"Glee" Introduced Me to Madonna and Gave Me a Western Music Education I Still Value 10 Years After the Show's Premiere
In this op-ed, writer Aamina Khan talks about growing up as both South Asian and American and learning about western music from "Glee," which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary since the premiere in 2009.
If the term “stan” was commonly used back in 2009, it would be an accurate description of how I felt about the song “Don’t Stop Believin’.” I scribbled its lyrics all over my Converse sneakers and into the captions of photos on Facebook. It was a perfect anthem to soothe the general feelings of anxiety and inadequacy that came with being 13. But I wasn’t a teen who had uncovered their parents’ old Journey records. I first heard "Don't Stop Believin’" on Glee.
Actually, I learned about a lot of pre-2000s music from the wildly popular Fox series, which ran for six seasons. It's where I first discovered legends such as Fleetwood Mac, Madonna, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Pretty much everything that my friends inherited from their parents' music collections, I learned on Glee. I grew up listening to Bollywood soundtracks, classical Pakistani songs, and Radio Disney, and I’m not ashamed of that. I have always been a proud Jonas Brothers fan, and Lata Mangeshkar is a South Asian icon. But where there were gaps in my western musical education, Glee was there to fill them.
Growing up, I never admitted that. Everyone around me seemed to have known these songs since they could talk, and I would pretend to have the same inherent knowledge (sorry to my middle school friends for acting like I knew anything about The Beatles). Culturally, I have always been so American — I was born and raised in the United States and went to a school in Indiana a lot like the fictional William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio — but honestly, I would always find myself faking my way through conversations my school friends were having about songs and movies that I’d literally never heard of. In the pilot episode, Rachel Berry said, “Being a part of something special makes you special, right?” I felt like finally having the knowledge to be in on the conversations and know the songs my friends played in the car made me feel a little bit more special. In some ways, those music lessons from Glee armed me with the pop culture language I thought I needed to fit in.
As it turns out, this wasn’t a unique experience. A few months ago, my group chat made a collaborative nostalgia playlist. It included quite a few Glee covers, and when I raised the question about why we didn’t just use the originals, my friend who added them said that she never really listened much to the originals; she had a nostalgic connection to those covers. Those Rachel Berry solos and New Directions harmonies scored our high school years, and for some of us, the Glee version is a more honest reminder of our adolescence.
While some may debate the merits of covers vs. originals, Glee’s numerous homages to pop cultures past opened up a world for me that seemed difficult to access otherwise. We use words like ‘timeless’ and ‘classic’ to praise a song’s ability to give the same heart-filled rush to one generation that it was able to give to its own. Covers like the ones on Glee give those timeless songs another chance to do that 20, 30, 40 years later.
In fact, I can’t help but believe that every Glee fan’s musical literacy improved at least a bit, regardless of the music they grew up with, because there was almost no genre the show didn’t cover. The music selection was so diverse, varying in its decades and genres, from Les Mis to ACDC with Top 40 in between. Before that show, I thought rock music meant heavy metal and was shocked to learn it can also be acoustic ballads. That musical theatre was jazz and that it was also sometimes pop. That hip-hop was expansive, sometimes rap-heavy and other times more bluesy (and that it isn’t for you, Mr. Shue, I’m sorry). There was so much to learn about music culture past and present from that show.
During the days of my Glee cover obsession, I did kind of stop listening to South Asian music. I’m still figuring out how to get back into it with the enthusiasm I had as a child, and I’ve spent my short adulthood slowly reintroducing it back into my life. But I’m not angry at those fluctuations in my musical history. As a South Asian in America, I’m very at peace with the idea that there’s no right or wrong way to balance the South Asian and American influences in my life, because I am both of those things. That idea is very much in the spirit of Glee — balancing multiple worlds and not fitting neatly into predetermined boxes.
Even though Glee gave me an education in popular western music, the show also affirmed for me the power of music in any genre. Excited fans of American Top 40 and excited fans of singers like Atif Aslam aren’t that different. My love for boy bands like One Direction and BTS now can look a lot like my mom’s love for South Asian icon Lata Mangeshkar.
In the series finale six seasons later, Rachel paid homage to her iconic pilot episode quote, but with a twist: "Being a part of something special does not make you special. Something is special because you are a part of it." I still value that sense of belonging I first felt from Glee. But like Rachel, I grew up too. And belonging takes on so many more forms than being exactly like your friends from school, or even directly following the tastes of your parents — 10 years later, Glee is still a reminder that there are no rules to loving music and there’s no wrong way to be a fan.
This story has been updated.
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