{"id":624,"date":"2013-04-27T13:35:32","date_gmt":"2013-04-27T11:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=624"},"modified":"2013-04-27T13:35:32","modified_gmt":"2013-04-27T11:35:32","slug":"twenty-great-british-songs-a-non-canonical-selection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2013\/04\/27\/twenty-great-british-songs-a-non-canonical-selection\/","title":{"rendered":"TWENTY (GREAT!) BRITISH SONGS: A (NON-CANONICAL!) SELECTION <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

My colleagues in \u201820th century English Literature\u2019 (first-year) and myself have decided to use one spare week that we programmed after the unit on British Poetry for songs. I opened a Forum for students to contribute songs that they found interesting because of the lyrics but since the messages are trickling rather than pouring down (don\u2019t ask me why…) I have spent around, em, six? very intense hours working fast on my own selection.<\/p>\n

It is supposed to be a) representative of main trends in current \u2018interesting\u2019 British pop and rock (no Taio Cruz nor Cheryl Cole here…), b) offer an attractive list of songs with well-written lyrics, or, at least, lyrics far beyond the usual romantic trash \u2018I love you-I need you-I want you.\u2019 So here they are:<\/p>\n

Adele, \u201cRolling in the Deep\u201d
\nAmy McDonald, \u201cThis is the Life\u201d
\nAmy Winehouse, \u201cRehab\u201d
\nArtic Monkeys, \u201cFluorescent Adolescence\u201d
\nBloc Party, \u201cBanquet\u201d
\nColdplay, \u201cViva la Vida\u201d
\nDido, \u201cThank You\u201d
\nThe Editors, \u201cSmokers at the Hospital Doors\u201d
\nElbow, \u201cOne Day Like This\u201d
\nFlorence and the Machine, \u201cShake it Out\u201d
\nFranz Ferdinand, \u201cWalk Away\u201d
\nIdlewild, \u201cNo Emotion\u201d
\nJames Blunt, \u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Man\u201d
\nKasabian, \u00abWhere Did All The Love Go?\u00bb
\nKaiser Chiefs, \u201cI Predict a Riot\u201d
\nKeane, \u00abSomewhere Only We Know\u00bb
\nLily Allen, \u201cSmile\u201d
\nManic Street Preachers, \u201cMotorcycle Emptiness\u201d
\nMumford and Sons, \u201cI Will Wait\u201d
\nMuse, \u201cUprise\u201d <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like ALL of them, though some are among my personal favourites. In some cases, I have chosen a song that might be not so good but that has better lyrics than hits by the same artists. I have excluded, as you can see, hip-hop and, generally, any form of rapping, let students enjoy that on their own. Not my cup of tea… as I don\u2019t like being preached at.<\/p>\n

Personally, I have always preferred British to American music, at all levels, though, very incongruously my favourite band is American (the awesome Interpol!). Actually, I can very well say that British pop and rock played a great role in my decision to take a degree in English, as I\u2019m sure was the case with many of my contemporaries and is still the case with, I assume, some students. When an ex-student sent me a picture of graffiti scribbled on a loo door here at UAB I almost fainted with pleasure: \u2018Ian Curtis me posee\u2019. Yes, indeed, he still does. <\/p>\n

In my profound stupidity, I thought that at some point in the degree someone would lecture on the lyrics that mattered to me so much as a student. Nobody did. And, so, eventually, I wrote myself a few papers on music (Marilyn Manson, Linkin Park, Kylie Minogue, music videos, etc.) and managed to introduce a few songs in class with the excuse of the lyrics and their being, em, a form of poetical writing. I have always wanted to teach an elective subject but at the rate I\u2019m going, what with Harry Potter, and Gender Studies in the next two years, and who knows what else, I\u2019m not sure this will ever happen.<\/p>\n

Actually, one of the factors stopping me is that as I age pop and rock music has come to play a lesser and lesser role in my life. I haven\u2019t totally disconnected and the work I\u2019ve done for the selection has showed me that I need very much to reconnect. Partly this disconnection has to do with my losing the ability to enjoy music as I work (I need monastic silence now). Also with the fact that keeping up to date as regards good pop and rock is somehow even harder that keeping up to date with good fiction (see my last post). Music is gone from TV, except for the trashy MTV, which I do watch now and then. There used to be an excellent music TV channel, Fly Music, a few years ago (2005-8), focused on the best of indie. That, however, went, replaced by… Disney Channel. I-Cat FM, my favourite radio channel has become an internet channel, and I simply don\u2019t listen to the radio on the internet (Fly Music is now also there). I\u2019m not a Spotify person, either. And, well, downloading illegally, which everyone does, works only partly for me, as I belong to the generation that used to buy LPs and treasure them as objects (even for their covers). An .mp3 file is, for me, a disposable item, rather than a treasured possession and it has the very negative effect of making it all seem too homogeneous and equally disposable. And, well, as I argued last week in relation to fiction, gone are the times when I\u2019d risk whatever money CDs cost now. So, it\u2019s hard to keep up.<\/p>\n

So… We\u2019ll see how students react to my choices. And which choices they finally make in the Forum. I\u2019m worried indeed that the generational gap will work against me, generating scepticism on their side or even protectiveness of the territory. Or maybe I\u2019m projecting here, I remember being truly annoyed when I saw one of my ex-students wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. Hei, that\u2019s \u2018mine\u2019, I complained. She smiled and told me, \u2018don\u2019t be old-fashioned… Music has now no age.\u2019 But does it?<\/p>\n

Just to finish: do listen to the songs, they are amazing. One must admire very much a culture capable of producing them in such great numbers.<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them first for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. If you like my blog, you can subscribe using the RSS feed (right-hand column, below Blogroll.) You\u2019ll get an email message for every new post. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My colleagues in \u201820th century English Literature\u2019 (first-year) and myself have decided to use one spare week that we programmed after the unit on British Poetry for songs. I opened a Forum for students to contribute songs that they found interesting because of the lyrics but since the messages are trickling rather than pouring down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-general","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}