Director's Notes – Episode 116

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

One of the awful things about being in high school band is you have to go to pep rallies. This is, of course, more than balanced out by the extreme popularity you earn by playing, say, the euphonium while wearing a ruffly jacket and coffee-can-shaped hat while walking in precisely measured steps to 100-year-old music while making mouth farts into a metal cone and crowd-forming abstract shapes on a grass field that's been painted to look like wide-ruled notebook paper. That part of being in band is pretty cool.

But pep rallies are a beatdown. 

At Ralph H. Poteet High School in Mesquite, TX, in the early 1990s, our pep rallies were in the morning, during first period, about 30 minutes long, outside in the parking lot, and basically included the following agenda:

1. Band, standing the whole time, plays fight song. In the cold of late fall, with tired lips, the fight song (ours was "Anchors Aweigh!") undulated like a warped record.

2. Cheerleaders shout and jostle the football team onto some risers.

3. Cheerleaders scream words in unison while making chopping gestures with arms.

4. Principal recites memorized platitudes.

5. Football captain makes sports promises his sports talent can not always keep.

6. Cheerleaders begin shouting individual letters (perhaps a code) while kicking possible ghosts and then stand atop one another as a gesture of intimidation toward smaller foes - a sort of Living War Totem.

7. Band plays the school song, which has lyrics?

8. Everyone goes back to class, except for the band, who pretend it takes another half hour to put away instruments. 

The football pep rally is a strange thing really, that we need to get our fan base chauvinized before a game. There were never pep rallies for stopping sexual assault or assuring medical care for those most in need or decrying white supremacy. 

And you might say "well of course we don't have pep rallies for those other things, because they're not games, they're not exciting. they're important, but not something we can really get to cheering about." 

But I'd argue you can make people celebrate anything if you require a focus on it. We had to stand & recite the pledge of allegiance. We had to go to pep rallies celebrating the world's most physically destructive sport. We even had to bow our heads in silence for a prayer before every football game, even though we were a public school.

I don't want to take anything away from football fandom. I love football plenty. I've just been thinking a lot about how the pep rally, the mandate to stand for anthems, and the many decades of politicization of the sport have us geared toward the most primal feelings of aggression and patriotism, rather than the deeper concerns for what a 100-yard long flag held by uniformed troops underneath supersonic fighter jets really means. 

The most enthusiastic cries my high school ever inspired me to make were for beating the shit out of the Highland Park Scots. And, to be honest, that was fine. Because fuck that team. 

- Jeffrey Cranor
October 15, 2017