I was fortunate enough to be born into a middle-class family. I never had to know from want. I had what I needed and mostly what I desired, so it wasn't until around high school that I really began to notice any sort of class disparity. Clothes, automobiles, houses--the obvious and immediate identifiers of social strata--we had as much if not more/better than many, and not near as much/good as a few. I didn't care, though. I had my comic books, my video games, my music, my family, my friends, and none were hard to come by, and none ever went away. My mother always told me I was going to be rich and successful. My grandparents were apparently poor, but it never seemed to bother them. Sure, they weren't very sophisticated, and they didn't sound very educated, but, hey, they had television, and one was (eventually) even in color. They had money to give me every weekend. Life was good for me, so why shouldn't it be for everyone else?
My mother always told me that I should be grateful and thankful for what I have, for many others weren't as fortunate. I nodded, and I said "Thank you," and "I enjoyed it," and I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. Everyone had it good enough, and if not, then he or she could just study harder or just get a better job.
Then came college. I couldn't go to my university of choice because I had a full scholarship to a community college, but only a partial one to Mississippi State University. I had to attend the community college. I was angry. Why didn't my parents save enough money? Why didn't my dad get a higher-paying job? Why didn't my mom complete her college education after she had my sister and me (and later my brother) so that she could get a good job? We weren't poor. I should have been able to go to whatever college I wanted to. It's all my stupid parents' fault. Wasn't the reason Dad came home so late every night during my childhood because he had to work overtime or sometimes two jobs so we'd have money? Well...where did all that extra money go? Wasn't the reason that we couldn't ever get a real swimming pool because we had to save money for college? Whatever.
Years later, and I'm a teacher, and a goodly proportion of my students come from a low socio-economic background. I make a few home visits during my first couple of years of teaching, and I begin to see what my mother tried to impart to me for so many years. I start completely supporting myself, living on my own, and I finally understand about paycheck-to-paycheck. I get married, and I now know what Sonny & Cher meant when they sang, "Before it's earned/The money's all been spent."
I get several years experience under my belt, and I'm now ashamed at how I treated and blamed my parents for trying their best to rise above their station in life. I research a few books, and I see concrete, statistical evidence that corrorborated what I had seen over the past few years of teaching, of how difficult it is to shift from one socio-economic class to a higher one. I learned more than I ever wanted to about generational poverty.
Generational poverty is what Lyfe Jennings means when he says, "Old School." In the chorus, Jennings equates "Old School" with "soul food," using detailed imagery to nostalgiacally describe the culinary delights of his class, but in the verses, he details his problems with poverty, about not being able to live paycheck-to-paycheck, about multiple jobs, about mounting and impending debt, about increasing prices and decreasing income, about the folly of pride when it comes to harsh reality ("I'm a king/but my crown's in layaway"). If "Old School" is "the color of soul food," and that color is any color but green, then his life has always been that way, as that's how he was raised, and that's all he knows. It was his parents' life, is his life, and (he's afraid) will be his children's life.
He doesn't see an end to it, either. By surrounding his words with sumptuous and sympathetic horns and strings straight from the early '70s seminal soul records that first brought national attention to the sorry situation of African-Americans in the ghettoes and sub-suburbs that was caused by poverty and caused rampant crime, Jennings hopes--like the socially-concious records by his spiritual soulfathers Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder and Percy Mayfield and Sly Stone and War and the O'Jays and the Temptations--to again shed light on poor and disenfranchised before they turn into the dead and the buried.
Jennings uses the term Old School in a darkly ironic way, as he knows that the good old days weren't always good, and romanticizing them can lead to further degradation of a race and a class. Glossing over and glorifying the past is as much of a crime--and can do as much damage--as ignoring it completely. Hopefully, Jennings' records attests, someone will open their eyes to the problems while they're current, before time runs away and we're left blaming people who were only trying their best to provide and warn us in the first place.
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