"Straight Up" by Paula Abdul, Monday, May 17, 2021
HOW ABOUT SOME INFORMATION, PLEASE? "Straight Up" is straight up a guilty pleasure song these days. The song has appeared in movies, but it's not to the cliché level of some classic rock songs, like "Walking on Sunshine" or "One Way or Another." Coming across the song today at work while grading papers on a gloomy, now third day of no sunshine and heavy rain, I remembered how this song first resonated with me--hearing it on the staticky radio, running errands on a rainy day. The D-minor chord progression of this track offers that classic '80s overproduced sound with a twinge of sadness, a hint of badassery, and a heavy dose of nostalgia. But what I noticed today was while the first part of the song was catchy, the production on the second verse and the bridge doesn't hold up. Modern recording practices could have nailed it, but the instrumentation leaves Abdul's vocals bare, and the vocalization and mismatched rhymes need something to cover them. But then I did a little research. It turns out that one of the produces of Abdul's first record was Glen Ballard, a name that looked familiar. Ballard was a famous producer and performer whose career started with Michael Jackson's Thriller. After working with Abdul, he would go on to produce Alanis Morrissette's Jagged Little Pill. In the 2000s, he worked with Katy Perry to rebrand her as a pop star on One of the Boys, an album that seems to miss the mark on production by today's standards. According to an episode of Lead Singer Syndrome, P.O.D. lead vocalist, Sonny Sandoval, talked about Ballard (their producer for their Testify album which also features Perry) took young artists on as projects. He spent lots of time with these musicians and helped to rebrand them.
AM I CAUGHT UP IN A HIT-AND-RUN? Despite all of the metaphors involving one night stands and slamming, this song got me thinking about intentions. I get very frustrated when people don't show their intentions or when they have some game of chess they're playing with other people. In fact, one criticism about working in Korea is that the boss's intentions are never clear. You have to play mind games to figure out what your boss actually wants. Not coming from the business world where I can see the value of masking your true intentions, I don't think trickery or manipulation have any place in the classroom. But two years ago, our boss hired a teacher who was very shady. He was the boss's lapdog, and we learned that he had ambition to be promoted. We also found that he was a habitual liar, even lying about his resume credentials. But he maneuvered around school, building key relationships and trying to show himself as the go-to teacher for responsibilities. His dishonesty and opaque intensions, but the other teachers in my department on edge, and eventually we developed closer alliances because of him. I tried to use my position of authority and my job experience to raise concern about how dangerous this teacher was to not only the teachers' mental state, but also how this teacher was teaching students wrong information and was ignorant of basic English skills needed to instruct in an English as a foreign language classroom. What worked best was to straight up tell him about his faults and keep pointing them out rather than letting it be points of gossip. When I told him straight up, he started to back down on his ambition and even set his sights on a new school.
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