High School Hit Parade

July 1999

The classics—Jerry Lee Lewis’s “High School Confidential,” Gary U.S. Bonds’s “School Is Out,” Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” the Ramones’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School”—aren’t. They’re stiff and contrived and they come off as sales pitches. The stuff below is pure Charlie Brown, as in the Coasters’ 1959 hit of the same name. The song takes stut­tering steps—“Who walks in the classroom cool and slow?”—but it moves, it might go any­where, including where it has already been: “Fee fee fi fi fo fo fum / I smell smoke in the auditorium.” And people thought he was only kidding. He thought he was only kidding.