When I first began teaching, I assumed the students would be interested in what I knew about music and its history. This was vanity disguised as pedagogy. They were not interested in what I knew. They were interested in what they loved, which is different. Their music arrived without ancestors. Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, Kanye West – each appeared to them as a fresh event in human consciousness, untouched by influence or commerce. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Young people require this belief. Otherwise they would have to admit that they have inherited the world, and inheritance comes with relatives whose records take up too much space.

I could have corrected them. Teachers are licensed to perform that kind of thing. It usually ends with the teacher being right and everyone staring at the clock. Instead, I began studying the music they admired. I listened for what they heard in it: the machinery, the seduction, the confession, the beat announcing that history arrived and was wearing better shoes. Only after entering their music could I begin opening the doors behind it. Here was an older rhythm. Here was a borrowed harmony. Here was a gesture performed decades earlier by someone who was now reduced to a footnote. I love showing the trail of fingerprints.

Yesterday I took the free political-ideology test at 12axes. It examined my convictions, processed my moral uncertainties and declared me a pragmatist. This seemed not insulting. Pragmatism is what we call compromise when we wish to continue respecting ourselves. Then I noticed that the site compared me to Joe Biden. Like when Spotify tells me about artists I am like. Go away. I do not want to hear that. For a moment I feel diminished. I answered all those questions only to be transformed into an elderly American institution. Then I remembered the students I had managed to reach. I had not reached them by insisting that they enter my history. I had entered theirs first. Pragmatism! Not the surrender of conviction, but the recognition that nobody follows you through a door until you demonstrate you can see the room they are already standing in.