Walk This Way

As some of you know, I’m an English and Humanities professor. You may have a trope in your mind that you may think fits me. It doesn’t. I like to bring learning to life, and I keep it real. Last term, one of my current students was talking to one of my previous students about how surprised he was that he was enjoying his Humanities class. His classmate replied, “You must have Brown. She’s straight live.” I’ll admit that’s more advanced slang than I’m completely familiar with, but I know how to read context clues and understand that it was a compliment.

One of our assignments (this week, actually) is about art crossing cultural boundaries, and I always begin the lecture for that assignment by playing the video above, with no preface whatsoever. My students are a couple of generations younger than me (for the most part), and they don’t know what MTV was before The Real World changed television completely.

I talk about the history of MTV, how those of us whose cable companies didn’t offer it had to watch USA’s Radio 1990 and/or Night Flight. We wanted our MTV, and we eventually got it.

The first shows on MTV were the music news segments with Kurt Loder, Martha Quinn, a second generation Zappa here and there, and various other tidbits, but MTV was almost completely music videos round the clock when other stations still went off the air at midnight or one. After Letterman signed off, NBC did, too.

There were also three nighttime off-the-mainstream shows. If you were a teenager in the 1980s in the US, your MTV shows defined you; they were part of your identity. 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, and Headbangers Ball. Most people watched one of these shows and avoided the others, or some variation of two outta three ain’t bad.

And then Aerosmith and Run DMC brought the two most diametrically opposed subcultures together in one song. I will believe until my dying day that this collaboration did more to unite subcultures and blur genre lines than had ever been accomplished before. Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” duet was far too VH1 to affect the MTV crowd (iykyk). The remake of “Walk This Way” was groundbreaking in a joyful way, and it is a microcosm of how progress is made and how mutual respect is born.

I mention Aerosmith first because it’s their song—the collaboration with Run DMC was a remake, so that earns first billing with me. I especially love that they didn’t soften it—there’s nothing but animosity until they literally break down that wall (we’ll leave Berlin out of this, although we probably shouldn’t). You’ll note on a close watch of the video that the wall comes down from both sides. That’s important, whether it’s examined closely in meaning by viewers or not. Also, the frustration of bands in the eighties having close neighbors in their studio space was real, even among bands of the same genre—“we can’t play our music over your noise” screamed from both sides of the wall. Run DMC taking over the lyrics is brilliant—it shows that they’ve heard this song enough to perform it. They know the song from hearing it. Pay attention to a slight lyric revision in the onstage scene. Stone cold genius. This is the beauty of artistic appreciation and collaboration unfolding in roughly four minutes. The result? New perspectives are adopted, a new audience is met, appreciation is born, and by the end of the song, cooperative community is established.

We’ve made so much progress in understanding different cultures and subcultures, mainly through the arts, including and especially the culinary arts. I encourage my culinary students to use food in their assignments, and I’ve seen spectacular presentations on rice as a cultural ambassador, the joy of tacos, dumplings from various cultures, the universality of comfort food. If you want country fried meat in a non-American cuisine restaurant, look for milanese on the menu, or ask your server. We’re all human, and we all love to sing, dance, enjoy good food and beverage in good company and share love and laughter.

When you hear music that’s foreign to you, outside of your aesthetic, instead of rejecting it, look for similarities instead of differences, and give it a chance. Your cultural lens shouldn’t have blinders.

Stop letting politicians guide your focus to differences—we’re all in this together, whether or not we accept that. And we’re Gen X—we don’t build walls; we tear them down. Now it’s time to remember (East) Berlin so we don’t see it happen again. Let’s make it harmonious. Walk this way.