Politics & Power Quote by Margaret Whiting

There is a gentle gatekeeping tucked inside Whiting's warm pedagogy, and it tells you almost everything about how American popular music polices its own canon. On the surface, she is describing a civic-minded mission: give kids a sense of "musical heritage" through "great songs". But the word "heritage" is doing heavy lifting. It quietly treats songwriting not as a living, messy ecosystem but as an inheritance you either receive correctly or risk squandering. That framing turns taste into stewardship.

Her age bracket matters: 8 to 14 is when people learn what counts. Whiting isn't just teaching melody and lyric; she's installing a template for cultural legitimacy - the Great American Songbook logic where craft is synonymous with a particular era, a particular harmonic language, and a particular kind of emotional restraint. The line about not doing "too many modern composers" lands like a polite wince. It's not an argument; it's a boundary. Modernity, here, is less a time period than a threat: louder, less "written", more producer-driven, less easily scored, less easily sanctified.

Then comes Billy Joel, the strategically safe exception. Joel functions as a bridge figure: contemporary enough to sound generous, traditional enough to reassure the curriculum. Invoking him signals openness while preserving the hierarchy - modern music is acceptable when it resembles the older ideals of narrative songwriting, clear chord changes, and adult-pop seriousness.

Contextually, this is a late-20th-century anxiety about cultural dilution disguised as education. Whiting's intent is preservation; the subtext is canon maintenance. The rhetoric works because it sounds like care, not control.