8 May 2008

Only 5 students in class today! I wonder where everyone was?...

With such a small group the conversation was very different from how it usually is with the larger group. It was a nice change!

First of all we found out that Minnie had her birthday the past week -- Happy Birthday!

Then we found out that Hong Bo's birthday is next week!

Today we actually hardly talked about music at all. We talked about:

* "Time" (understanding "time" in a linear way versus thinking of all time and history existing at the same time).

* Deja-vu

* Dreams/dreaming

* UFO's and life on other planets

At some point someone mentioned that they had seen Britney Spears wearing a dress that had Korean writing on it, but which made absolutely no sense in Korean! We looked the picture up online and the Koreans all laughed their heads off.

I can well imagine how silly this must look in their eyes -- I have seen a lot of non-sensical English on many questionable fashion statements in Eastern Europe!

In the end we hardly heard any music today, but we really had great conversation!

1 May 2008

14 Students today. The theme was "love" songs, though I realized that since it is "May Day" we should have made the theme "work" songs.

I started the class by trying to explain this idea. And I played the most "work" song in America: "Take This Job And Shove It" (song, lyrics) by Johnny Paycheck (bio). However, I think I failed in two ways with this song:

1. Most students didn't realize why anyone would dislike their job so much as to write a song about hating it.
2. I couldn't explain the phrase "shove it" very well in class, so I don't think most of the students understood it. Here is a defintion from Dictionary.com: "go to hell: a term of contempt, abuse, disagreement, or the like."

Before we sent into love songs, I asked if anyone had had any musical adventures in the past week. No one had. I asked Jorge if he has improved on his harmonica. He said he hasn't really, but he started learning how to play "Sweet Home Alabama" (song, lyrics) on his guitar. (I noticed there are a lot of videos teaching you how to play this song on YouTube.)

Lyrically there is a lot of commentary in this song, but I found it hard to explain to the class all the references. I think the problem is that most of the references are from the mid-1970's -- about 20 years before most of my students were born! Here's a Wikipedia article which explains the song.

I also mentioned that their song, "Free Bird" (song with lyrics) is considered an American song classic. I tried to explain that it is a joke in America at concerts for people to yell out "Free Bird" at the performers. I'm not sure myself why we all think this is so funny... Mercifully I did not make the class sit through the entire 9-minute song, including the *very long* guitar solos at the end. Here's more information about the song.

I explained, too that the band who wrote this song, Lynyrd Skynyrd, is a typical southern US rock band and that the band suffered a tragedy when it's airplane crashed, killing 3 of the band members, including the singer, but some of the band survived. The story of Lynyrd Skynyrd is an interesting tale of a prototypical American band.

Ok, enough of the Skynyrd, on to love songs.

First choice was "As long as you love me" (video, lyrics) by Backstreet Boys (bio). The student who picked the song says he likes it for the lyrics. Indeed, the lyrics are about true love: loving a person exactly for who they are and whatever they have done in the past.



The next song chosen was "Crucify My Love" (video with lyrics) by X-Japan (bio). The class really liked the lyrics to this song.







The X-Japan song had a melody that reminded me of the song "Calling You" (original song with clips from the movie, lyrics), which is one of my favorites, though it is very sad and melancholic. The song is from the movie "Bagdad Cafe" (info). I love the original version, but I also really like George Michael's version. I think he hits the restrained melancholy perfectly. Apparently Celine Dion also covered it, if you like her (dramatic) style. You can see, it's a very popular song!

As so often, I had never heard of the band (X-Japan) that the class chose, even though the band is extremely popular in Asia. I love finding out about new bands!

In fact, I am going to a concert on May 21st as a direct consequence of this class: I will go see the Yoshida Brothers (bio, a famous song/video) because one of my students once played their music in the class and I thought it was a great mixture of traditional Japanese music with modern music.


The next song chosen was "Friday I'm In Love" (video, lyrics) by The Cure (bio). I said that it's true that the song has the word "love" in it, but how is it is a "love" song? The answer: It's about loving the weekend, not a person. Good interpretation! :-)



Another student picked up on the theme of days of the week and chose "7 days" (video, lyrics) by Craig David (bio). Well, this use of the days of the week is much different than the song by The Cure! I think it's pretty clever ;-) .

We had recently heard another Craig David song and I mentioned in that post how he used the vocoder. I was surprised to hear that this song also uses a vocoder. Does he use a vocoder on *every* song?!? I mentioned the vocoder in class, but the students didn't seem to know what I meant, so I played the song which uses the vocoder effect to the maximum: Cher's "Believe" (video, lyrics). Vocoder overdrive!!


The next song chosen was "The Way You Look Tonight" (video, lyrics) by Rod Stewart (bio). (Note about Rod Stewart's bio: I wonder if the student who chose this song knows about his long history, ranging from rocker to disco quee... er, I mean king.)

At this point I asked the class who has had a "love songs" compilation CD given to them. A couple of people raised their hands. One woman said she had received one, but had thrown it right away because she didn't like the guy who gave it to her. A couple of the guys have made love songs compilations cds for girls. Including me! ;-))


Next song chosen was "Beautiful Disaster" (video, lyrics) by Kelly Clarkson (bio). The student who chose this song like Kelly's voice a lot. But lyrically it's also an interesting twist on the "love" theme; similar to the first song, it's about loving someone just how they are.



The next song was "Everything" (video with translated subtitles) by Misia (bio). I asked the student why she chose this song and her answer is that she likes the voice and the lyrics: she wants to be everything for the guy she is in love with!




I hadn't asked Ira for a song in a while, so asked her which song she wanted to hear. Her brother had actually chosen one for her, so we listened to "Angel" (video, lyrics) by Massive Attack (bio). It is true that this song includes the word "Love", but it build too slowly and the music is rather foreboding, so we took it off rather quickly. That said, I actually like Massive Attack and their "foreboding" music a lot. My favorite song by them is "Teardrop" (video, lyrics), which is another very melancholic song. Like the song "Calling You" earlier, I like the woman's voice floating over the top of the simple, melancholic music.

These songs by Massive Attack reminded me that another British "trip-hop" (definition) band has just brought out a new album: Portishead (bio). Trying to work in the theme of "love" I showed a bit of the song "Sour Times" (video, lyrics), but I don't think the class is into this kind of music; it's rather dark... Their music is like soundtracks to films: in fact, I believe that's how they started -- writing film soundtrack music. I really like Portishead and look forward to hearing their newly released album "3".

The last song of the day was by the Korean grop Jewelry (bio), but I don't remember which song it was, sorry!