WHAT'S IN A NAME?
There’s a timber sign in a town not far from where I grew up—olive green with white capital lettering routed into it. The kind used for old government buildings and state parks. It reads:
Welcome to
Moorooduc Township
Home of Debbie Flintoff-King
Olympic Gold Medallist
I’ve always found the conviction of the sign (four horizontal slabs of engraved plank standing over a meter tall) endearing, but suffused (for me at least) with a faint irony given that the sign is embedded in a perennially sleepy pastoral landscape while celebrating an Australian record for speed).
This week hit-generator Sia Furler has been honored with a similar 80/20 ratio of joie de vivre to wryness. Sia’s had a tertiary institution named after her in the city where she grew up—by a university she never attended. The Sia Furler Institute for Contemporary Arts and Media is a part of the University of Adelaide, the place Sia wasn’t going while she was crooning her own trail with acid jazz band Crisp. But now, after multiple Grammy nominations and chart-topping singles, Sia has the “exciting and humbling” experience of being immortalized in her hometown. Even if there is a gentle undercurrent of paradox in the flood of admiration.
Back To School
And there’s no shortage of genuine affection and delicate irony in other commemorative gestures. After his death, talks began to rename a high school in the area (TBC, apparently) to honour the late, great Michael Jackson. A beautiful gesture, even though the King of Pop never really graduated. When he last returned to his hometown of Gary, Indiana, MJ received an honorary diploma from Roosevelt High School which he missed out on while he was kindling a career that would set the world of recorded music alight.
Something similar happened in California in 1965, when young Steven Spielberg, Saratoga High School graduate and Eagle Scout, was sent a rejection letter by the University of South California. His ‘C’ average excluded him from entry to the university. Spielberg kept the letter and it stayed close by him through a legendary career that I don’t need to waste pixels rehashing. The letter was supposedly still with him as he spoke at the opening ceremony of the USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in 2010, the school that houses the Steven Spielberg building. He awarded the facilities a ‘C’ average.
Even more recently P. Diddy also extended himself into the education sector. After a music career and an entrepreneuring repertoire that extends from clothes to bottled water, Sean Coombs is planning to found a charter school in Harlem. Coombs grew up in Harlem in the 70s and while he did finish high school, it didn’t come easy. His father was killed while he was young and he aims to offer students a shot at education without the adversity that he faced himself.
Road to Nowhere
Aside from chemical elements, celestial constellations and newly-discovered insects, the primary namesakes for musicians seem to be roads. Especially, for whetever reason, alleys. And in hometowns, streets are often steeped in nascent disaffection for those who've left to pursue less conventional paths. And all the more likely if you're in, say, a punk or metal band, which must make a naming celebration somewhat conflicted. This is the only time I'm likely to say this I solemnly promise: Korn, in this way, bear a similarity to Sia. The craggy Nu-Metal stalwarts were "teary-eyed" when a back-access road to Rabobank Arena in Bakersfield, CA was named "Korn Row" back in the mid-000s. And the 'R' in Korn was even backwards. But as a hostile youth, it must have been just a little weird, even at the unveiling singer Jonathan Davis admitted that it was surreal: "This [city] was a place that I dreaded as a teenager because there wasn’t much stuff to do..."
Come Fly With Me
As if to extend the mingled implication of escape and nostalgia transmitted by hometown roads, someone in the mid twentieth century started naming airports after humans. John Lennon was once such human, a human who had the Liverpool John Lennon Airport named in his honour, with the moniker "Above Us Only Sky" below the airport's title. But Lennon, much like Korn (see above solemn promise) was possessed by a compulsion to vacate the town of his birth, famously musing: "I'm an Elvis fan because it was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool..." So again, an uneasy commemorative mix of adulation and distortion. But nowhere near as uneasy as Oklahoma's Will Rogers World Airport, named after the city's famed humorist...who died in an Alaskan air disaster. Yikes.
It must be a strange thing to be permanently memorialised in a place you've left physically, psychically. But without all of the alienation, without the adversity and yearning, without the paradox, maybe we wouldn't have been blessed with Sia or John Lennon. Or Korn.
-Paul Cumming
Simile is a weekly series by Cool Accidents fave/regular Paul Cumming aka Wax Volcanic that unravels current moments in music and follows the threads to some strange and strangely familiar places.
