Allison Bumsted: 'It's About Understanding Who We Are'

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was made by humans. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to Austin Community Conversations, a podcast featuring discussions about the interests, backgrounds and projects animating the members of a vibrant college community. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The Austin Community College name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service. [00:00:59] Speaker C: Thanks for joining the conversation. I'm Tonio Ramirez. My guest today is Allison Bumstead, a faculty member in the Humanities Department at Austin Community College. In addition to teaching multiple sections of the Introduction to Humanities course to dual credit students each semester, Alison is an active working scholar in her own right. As you'll hear in this conversation, she began her own academic career as a student at accident, ultimately following her curiosity all the way to a doctoral degree and most recently to her first book published through the University Press of Mississippi. The book is entitled Teen Set, Teen Fan Magazines and Rock Journalism and exemplifies a core commitment of Alison's work as a teacher and scholar. Namely, she invites us to take seriously what people value, regardless of whether the objects of value in question adhere to traditional conventions of, quote, high culture. During this interview, you'll hear her say that she wants her students to share in a communal joy in learning. And this, of course, is what a thriving learning community is all about. It's my pleasure to share this conversation with Alison Bumstead. Let's dive in. [00:02:12] Speaker A: Allison Bumstead, welcome to the office. [00:02:14] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. [00:02:16] Speaker A: Yeah, glad to have you here. [00:02:17] Speaker D: So. [00:02:18] Speaker A: So I wanted to begin by asking you about an experience that you have that most of our faculty don't, and that is of being an ACC student yourself. There aren't that many people on the campus who can claim that they began their coursework at ACC and then went all the way through the academic pipeline to achieving a PhD. So I wonder if you might talk a little bit about that. [00:02:38] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. I started at ACC in 2007 as a student. I was 19 and I wanted to be a history teacher. I already had a trade of personal training which no one wants to be personally trained as an adult by 19 year olds. I learned that very quickly and I started ACC full time as a student in the fall of 2007 and earned my associates in teaching 8 through 12 because I wanted to be a history teacher before I transferred. While I was here, I Tried to be as involved as possible as I was. Not so much in high school because I worked full time. I was working full time. I was here. But still I told myself this time I was going to be involved. And I joined the newspaper. Obviously, like, the buildings have been completely remodeled, closed or opened. But as a student, I really enjoyed my time here. I felt that I had a space, actually, because I wanted to become a teacher. I used to. I'm sure this is not positive, like a thing to do now, but at the time I. I brought my own expo markers into empty rooms with practice teaching to an empty classroom. Yeah. ACC gave me a lot of space because it wasn't quite as large as it is now. A really, really cool experience. [00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you find that that informs the, I don't know, assumptions or the ways that you approach students who come into your classroom now? [00:03:58] Speaker D: Sure, yeah. Because I did take two teaching classes here to get the associates with before I went on to teaching. But, yeah, I mean, that time practicing teaching gave me time to learn how to pretend I wasn't teaching a class. If somebody walked in, like, oh, I just need to raise the point, go. But it also gave me time to work things out and think about things. And actually, the thing that changed my life most with ACC was in the elevator when the Pinnacle campus was still up and running. There was a poster, and it had Jim Morrison in the young lion pose. If you're just listening, he has no shirt on and his arms are out and he's looking straight at you, and he's like a cool necklace on it. [00:04:39] Speaker A: I know the image well. [00:04:40] Speaker D: Yes, you know the image well. And the poster was about a rock literature class. And when I got on the elevator, I didn't know if my GPA was high enough because it was an honors class. But all I could think about was, I can wait. I can still be a. Like a historian and talk about what I really love. And I went through a big Jim Morrison phase when I was 14, so it just brought all this floating memories back to me. And I signed up for the class. And that professor, unfortunately, has passed those Professor Lee Moore. I took two more of his classes after that. But that was the moment when I said, I can do what I want in the world. I want to. So I remember I wrote terrible, terrible papers, of course, about Pete Townsend and Paul McCartney and Revolutions and others. But I remember I actually still have that paper. That's the first time I actually wrote, like, an academic paper about rock and, you know. Rock and roll. Yeah, yeah. And Then. And then it just really, like I said, it just made me know that I could focus on what my passions were. And if it weren't for that, I don't know if. If I would have followed the same path. Yeah, I can genuinely say that that. [00:05:54] Speaker A: Sounds like a tremendously powerful experience. [00:05:55] Speaker D: Yes, definitely wonderful. [00:05:59] Speaker A: For students who might be thinking about taking a class with Professor Bumstead, if. [00:06:03] Speaker C: You were to take an outsider's perspective. [00:06:05] Speaker A: And describe what it's like learning with you, how would you describe it? [00:06:11] Speaker D: I would call it a communal feel, one that's really warm and engaging and inviting. I don't, you know, for lack of a better phrase, Ben Stein at you. You know, Bjolmer and full of pop culture references and jokes. I have lots of terrible dad jokes. Lots of it, in case anyone needs one for that day. [00:06:31] Speaker A: But, yeah, am I here? Just, just, just chime in, because I do the same thing. But I often, often am horrified to discover that my pop culture cache is not as relevant as I assume it to be. So, yeah, there's this great movie, this great John Hughes film, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If you don't know who Ben Stein is, you. You will once. [00:06:50] Speaker D: Yes, that's what I was voting. I think this seems like in the 90s they even had a Ferris Bueller show. I guess that would still be quite old, isn't it? Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. There are some references that people don't get, but they know I'm trying to be funny because they see my face and then they write it down to go look at it. [00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, yeah. [00:07:12] Speaker D: But I don't understand a lot of them, too. I'm learning. But that's the great thing about the classes. I encourage students to really explore. So I teach humanities and great questions, but I really encourage students to explore. Explore what they like, especially not just throughout the class, but at the end of class. They give them a project where they can actually look at things that are meaningful to them. Creative works. And a lot of times that's where I learn about things I had no idea about. I learned all about J. Cole one semester because many students really loved him. And so I was like, okay, now I know who J. Cole is. And other. Not just. Not just musicians and artists, but different pieces of art and architecture that, you know, students really find meaningful to them. And I think that's really important is that I encourage this idea of not just what someone else is trying to tell you. So I, by trade, in the beginning, I was a historian. And so as a Grad, you know, I transferred to Texas State, so I'm a transfer student too. So here's for the transfer department. When I went to do the history degree with the teaching certification, it was a lot of regurgitating. I mean, I learned a lot of information and I found a lot of it interesting. But with. With the exception of one or two teachers, my tests were. There were, you know, there were two tests in one essay for the entire class and nothing else. And it was, you know, fill up a blue book with all the facts you remembered with no critical analysis. So I actually had more. More fun critically analyzing rock literature at ACC than I did. And this is no insult sex. This is history in general. This is our history is because I had wonderful Texas State professors. I want to be very clear. I'm very proud of that school too. But yeah, it's definitely something that is important to me is that you have a chance to understand what your values and ideas matter too. And that can come across throughout all your courses. But I definitely encourage you to look at them and make your own meaning in humanities, because that's what critical thinking is about. You learn the information you have applied to yourself. [00:09:12] Speaker A: Sure. Well, so I'd like to drill down on that a little bit because if I understand right, your. Your scholarship is heavily focused in. In pop. Pop culture and specifically in music culture. And that's going to be in like the later half of the 20th century. Right. A humanities seminar or humanities survey course, sorry, like 1301 or 1302 is typically going to focus on broad swaths of time and on. I'll use scare quotes here. Culturally significant artifacts, works, buildings, music. It's not unexpected that music should have a place in the story of the humanities course, but I imagine that a lot of people would assume that music, if it's going to be featured at all, is going to maybe in a Renaissance to 21st century class, focus on classical music, maybe jazzed, if it touches in the 20th century at all. Because these are considered like high culture. [00:10:10] Speaker D: Yes, high culture, yeah. [00:10:12] Speaker A: Whereas the, the music that you tend to focus on. Right. So, you know, Jim Morrison is not going to be a significant feature in like minimalist 20th century classical composition, but he is a significant figure in the culture, hugely significant. [00:10:27] Speaker D: He's become a legend. [00:10:28] Speaker A: Yes, right. I mean, legendary in the way that, you know, characters in myths might be legends in their own regard. [00:10:36] Speaker C: So I wonder. [00:10:38] Speaker A: You've told me in other conversations that your scholarship focused in Beatles studies. And I imagine that a lot of people listening to this might Be surprised to discover that there is such a thing as Beatles Studies as a recognized academic field. So what's it like to be working in a kind of nascent emerging field, you know, being an excited proponent of the work in that field, but also fighting against the fact that it's not. It's not as widely known or acknowledged? [00:11:07] Speaker D: Well, I have to say it's. It's magical. It's a wondrous field. It's something that. When I started in it, so. So I'll. I guess I should give a little background. I went on to teach for a few years and then I was. Or no, I actually went on to. When I graduated, before I went on to teach, getting my timeline right, I was accepted into the Beatles master's degree, the first one, the Beatles and Popular Society degree at Liverpool Hope University. It has since shut down and it has been revived at Liverpool Union, which is a larger university in Liverpool. And I think it itself is struggling not because there's not enough people, but because there's not enough support for the popular. And that's typical. As you said in popular culture studies, there is just a plethora of uncharted territory. There's something to be said about everything that is meaningful or that we've made meaning from. And often it gets dismissed as ephemeral because it is so popular, because we see it as for the masses, but not for the class. Right. So that's one of the interesting things. Now in humanities I do teach music throughout. In 1302, 1301, not so much because it is a bit different. Not that I don't teach any, because we'll talk about like song stitches and stuff and with the Odyssey and that oracle way of sharing information or oral, non oracle and. But I do in 1302, and it's usually with. Starting with Vivaldi and going into Beethoven and talking about the baroque classical music. But 1302, if you take humanities, 1302, there is the option in the 1900s, in the 20th century to talk about popular culture because the world is changing, we're interconnecting and we're able to share those ideas. Specifically, as you said, I focus on the Beatles and in the Beatles world, just to touch on that is there are academic scholarship, scholarly conferences not only around the Beatles, there are several Beatles ones. I've been to two, just most recently in Liverpool at my alma mater in Liverpool Hope, there was one and they're quite popular. The one at Monmouth in 2018, which was the wide album conference. Dr. Ken Womack held, which if you're a big Beatles fan, you might know his work was packed and it had amazing speakers, guest speakers and scholars presenting and graduate students presenting. And it was quite a scene. So there's also lots of popular culture conferences, too, where, if you're interested, I'm actually presenting on Kate Bush and Stranger Things coming up in Marlins. Yeah. Yes. I'm very excited about it because I focus a lot on women, which. Women's voices are often dismissed, whether it's in the high or the low in those realms, if we're talking about field theory. But. So there's popular culture conferences like the PCA and many others. There's one coming in Bowling Green State at the end of. Because they have a large popular culture library. And then also I know there's a Bruce Springsteen one at Monmouth coming maybe in September sometime around there. There are tons of these, tons of these to focus on. So if you're interested in something like this, I think the PCA, which will be New Orleans this year, has 1700 people for. Or at least attend, and that's yearly. It's a very large conference that fills up the whole Marriott and beyond, whichever. Whichever city it's in. So I would like to end on this comment on talking about the idea of the popular being dismissed. It's across academia, too. It's not just among the general public who say, oh, that's cute, you have a Beatles degree. What day did Paul do this? And I have no idea. So for factual information, one of the really interesting things is that people think that it's just you sit and you learn facts and regurgitate it. But something like a Beatles ma. It's not about just that. It's about understanding the experience, the process. Lots of different types of theories involved. It's just as scholarly as studying. You know, I'm just looking at your bookshelf, Plato, which I see you have a book. I have the Beatles of philosophy on this, so. Or studying World War II. You know, I think people think it's limited, but it's really not because you have elements of fandom to discuss. Which is my favorite, one of my favorite things to discuss. I have a friend who's coming out with a book on the Beatles and real person fiction. There are so many different things to talk about with the popular and historical importance that a lot of historians dismiss. It's not just in. When I say it's not in scholarship in history too, because a lot of people dismiss the popular in history as well. They don't want you to be talking about the Beatles. They talk about something that's more reputable. Talk about Napoleon. Talk about something that, you know, it's been talked about to death, to be honest. [00:16:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. [00:16:04] Speaker D: You know, and so let's focus on what. What we are passionate about and love. And libraries can be. And this is something I actually talked about in some of the research libraries can be. They can either be helpful here in uplifting the popular, in valuing it, or they can be hurtful in the fact that they don't. Some might not carry certain books or magazines for a certain period of time. I realize magazines don't have the same weight they did because they see them as ephemeral or uninteresting. But that's something that's been going on for quite a while. But the tide is changing. Popular is becoming more acceptable in this world. [00:16:39] Speaker A: This is one of the things that I find really interesting about the work that's featured in your recent book that you published here. I think it seems to me that there's a canonized set of artists and figures from the 1950s and 1960s. You know, Bob Dylan has a Nobel Prize. Right. Or, sorry, is it a Pulitzer that he has? [00:17:05] Speaker D: He is the Nobel. I think he handed it back then, didn't he? [00:17:08] Speaker A: Yeah, but he gets, you know, gets his own biopic. Right. It's considered a cultural event. And the Beatles certainly, I think, have. They enjoy that cachet as well. But there's a tremendous amount of stuff surrounding the explosion of this, including fandom, that doesn't seem to get that kind of attention. And in many ways, it's actually literally regarded as disposable. [00:17:31] Speaker D: Right. [00:17:31] Speaker A: So the artifacts that you're writing about in your book, teen magazines, teen fan magazines, you know, it's hard to get actual physical copies of many of these, probably because many of them were put in landfills decades ago. [00:17:45] Speaker D: Right. [00:17:46] Speaker A: But I was immediately convinced after the first few pages of the book that there's a wealth to be explored here. And an interesting access point from that, for me was the way that you introduced and returned to this idea of seriousness in the introduction to your book. Right. So you've already touched a little bit on the struggle that popular culture at large can have to be perceived as serious in academia. So it's going to be an uphill battle, I suppose, convincing many people even that the Beatles deserve to be taken seriously in the way that Vivaldi does. But then on top of that saying, but not only the Beatles, but the fans of the Beatles and The magazines that they're reading, trading, contributing to, supporting, these are actually culturally rich and significant in their own way too. So talking about seriousness, I forget the name of the person whose quote you brought it in from, but you said you're treating this as a term that basically refers to when we treat something as more than mere entertainment or distraction. This seemed to me like a good way of framing this notion of seriousness and the way that you return to this in thinking about how many vectors of marginalization you can see in thinking about TeenSpep, this magazine that you were talking about in the book. So it's a big question, but I wonder if you might talk just a little bit about how you can see marginalization through. Through the vehicle of thinking about this magazine. [00:19:23] Speaker D: Sure. So this is a difficult question. Not that it's necessarily difficult to answer, it's just. It's a long question in the sense that when you look at a magazine now this magazine I focus on is quite a phenomenon and it was only around for about five years. However, it made an impact. But when you look at a magazine you have to take in many facets from culture, music, gender, especially because we think of if you weren't a reader of teen fan magazines or if you were, you know, it's typically, oh, they're girly date magazines. And so this time period we have a strong force of female fans and this has been acknowledged by many scholars that female fans, you know, really drove the sales for so many artists, including artists that we consider very male, like Led Zeppelin or Van Halen, because a lot of women love them as I do. And we know that we often talk about screaming girls when we talk about the Beatles. That's actually. My friend has a book out called My Private Linen Confession. I can't remember the subtitle, but it's about not screaming. And this is something I actually talked to her about and I've talked to many first generation Beatles fans. One of them who was actually at the It's Alban show and she is seen like swooning and screaming a little. Her name is Debbie Gendler. She has an amazing book too and experience with the Beatles in her life. But these female fans have been completely dismissed. But this, this goes before the Beatles. Let's go back to the 19th century. If we are nerdy, I'll just go really quick. Is it. [00:21:04] Speaker A: Feel free to get as nerdy as you'd like. [00:21:05] Speaker D: Litzmania Litz was a. A composer that actually a recent article and this is something I've wrote and written Myself in a recent article that I'm coming out with. But a recent publication referred to him as a panty dropper. Right. So it's really interesting in the 19th century and the Tom Jones. [00:21:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:27] Speaker D: Throwing women with their lockets at their hair because, you know, things were just a bit different and people just loved this star. And then we will fast forward to Frank Sinatra. Women would swoon and faint in a very different way. And one of the things that I particularly love is the cartoons around it. You know, the Looney Tunes dog cartoons like swooning Swooners and different ones where they have these cats and then I know exactly come home and instantly have kittens because they've been around the tomcat and. Or they're chickens or pigs and they're. And especially chickens because often it's like there was an ad for or a response about. Capitol Records owned teen magazine in the very beginning. And one reporter wrote a bantam bonanza which, you know, little foul, little chickens. Again, recognizing teen fans, not necessarily in a positive way. It's usually a very pejorative term like the word teeny bopper in general. So we have this. And then of course it goes to Elvis again. You know, him shaking and women fainting again. And it changes a little bit with the Beatles. There's just something that's almost indescribable with Beetle Phantom. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And a lot of scholars consider this, like Candy Leonard, Ken Womack and Robert Rodriguez and many others. If you're a Beatles fan and you want to read some more books, those are some good names to check out. And Christine Feldman bear it too. Anyway, so when the Beatles arrive, a lot of teen fan magazines had already been around and they were not necessarily only for girls. At the very beginning in 1955, we have dig. By 1957 we have the most popular. Which would have been 16 magazine, which even readers who are maybe in the Gen Z may have read. Well, actually, no, that would have been gone. Maybe Tiger Beat, Tiger B. Not 16. 16 would be gone by 2001. I believe it lasted for a very long time. And that was led by a very strong female editor by 59 and made it this cultural phenomenon before magazines like Rolling Stone and then Teen Set comes along and it's a little bit different, but it still has a strong female base. And it's something that I talk a lot about in the book. But this whole time period and teen magazines are seen as for young girls and is often a very pejorative Word. So when we talk about marginalization, to go back to your point, I'm sorry. See, it's hard to talk about. Like, I have to put all these moving parts into place. That's why I feel bad. [00:23:47] Speaker A: I know I set you up for a big question. [00:23:48] Speaker D: I'm sorry about rambling, but. But just to go back to that seriousness, not only do we have a lack of seriousness because it's a teen fan magazine, but because it's seen. Because all teen fan magazines are seen as teeny popper for girls. But you will find archives of Rolling Stone and Cream and others, especially those two. So they are. They are accessible. Even, I think, the Austin Public Library, when it was still downtown over here where Rio Grande campus is, it wasn't very far from here. You could get, I think, Cream on microfilm. I don't know if they still have their microfilm or if it's still accessible in the same way, but I remember thinking, oh, that's great. I can read. It was about Sex Pistols. I remember that issue was later in the 70s, but you couldn't get any teen fan magazine. And honestly, there's very few that if they exist, they're usually in physical form and incomplete. I have digitized the entirety of Teenset, but it's only 40 issues, so that was a little bit easier than, say, if I did the entirety of 16, which lasted, you know, 40 years. [00:24:54] Speaker A: So. [00:24:54] Speaker D: But again, no archive. And the companies who own them don't even know they own these magazines. That's what's really sad is that these things that are cultural phenomenons are owned by random companies that don't even know. Like, Scholastic didn't even know because it was bought by someone, Was bought by someone, was bought in the 90s. And it's just in a drawer. It's this little magazine from the 60s. Like, who cares? Well, there's a lot of significance to that, and a lot of people came out of the woodwork when I started asking questions. And I don't know if anyone is familiar with Rolling Stone, but one of the most famous editors, Ben Fontores, actually knew the editor of this magazine, wrote for this magazine and promoted the book. [00:25:29] Speaker A: So, okay, yeah, that question that you ask, it's really. It's really pithy, but I think it really gets to the core thing. Who cares? Right? Discovering that actually someone does. A lot of. Someones do. [00:25:40] Speaker D: A lot of do. [00:25:41] Speaker A: And they care in the sense that this matters to them. It captures something of importance to their lives. You know, I think anybody who has seen you know, footage of the Screaming Girls, the Beatles concert, will recognize that there's something different happening there. I mean, it almost looks like, like. Like a religious ecstasy of a sort that's happening. And I'm sure there's tons of scholarship on this as well. But pointing out as you do, that the fans are marginalized in virtue of being described as teeny boppers rather than rock fans. Right. [00:26:14] Speaker D: The. [00:26:14] Speaker A: The genre ends up being marginalized by being called pop or bubblegum or what have you, rather than being called, you know, rock music. And I, you know, anybody who's been a fan of that style of music, you know, I certainly have most of my life, will recognize that there are certain tropes in the way that Led Zeppelin's music is described as being muscular, for example. Right. And you always have this kind of subtle emphasis of like, this is for the boys. [00:26:40] Speaker D: Right? [00:26:40] Speaker A: Yes. And it's interesting to discover that the content, the magazine that you're focusing on here, Teenset, that was at least accepted as being the one for girls, for female fans. That's the one that was discarded. That's the one that wasn't regarded as worth putting on microfilm or what have you. [00:26:59] Speaker D: Yeah, all of them. I mean, Tiger beat 16 date book, especially date book gets a lot of cred because it published the more popular than Jesus article from. From the. Was it the. The London. London Sunday Times. I always mix the name up. Maureen Cleave wrote it, but in England, it was no big deal. However, when it's published in the teen magazine in here, which, honestly, I. I won't say the other term that was on the front of the magazine, but it was something Paul McCartney did not like that was used derogatory here. And he. He talks about how he doesn't like that people in our country can use this word, et cetera. And that was on the COVID and that was his picture. But then John Lennon's little comment underneath about more popular than Jesus without his picture on the COVID is what got the attention. Right? And then you'll have scholars who either love Date Book four because they think it's punk rock, or they think, oh, what? What's sensationalism? What? [00:27:55] Speaker A: How. [00:27:55] Speaker D: How dare they do this? That's a TP magazine for you. And I was like, no, no, no, no. Sensationalism. It does not mean it's not fictional. Right? I mean, doesn't mean it's not truthful. It just means it's been exaggerated. But even then, it was. It was almost a copy, word for word of the actual Article. [00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so. [00:28:13] Speaker D: But no, they're not saved. You're right. That, that lack of serious. Oh, I had something to add to it and I, I need to write my ideas down to what you said. But it is interesting how this lack of seriousness is such a comment. It's like, oh, but it wasn't serious. It wasn't serious. Jim DeRogata said this in some of his work. He's a really a well known rock critic, you know about lacking seriousness and rock writing is a serious form of irony. And yeah, it can be, but doesn't mean that the readers here weren't serious. I've interviewed a fan, a first generation Beatles fan. She saved her letter. She wrote to Teens that never sent. It has the original stamp and she let me read the letter, what she wanted to say. It's really important to her and how they didn't feel. A lot of fans didn't feel comfortable not being, you know, really knowledgeable about certain rock. Now there is a term for that type of rock that you're describing, but I'll save it for the second I. [00:29:12] Speaker A: Read it in the book. Yeah, I know it very well. Yeah. Has to do with roosters. [00:29:16] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Yes and rock. So there's the absolute dismissal. And I received it on, on my end too for writing about team fan magazines, you know, oh, I don't want to read. I tried to interview a Cream editor once and he said, oh, I don't care about picture books, you know, but you're missing something. You're missing what was really important to others. And actually that's what I was going to say. One of the most quoted Jimi Hendrix articles ever was in Teens that written by a female. Again, this goes back to. This is a complicated layer and this is across fields. I don't think it's just applies to the popular. But female voices are often not seen as. As valuable in what you see. It gets complicated because you brought up the whole genre thing of pop and rock. And I actually write about another article about Pomecartney Wings and how by the late 60s, obviously before Wings, we start to see the word pop being used as a pejorative term. But it's not the whole time in the book I actually say that if the Monterey Pop Festival would have happened in Instead of in 67, if it would have happened in 69, I think it would have been called the Monterey Rock Festival. That's how much it changed because of that folk influence in the genre of something has to stand for something, something has to be meaningful. Something has to be, you know, this, that, the next thing. It can't just be this ephemeral mass produced pop, but they're listening to mass produced music. This is what just confuses me with this. I call it rockism. It's not my term, I didn't invent it. But it's a term that I really talk about is that rock aesthetic. But you know, I talk about with Wings because they, they'll never. They don't like the word rock. They like to use only the word pop. For him and for the, for Linen, they'll use the word rock. Although I took. They weren't listening to the same one. And I was in the 70s, I mean, I wasn't there, but you know what I mean? So, yes, there's so many layers, but I think that's across with any type of creative work, especially modern creative work. So if you take humanities and we talk about these things in classrooms, it's the same type of thing. If we're looking at a piece of Jackson Pollock's work, we really need to think about how influential, how important and how out of this world that work was. Yes, right. And we have to put it in context. And it's the same with, when we start talking about how important, you know, rock stars are, Rolling Stone is that it's always out of context as this important thing. But when, when the people who wrote for Rolling Stone or the people who have the loudest voices write the history, that's the one you hear. [00:31:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:43] Speaker D: I was called a revisionist by somebody and I got really frustrated because I was like, oh, because a group wasn't listened to, now they're being listened to and it's revisionism. Revisionism doesn't have to be a bad thing. It means that voices now are being heard that weren't the history that has been told is not complete. [00:32:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:00] Speaker D: And it, it never will be in our lifetime. And a lot of the voices I interview are moving beyond living memory. If I don't talk to these a lot of people now, I lose them. [00:32:10] Speaker A: Yeah. So this, this is the point that I think is it ties back to some of the first questions that I asked about how you approach your field and how you introduce your students or engage with your students. I think that it's so important for students to see that their own experiences are worth taking seriously in the way that you're describing here, that there's a real opportunity in treating their experiences, including the things that they might not think other people are going to regard as more than Mere entertainment as being that. And recognizing that one of the works of a historian and a humanist such as yourself, that the scholarly work involves revisiting and doing for people who couldn't have done it for themselves in the 70s and 80s, and advocating for that, that's really kind of preserving something that isn't going to be preserved. Otherwise, like you said, a lot of these people, they might not be around for grammars longer to tell that story. So do you kind of feel a certain sense of obligation or do you feel like you're like a preservationist of some sort? [00:33:20] Speaker D: I mean, yeah, I never knew I would make it this far. I have to say that. And I think I've always taken every step with the idea that if you really want to understand not only the world, but you, you need to understand everything around you. And you need. As best as you can. Of course, you can't. We don't. If we could learn everything, life would be a little boring, right? But we really need to understand who we are. And I. And when. Even when I taught high school exclusively, one of the things that I would say to my history students is that history is not about names and dates and facts or even necessarily just events. I know a focus a lot is on cause and effect, which is really important, but it's about understanding who we are. And we can't understand who we are if we don't take the time to look at who are we? We are if we don't take the time to understand that, you know, somebody has spent their whole life focused on something, or their emotions are so wrapped up and say, like Paul McCartney or John Lennon, that in all of their work they dedicated their life to. It isn't that important, is it? There must be something that we need to look at. And Taylor Swift is a great phenomenon, or Beyonce. Whether you like them or not, people are investing their time, their emotions, their energies. And that isn't what humanities is about. It's about our creative. It's our values explained through creative works and our emotions expressed. And now whether or not what I express is what someone else takes away or adds meaning to that, that's. You can't help that. Once you have a piece of art out there, it's what people want, want with it. Right? You can't tell them what to think. But that's the most important thing to me is that we really do understand what we're doing is not a waste of time just because it's not on Mars or on FDR or. I don't Know, Alexander the Great doesn't make it any less important. Actually, my new hero. Well, I say new, but newer hero in my life has become Judith Sims. Because one of the things I really think is important, and she's. She's the figurehead of the book because she. She's on the COVID She was the leader of a magazine that really had no oversight. So she got to do. And she had. She. The magazine had money, so she got to do what she wanted. She was hanging out in Abbey Road and doing all this cool stuff and Abbey Road studios and. Because I feel like growing up as a young girl, I loved rock and roll. I always knew I loved music. And I have a few key points which I'm not going to bore everyone with. But I remember Janis Joplin was like a key figure, but there weren't very many other females. And Almost Famous came out, and I wanted to be a rock writer. Didn't want to. To be Penny Lane. Didn't want to be a groupie. Although I don't think there's anything wrong, excuse me, with being a groupie at all. I think Pamela Debar, if you follow her at all, she's amazing. She's really interesting. She was a member of the GTOs. If you are rock curious on that one, it's very fascinating piece. [00:36:15] Speaker A: But that wasn't what you identified with. It just turned out. [00:36:18] Speaker D: Yeah, I didn't want to focus on that. I didn't want to be seen as that. Like, what was it? Someone, I think in, like, 1996, a college student was on Jeopardy. And Alex Trebek asked her what she wanted to do. And she said, I want to be a rock critic. I want to write about rock. And I'm paraphrasing. And he goes, oh, so you want to be a groupie? If that were a man, he wouldn't have said that, right? Like. But groupie doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's about those who love music. It really depends on how you define it. But it's that I didn't have that, like, idea that I could be what I wanted to be. And when I found Judith Simpson, this is the person. There had to be a person. And there was. And we've overlooked it because we've decided that this history is more important than this history, or it's very exclusive. And part of the argument in the book and in my classes that I make, because I want to tie it all together is that I make a big argument that Teensa is just as cool as Rolling Stone. And it should be considered that. However, I don't want to close any doors on any other magazine like tiger beat or something 16 because they also have some really cool things. They might be different, but they still have other amazing things. So we need to stop walling off on how we talk about things or art pieces. So dismissing, you know, abstract art versus or literature over things that are considered classical because we're, I mean, what is literary evaluation anyways? We're just, we're told what is valuable, right? And we're told why we should think it's valuable. But what about what we think is valuable and why? So it's going back to all the points earlier. I think that's really important to me in that case, if I can leap. [00:37:53] Speaker A: Ahead a few decades. At one point in your book you mentioned, if I recall correctly, that you had visited a Barnes and Noble in 2018 and had discovered that there weren't any teen magazines as you recognize anymore that were being sold. Now recently I found that it's pretty common to find. I don't know what the format is called called, but they're, they're one off issues that focus on a single single artist. It might be Taylor Swift is usually pretty frequently. They're very expensive, like $16 magazines that feature lots and lots of high gloss photos. Maybe some stories about her, some, you know, maybe some little message that she has for her fans. How are those tied to the history of teen magazines, if at all? [00:38:38] Speaker D: Well, I, I think this, the younger generation now and even, even millennials. I know everyone thinks millennials are young. I feel like they think they're born around the millennial. They're not. [00:38:48] Speaker A: I'm discovering this. [00:38:50] Speaker D: They're not. They're my age. They like physical things. I think that's one really important thing is that if we go back to the origin of the teen magazine, you remember there's no Internet, right. Phone calls were expensive and, and the communication interactions happened face to face often. Unless of course, phone or radio or even TV. But not everyone had a TV in the 50s, into the 60s. And definitely not in color. I don't even think Leonard Nimoy had a color TV when he was on Star Trek to show my other nerdy side. This was a very communal sense having these magazines. People could talk and they could read and then they could converse coming in as knowledgeable fans, right. On whatever information. And I think I read teen magazines in the 90s because I was a huge Hanson fan, which I'm working on a piece on that right Now I'm very excited about Hanson and Spice Girls. And that's the only place I could really get that information. We didn't have the Internet yet. And even. Even so, it wouldn't have been a lot of information in the way it is now. Whereas I don't think if you didn't grow up without it, you really don't understand what's. How little information was there. But I think people want the physical. That's why they make the friendship bracelets at the Taylor Swift concerts and share them, because it's that physical. There is a relation in the sense that. I wouldn't say they're terribly different than like the 90s magazines and maybe the 80s and into the 70s. They're not quite the same as the 60s. The 60s is a very different time period where people actually had access to stars. If you watch the Monterey Population concert, which is available, or you look at pictures in the October teens issue of 67 is really cool. And Jim Marshall did the photographs, which, if you're a fan of rock photography, he's the man where the stars are just hanging out in the crowd because they could. 69. We have Altamont. You can't do that anymore. Right. Things have changed. So I feel like, you know, the magazines were just a bit different then than they. Than they are now. I mean, significantly different in the sense that people did have access to people, whereas now we don't. I mean, how many people get to actually interview and sit down with Taylor Swift? Very few people, because she's so busy. But I think going back to the physicality of the magazines is you can grab the magazine, you can talk about it, you can share it, and it would be kind of similar to the 90s magazines. I don't. I see them on the stand and I like to pick them up. But you're right, they're almost $20. Yeah, but there's something people collect as well. I think fans collect the magazines. There's a lot of Beatles ones. I have a few of the Beatles, like Time magazine when they do that. I think Time is a big one that does that. [00:41:23] Speaker A: Yeah, Life magazine. [00:41:25] Speaker D: Life does. Yeah. Life does it. Yeah. That's what I mean. Yeah. The Red Square. Yeah. Life magazine does it and they read it. And I don't know how interesting the information is. I don't know how exclusive it is. I imagine just based off of a few I have on the Beatles. It's more for a general reader, you know, a fan who's interested. [00:41:44] Speaker A: My experience as well. [00:41:45] Speaker D: Yes. Yeah. It's not. If you're a die hard fan, you want it for your collection, but you don't necessarily need to read it. But yeah, I think it's very similar. Even Rolling Stones that way. I wouldn't say Rolling Stone at this point is nearly as interesting as it even was in the 2000s because it's a lot of glossy photos and there are good articles in it still. But it's not. It's just that that rock writing, that that's gone since the Internet and a lot of cool rock writers are now on the Internet writing. [00:42:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was. It seems like it was in the. Around 2006 or 7 that that music blogs kind of became the vanguard of where rock journalism went to at that point. [00:42:23] Speaker D: Yeah, there are a ton of rock writers. I'm part of a music journalism history group on Facebook and there are a ton of rock writers still writing, but I can usually access their stuff through the Internet. I don't need to buy a magazine anymore. [00:42:36] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of what I enjoyed about reading through some of the chapters of your book was that it helped me to retroactively make sense of some of my own experiences. And I think that's one of the real treasures that can be discovered when people engage with scholarship like this in a serious way. Because I was a teenager in the 90s, music was incredibly important to me. And when you were writing about the way in which pop had been used as a pejorative, I distinctly remembered a TV interview that I watched. Tom York from Radiohead was talking about, about how when they were recording the Bends, their second album, that they were just trying to make a really good pop album. And I was really confused as like a 13 year old kid. Like, you're not a pop band, you guys are an awesome rock band. Pop bands are like, you know, New Kids on the Block or something like this. But understanding, you know, that no, what was happening was it was a reclamation of a tradition here and positioning themselves in artistic tradition that they very much belong in. And it's led me to kind of realize that there's something interesting now in the fact that it seems to me anyway, that it is pop artists or artists who are working in the kind of aesthetic that would traditionally be recognized as pop. Taylor Swift, chaperone or what have you, who seem to be kind of getting the attention of legitimacy right now. So you'll find newspaper articles on these artists. You don't find a lot of people holding electric guitars on the COVID of Newspapers anymore. And so it's just interesting to me, I wonder the extent to which work like yours can help contemporary, especially younger fans, to understand that there was a long road to get there, to establish that kind of legitimacy for this music. [00:44:30] Speaker D: I'm working on a piece on Hanson and when I say that it's the most, you know, raucous response is just like, sure. I'm like. They played their own music. Brink o' Kasich produced. You know, I have to validate them. I have to say. Well, a member of the Cars produced them, you know, and. And Spice Girls too, actually. [00:44:47] Speaker A: I didn't know that he produced them. [00:44:48] Speaker D: Yes. [00:44:49] Speaker A: For Squeezy Record I knew, but not that one. [00:44:51] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. He was a rock star, but, yeah, it's taken a long time. It wasn't a problem, though, in the beginning. Right. Elvis didn't write his own music. And Frank Sinatra, I mean, all of the people that we really recognize in the 40s and 50s, not all of them, but a bunch of the big time stars that we love. And they have every right to be loved and they've earned it. They didn't write their own music. [00:45:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:14] Speaker D: So they're performers. There's a great book called Faking It By. I think it's Hugh Barker and Uviel Taylor. And one of the chapters. And I taught on the Beatles in May course at the very end when it was wrapping up. And one of the things I taught was this idea that from the book, I loved it. He talks about. They both talk about. When Kurt Cobain does the Unplugged Nirvana on mtv, he says, I want to play a song. I'm paraphrasing from one of my favorite performers. He refers to Lead Belly as a performer, not by. Not as a musician, not as an artist, but as a performer. [00:45:47] Speaker A: Yep. [00:45:47] Speaker D: Because he was a performer. He liked Jimmy Rogers. Lead Belly did. But people have especially like. Oh, my gosh, their names. Lomax. The Lomaxes and stuff. I love the early. The early 20th century too, when it comes to music history. [00:46:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:05] Speaker D: They really, like, made him look like this authentic hard man from the South. You tried to present him in a very. In the book, they use the word primitive. And that's true. They were trying to make him look in a very specific way. Not necessarily. That was a positive thing. And I love that the book uses that because it gave me a great lesson to create where we think about what is and isn't authentic. What is and isn't authentic. And is it a teen girl screaming, is that not as authentic as a guy in a mosh pet. Yeah, like what? What makes their experience less? Why should we be dividing them? And why should we be talking about talking about them this way? But I. I think it just goes back to that. Whereas now, you know, I grew up, you know, a scholar. Norma Coach does this great thing in one of her pieces called Groupie and Other Great Groupies and Other Grotesques in the early 2000s, where she says, you know, rockism had already seeped into my way of thinking. And for me, it was the same because of the path I took. I was, you know, the token rock girl. I wanted to be, you know, with the boys because I knew about rock. And then my glass was shattered several times, and I realized a lot of things I loved were completely dismissed or I was over and over again dismissed as a female fan. So I was like, you know what? Why. Why am I acting the same way? Why do it? It's because it's. We're taught that. Right. You know, and when I broke the cycle, I actually started really appreciating Taylor Swift. Yeah, like Midnights. I love that record. But that's the first record that spoke to me. She's two years younger than me, so I'm 87. She was 89. Right. And I felt like, okay, now she's not necessarily going to that younger audience. She's going. I'm going to do. I'm going to reach whatever I want to reach now, not just my younger audience, which she admits she focused on younger audience, but just to go back to Taylor Swift at the pca. Last year in Chicago, at the Popular Culture Association Conference, there were over 25 papers on Taylor Swift alone. There's a lot to say, and not just about fandom, but about musicianship and even the dismissal of her throughout her career by other musicians that think they're more authentic her because they do something else. Right. And that goes back to the whole just to roundabout about the book is that we really do need to stop doing that and go, okay, maybe I don't like it, but maybe there's something interesting here. [00:48:28] Speaker A: Well, that might give us kind of a nice point for winding down. So our Liberal Arts, Humanities and Communications division publishes an annual journal featuring student work. And in this most recent spring issue, there's, I think, at least one, maybe two pieces on Taylor Swift taking a scholarly approach to looking at something that's clearly of value to the authors of the pieces. And it's. Yeah, it's really cool to get to talk to somebody who is. I Think carrying that torch for inviting people to take those experiences seriously. [00:48:59] Speaker D: Yeah. I hope they continue to write about whatever they love and whatever brings them joy. But also from that, you know, the academic approach. And the more we do, the less. The less, the less resistance we'll have when we want to share in our communal joy in academia. I just. There's so many barriers up, but they are coming down. We shouldn't have to defend. I shouldn't have to defend why I want to write a book about Hanson. [00:49:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. [00:49:24] Speaker D: I shouldn't have to defend it. But it's a very personal reason and an interest that I took when other people were going Backstreet Boys direction. I went a different direction, too. Yeah, I think that's great. And I hope that students really hold on to their experiences because you never know what is going to lead you there. You know, I just would like, if I could say one last thing here, is that I didn't know when I took that class. I knew it opened my eyes that I could talk about rock in a way that I'd never been able to. But when I went off to Texas state, Dr. Deidre Lannan had a course called Music and Social Movements. Yes, More, more, more. Right. Yeah. I love history in general. I taught world history, American history, all of this. I love them. And when I started, when I moved on to the Ph.D. again, I never knew I would make it that far. I didn't know if. I didn't know it was an option for me. I didn't know if I had the talent or the wherewithal. But it's not even about that. Sometimes it's about, do you notice something in a pattern that isn't right? Do you notice a break in the pattern? And. Well, when I started my PhD, I was still writing about the Beatles. I was writing actually about all four Beatles solo careers. I was just extending my scholarship from my ma and then I found someone in 1974 mentions teamset in a thesis. And I was like, what's team set? Why haven't I heard about it? And when I go, when I said, why haven't I heard this? That's what did it. Yeah, it's the why. Because it led me down this path. And it was actually. It was so difficult. But I look back and I think about. Because no one took the time to ask why that subject has been left for so long. And it was a shame because it could have shaped the way we talk about things in a different way. [00:51:12] Speaker A: Sure. [00:51:13] Speaker D: But the why ask questions that's the big thing for me. It was why, why, why? And when I asked myself why this I. All the stuff I loved that I was writing about as coveted, how I thought about it changed. And so that's critical thinking. Right. That's why we ask our students to really think about what we're looking at and why it's important. If there's something else at the time that's maybe equally important to you or to someone else, and maybe we should be looking at that, too. I love so many artists we learn about and books and literature, but surely there is something else out there that is amazing and undiscovered or just not talked about enough. And we need. I had a publisher tell me no on the book. Right. You get lots of denials when you're working forward, but you just got to keep pushing through them. And they said, you don't need to focus on the why. You need to just focus on how great the magazine is. And I said, how can I do that? Because we have to understand why, then to understand why it's great. You know, And a big part of. [00:52:13] Speaker A: What makes it great is the fact that it inspires that curiosity. [00:52:15] Speaker D: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We have to. We have to understand why it's been ignored for so long. And honest, that's not the, you know, the why isn't the complete focus. But we do break. I do break down, like, the historical why. And a lot of it's because female voice has been left out. [00:52:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:52:29] Speaker D: And a certain group dominated and. And that's. That's typically the case, but now that's changed forever because it's different. So I hope more students will write for the journal and apply for the journal, and if it doesn't work out the first time, keep doing it. Trust me. I had so many articles sent back to me and kicked back to me and told I couldn't do this, that, or the next thing, and, well, here I am. [00:52:56] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, that's a wonderful thing. And I wouldn't surprise me at all to discover at some point down the road in ways that you could not possibly predict, someone reading this book is going to discover something that you observed, and they're going to wonder why. And that connection to, you know, continuing to explore is going to be there as well. [00:53:13] Speaker D: I hope so. I always. Well, I always. For the last year, I've been. I've said to a few colleagues that my best day will be when someone comes and tells me all about the editor, Judith Simson, asks me if I've heard of her that will be the day. I don't need to correct anybody. I just know that my job is done now. Her voice is being heard. And that, to me, will be the biggest compliment. Oh, actually, last time you heard of Judith Sims, I feel like. Please, tell me about her. [00:53:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for stopping by, Alison. I could talk about rock and roll all day, but. Yeah, I guess we'll draw things to a close here. And congratulations on the publication of the book. [00:53:55] Speaker D: Thank you again. If I wouldn't have started here, I wouldn't have got there. So bring that phrase home. [00:54:02] Speaker A: All right, well, thanks. [00:54:03] Speaker D: Thank you so much.