Slacking Toward Bethlehem

Back in 1997, I walked into my seventh-grade art class and found my teacher Ms. Philips in an anxious mood. Throughout the mid-nineties, her teenage sons’ ska band The Gadjits had been gigging around Kansas City, Missouri, when they suddenly got signed to Rancid’s label Hellcat. As class started, Ms. Philips popped in her son’s new CD and passed around the case. Listening to their tracks, I was floored that anyone I knew could record an actual album. But my teacher wasn’t a proud parent boasting about her kids’ achievements, or even an impassioned arts educator imparting the priceless lesson that with resilience and grit, anyone, even absolute nobodies like us from the Midwest, could “make it.” No. In fact, Ms. Philips played the album so we could help her understand her boys’ incomprehensible decision: The Gap, according to Ms. Philips, had offered her sons $10,000 to star in a commercial, and they refused.