion we had a coach instead of a bus for our trip into school. The driver had the radio on, and Dead Ringer flooded my senses, partly because I was right under the speaker, and partly because of the feeling of absolute excitement that the music awoke in me. I went out and bought Bat Out of Hell, and every track electrified me, but my favourite was the final track For Crying Out Loud, an emotional closer that is still my favourite final track from an album. The last album was Declaration by The Alarm which introduced me to the idea that my Conservative upbringing, politically, was not actually the full story. Their songs sung amazingly by the late great Mike Peters started me on my political march leftwards, something that gathered pace when I joined the Royal Air Force The track Blaze of Glory is stunning in its power and its force. Oh, and by the way The Alarm were responsible for the greatest Christmas cover version ever, Happy Christmas War is Over, when they replaced the children with a Welsh Male Voice choir to stunning effect. It’s way better than the original in my view.
So, there you have it, seven albums, 10 years and scores of memories. Maybe check the albums out for yourself if you haven’t heard them. You can find them on either YouTube or Spotify. Happy Listening!
Which topics would you like to be more informed about?
I am, and always will be, a learner as well as a teacher. The area I would most love to know more about is Popular Culture. For me, it is the true voice of creativity. High Culture is the mandated voice of creativity handed down to us by the rich and the influential, and will always be set up to divide society into the cogniscenti and the others. It reflects what is acceptable and unthreatening, whereas true Popular Culture is something over which they have little control. I would love to undertake a PhD in the future focused on the field but I know I need to have much more understanding of the discipline.
This Blogmas, starting on December 1, I will be taking my first steps along the path to my goal. I have been busy on ebay all summer and I have Christmas magazines ranging from 1896 to the 2010s. I will add a new one from this year to finish the collection and I will then try to investigate each magazine from a popular culture standpoint looking at it’s role as both a reflection of and a shaper of the British Christmas. Each day for, I think, 14 days I will research and write about a magazine and then on the final day I will try to tie together the themes that have been important and influential across the years. If it gets a good response, then I would like to either turn it into a full researched PhD or a book.
So, my question is, would you be interested in reading this series of articles in December? Let me know in the comments if you would, and if there are particular topics you would like me to look at. I don’t often ask for audience participation but I would really value it on this. Many thanks in advance.
What would your life be like without music?
The first post I wrote for this blog when I restarted it was about an extended period of deafness that arose due to a combination of hearing issues in my left ear and the complete blocking of my right ear due to wax build up. During that time I was working online so I was able to teach with the use of headphones, but otherwise I was pretty much trapped in a world of very muffled sound. There was some ability to hear, but it needed to be carefully managed and it was only for conversation. Music was lost to me for six months because I couldn’t pick up a tune.
That time was extremely difficult for me because music had been part of my life for about 50 years by then, and it was the very basis of my online persona at that point. Without it I had less to say and it definitely isolated me from people in both spheres of my life. Looking back, it took almost all of the colour out of my existence and the loss of music was a huge part of that. Even today, I look back and shudder when I think how grey and dispiriting that time was. I genuinely can’t understand people who rarely listen to music because to me it’s as central to my life as breathing. Do they feel grey and dispirited?
What would happen if I became deaf again? Perhaps I could deal with it a bit better but I know it would remove a huge part of my life, a part that is irreplaceable.
If you want to read the original post, which I still think is very interesting, here it is https://davidgpearce205.blog/2021/04/22/the-sound-of-silence/
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 