Things May Change

Song 275: Listening to this week’s playlist cut, you can meet Society’s Child by Janis Ian, who also wrote the song. When this track hit the airwaves in the summer before my HS junior year, I liked the sound of it, and I quickly learned to sing along with the chorus, but I didn’t know most of the verse lyrics, and I had no idea about its subject matter — I thought it was just a song about a girl breaking up with her boyfriend. I also didn’t even know the name of the song — I assumed it was called Can’t See You Any More or some variation on that theme. Hanging out with an Asian friend, at a time when there weren’t many Asians living in our town, he asked me if I liked that new song Society’s Child and I told him I wasn’t sure if I’d heard it. He soon had it spinning on the turntable, and of course I recognized it, so I told him I had heard, and liked, the record, but I just hadn’t connected with the title. He then asked me what I thought about the controversial topic of the lyrics, and I had to admit that I had no idea what he was talking about. He promptly quoted me the opening lines, and I quickly realized that this was much more than just a simple love song. At the time, I considered myself a political conservative, as did my parents and grandparents, but I had no problem with the idea of an interracial couple, and as far as I knew, neither did anyone in my immediate family, so I admired the song, and the songwriter, for the powerful message that came wrapped in a very personal narrative. I also took it as a good sign that someone only a few months older than me could have a hit record riding up the charts. I had been writing songs for a year, and sharing dreams of musical fame and fortune with my classmate Brian Johnson, even occasionally playing guitar with him, though the dreams, some talk, my songwriting and the sporadic guitar jams were as close as we ever came to actually having a band. Still, the fact that a girl my age could have a hit song that summer made me feel that my own dreams should have some possibility of coming true. The fact that Leonard Bernstein gave Janis and her song his official stamp of approval, via a TV special, plus accompanying press promotion in at least one of the major weekly magazines that my family subscribed to (probably Life, Look or the Saturday Evening Post), banished that Devil’s Music shadow that sometimes followed my pop music favorites, because, as a violin player in the HS orchestra, I knew the name Bernstein quite well, as did my family, at least in part because of my involvement with the violin, so his very public praise of Janis’s music carried a lot of weight in my family circle. In the final verse, Janis sings “When we’re older things may change,” and at the time, I fully expected big changes in the realm of race relations during the time frame from then to now, but sadly, as recent events with conflicts over the Confederate flag and KKK icons have illustrated, it’s just as possible today that Janis could play this song on stage and have to hear people in the audience screaming “Nigger lover! Nigger lover!” just the way they did at a concert she played when she was 15. She showed bravery then in performing the song, as she had in writing and recording it, and she crafted a classic record that endures, and that conveys a very important message that needed to be heard in 1967, and that still needs to be heard today.