Make Your Own Kind of Music? Baah!

There's currently a cute ad for Adobe Acrobat making the rounds. I like it even when it makes me wait to start my solitaire game. It's a riff on the movie Office Space, where a positive-thinking young man strides into an office and one by one, sets the workers free from scrounging for sticky notes, getting paper cuts from licking envelopes, and wasting reams of paper for legal signatures. Everything can be solved with Adobe Acrobat, apparently. The legal-signature guy is e-signing for the first time in his life (um, this must be one regressive office. I was e-signing real estate docs back in 2006, but whatever). He tells the Adobe savior that he doesn't "know how to feel about this," and the guru says "Sure you do." This is somewhat alarming, because the next thing you know, the e-signer has a chainsaw and is demolishing his desk, to the tune of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil's 1960s anthem "Make Your Own Kind of Music." The central theme, for anyone who never heard it, is:

Make your own kind of music.
Sing your own special song.
Make your own kind of music,
Even if nobody else sings along.

It's inspiring, no question. Cass Elliot had a significant hit with it, and the lyrics were read at her funeral. Bobby Sherman, the teen idol, included it on his second album, which is where I first heard it. I was about 11. My mother wasted no time turning the song into a sermon.

"You hear that?" she asked, shaking her finger at me. "Make your OWN KIND of music!" She often spoke in all caps.

I knew exactly what she meant. She meant, "Don't follow anyone blindly. Don't be a sheep! Don't conform! Be an individual!"

See, she and my dad, like many other parents, were convinced that every adolescent was particularly susceptible to peer pressure. Stories in the news all sounded like variations on the book Go Ask Alice, in which a girl who wants to fit in lets other kids talk her into taking LSD, which is a gateway drug that will lead people to smoke marijuana, or something like that. And of course, she dies at the end. That seemed to be the #1 nightmare that all parents shared. Not tobacco. The same kids who were viewed as such prime targets for illicit substances were often sent down to the grocery store to get a pack of Pall Malls from the machine for 50 cents. Don't ask me how I know that.

Note the phrase "peer pressure." It was typically used to represent activities that involved either drugs or sex. And the word "peer" was automatically paired with the word "pressure." Kind of like at the end of a long, sensational murder trial, when the defendant is judged by a jury of their "peers," who "pressure" the lone holdout to find the guy guilty so they can all get back to their lives and their jobs. Right?

I hadn't heard the word "peer," in any context, until 6th or 7th grade, when a teacher introduced it as a vocabulary word. I went home that afternoon and told my parents about it. Your peers, as I understood it from the class, were people who had things in common with you, such as your age, socioeconomic status, etc.

"OH SURE!" they immediately exclaimed. "Your 'PEERS!' The people who get you to smoke pot and jump off buildings!"

That pretty much shut down that conversation. 

So, I got the message. Be your own person. Keep a safe distance from your "peers," even friends, because you never know what dangerous notion might pop into their heads, initiated by some "peer" of theirs that you don't know about!

So I made my own kind of music. And as soon as I began to sing my own special song (or write my own kind of poetry or draw my own kind of pictures), I was subjected, not to peer pressure, but to parent pressure.

"What is that?"
"My own special song." 
"Well, it sounds like something they played in the 1940s. That's not original. It's annoying. Stop singing that."
"Want to read my poem?"
"That's not poetry. It doesn't rhyme."
"I drew this." 
"Why? What does it mean? I think you should start over."
"Thanks for clearing that up. See ya later. I'm gonna go smoke pot and jump off a building."

So, when someone tells you you're a sheep who's too willing to follow blindly, make sure you're not being subtly tricked into following them.