Thursday, 3 August 06

The class dwindled to only 5 people today. But it was a fun session nonetheless. As usual for Thursday I brought copies of The Stranger and The Seattle Weekly.

Our first topic was Yoshida Brothers (bio in English) from Japan. Noriko from Japan was our navigator.

The Yoshida Brothers play the traditional 3-stringed instrument the shamisen. Noriko said that young people in Japan are more interested in Western music and culture and not traditional Japanese music. But the Yoshida Brothers have managed to cross over to popular culture on the back of a beer commercial.

Noriko first showed a video of the brothers doing a traditional shamisen performance. I like it, though am not sure I could take more than 3 minutes of it... (By the way, Noriko says the guy with blond hair that the camera keeps cutting to is a famous Japanese singer.)

Next she showed a video which has the brothers playing a more modern version of the traditional music (the video is a generic "tour of japan").

Noriko is glad that a band like the Yoshida Brothers can get young people interested in traditional music, too. She said she herself listens to more Western music and when I asked her why she chose to play this for the class she said she wanted to show Japanese culture.

I asked if she has Yoshida Brothers albums which led to a discussion about how people buy and/or acquire music. She said that most young people in Japan do not buy whole albums anymore: they just download the songs they are interested in. The students from other countries concurred that this is behavior is true in their countries, too.

We moved on to "Missing" (lyrics) by Everything But The Girl. Inna from the Ukraine brought it. We talked about how desperately sad the lyrics are, yet put to an upbeat tempo. This is a device used by a lot of bands, to my mind most often in reggae. A couple of students mentioned liking the imagery of the lyrics, especially the line "I miss you like the deserts miss the rain".



And on the topic of sad songs (it seems this class is mostly about sad songs!) Inna played another of her favorites, "Lonely Day" (lyrics, video) by System of a Down. Naturally I pointed out that the line "the most lonliest day of my life" is incorrect English, but everyone realized that already...

To pick up the mood of the class a bit, for the last song of the day I played a video of one of my favorite live performances of a song: "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" by KT Tunstall on the French TV show Taratata. It's amazing how she puts all the elements of the songs together using an on-stage recorder. My mind could never keep track of all that! Indeed, on the same show the crowd messed her timing up and she had to re-start the song ("I want you back")

Not sure what we will listen to next week. Edgar from Russia doesn't like any of the stuff we've played so far, so I am trying to get him to bring something in that he likes.