Tuesday, 29 August 06

Today there were 3 students. No musical adventures from the weekend in the group to report...

I mentioned that this weekend one of the best music and arts festivals in the whole U.S. takes place in Seattle: the Bumbershoot Festival. It's hard to describe what the festival is like to someone who has never been there, but I encouraged my students to plan to go check it out. We will look more closely at the events during Bumbershoot during the Thursday class to find things of interest for them.

I mentioned that one of the bands I especially want to see is Spoon (website, bio). The students asked what kind of music Spoon plays so I played a video of one of my favorite songs of theirs, "I Turn My Camera On" (video). I hadn't seen the video before and I actually found that it detracted from the song -- I have that song with some others playing in my car regularly and it's great for driving, but the video does nothing to enhance the song. I turned it off half way through because clearly the students weren't into it either. I hope I didn't dissuade them from going to Bumbershoot! I still like Spoon a lot and look forward to their show at Bumbershoot, but I don't need to see that video again...

I mentioned that I am going to see a solo concert tonight by Tim Rogers (bio), lead singer for Australian band You Am I (bio), one of my favorite live bands in the world. I didn't listen to my gut feeling and instead played a short clip of Tim performing solo. I only played about 20 seconds of it, but when I turned around my students had blank looks on their faces like "Why would anyone go see *that*?!"

With these two misfires (the Spoon and Tim Rogers clips) I may have destroyed any musical credibility I had with my students... Nonetheless, I am totally psyched to see Tim Rogers tonight -- he's a true rock n roller to the core I expect a great show!

Clearly it was time to move on to something which my students would actually enjoy. Yumi was prepared and wanted to introduce us to one of her favorite singers from Japan, Kumi Koda (her website, bio in English). I asked why Yumi likes Kumi so much. Part of it is because they are the same age, but also because Kumi has a lot of vitality. Additionally, when Yumi was applying for jobs listening to Kumi gave her a lot of heart.

We first watched the video for "Butterfly". Clearly she has a lot of Britney Spears influence in the video, though not the music. The lyrics are about wanting to be a rich girl.

I asked my students if they think this video is "too" sexy, in other words, if being so overtly sexy makes it less romantic. They answered they think the sexiness in this video is fine. But Noriko did mention that Yumi participated in the annual New Year's Eve competition between Japanese bands, which is a family-oriented TV show, and she felt that Yumi was too scantily clad for family viewing on that show.

I was curious to see what that looked like and we tried to find that video on YouTube but couldn't find it. We did find a video of SMAP (see entry for 15 August class) performing at the year-end competition. Noriko said this song was very popular in Japan, across generations, because it came out around the start of the Iraq war and is an appeal for peace. Yumi likes it a lot and Grace (from Taiwan) is also familiar with the song.

To end the class we came back to Kumi Koda again. We watched the video for "Wind" which Yumi says is Kumi's most popular song in Japan. The lyrics are about not giving up, keep on running and not being defeated by a headwind.

Although I wouldn't probably play something like SMAP or Kumi Koda at home myself, I find it really interesting to hear highly polished pop music from other countries. It is fascinating to see the similarities across the different cultures, but how similar themes vary to appeal to the local culture.

It just goes to show that the most important aspect of music is that a person identifies with the song/music in some way, any way. For example, that Kumi's music heartened Yumi when she needed to get through her tests. Victor said something similar about Green Day in an earlier class. For whatever reason music moves a person, whether it's a lyric, a tone, a feeling it evokes or a memory related to a period of time that music reminds a person of, music has a special connection to the soul.

Part of the goal of today's session was for me to learn more about my new students' musical taste so I can suggest some Seattle bands that they might like. Next session we will find out more about Grace's favorites, but from what Yumi showed us today, I can't think of a Seattle band that is like this kind of pop music (Kumi Koda and SMAP). For the most part, Seattle bands are not very "happy" -- they tend to be more introspective and melancholic. Is it because of the cloudy weather? We will explore this more in the coming weeks to see if I can find some Seattle music they like.

In the end we didn't discuss Dixie Chicks today. Perhaps we'll get to them on Thursday. I plan to go see the weekly Children of the Revolution flamenco show at the Capitol Club (map) on Capitol Hill next Tuesday and invited my class to come along. It sounds like we will have a group for dinner and flamenco!

By the way, the Children of the Revolution concert at Seattle City Hall that we saw for the last class of the last session is now online.