I’m writing an essay for English due in… two hours. I wrote this nice essay on Eleanor Rigby which was absolutely perfect for the theme of the class, was brilliant, and I now think it is my baby. However, I realized it had fuckall to do with the assignment besides slightly tying into it with the line “in western society.” I had to go back to my original, American Idiot by Green Day. You’d think this would work, but apparently in bullshit English poetry analysis there’s a such thing as “too explicit.” I’m pounding it out, but I’m not happy with it. I usually avoid changing the work I’m analyzing in between the rough draft and final draft, but since we have three drafts total and we have the entirety of Spring Break to finish it I’m going to take the risk (and probably arrange a time to meet with the professor to workshop the new draft a little since I’ll effectively lose any benefit from peer reviews tomorrow).
Anyway, I need a song that I can listen to that is about nationality or ethnicity, or one that I can make a damn good argument that it is making some sort of oblique argument about those topics. I tend to listen to classic rock, prog rock, punk rock, folksy nerd rock (i.e. Jonathan Coulton) flavors of metal and so on. There are some rap songs I can listen to, but I’m so choosy about the more popular forms of music that it wouldn’t really be prudent to pick them since there’s a very good chance I’ll not like it.
I have a few ideas, namely Back in the USSR (Beatles) and Tom Sawyer (Rush), but it doesn’t hurt to have a few more ideas. (Mods, I know this probably gets close to the homework line, but I justify it by saying that I’m simply asking for a song, I’m doing all the actual work myself)
PS. Born in the USA doesn’t help since we did it in class as an example.
As much as I hate to break the rule about homework help, this probably isn’t doing anywhere near the majority of your work for you.
U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
Matthew Good - North American for Life, Little Terror
Flogging Molly - Black Friday Rule, Life in a Tenement Square, What’s Left of the Flag
Rancid - Avenues & Alleyways
No idea why Eleanor Rigby is a bad example though - I think it does make a very strong point about Britishness.
Those are good, I also thought of Arrested in Shanghai by Rancid.
It’s the essays in our book under the nationality section that made me panic mostly. They all were like Warhol’s “On America” or Scarr’s “The typical American through the eyes of the US Census Bureau.” Most of the other kids who chose songs are doing things that are explicitly about things like 9/11 or religion in America. While I think I made a damn good argument about its cultural critiques, I’m not sure I was explicit enough tying it into nationality. While my teacher is definitely able to grasp nuance, I’m not sure where her line between “nuance” and “dangling thread tying it to the subject” is. I’m also not sure whether she has a line between simply exploring a facet of a culture and talking about nationality. I may be able to salvage it, but I really have to ask my instructor whether it’s okay or not since I’m very close to the line.
ETA: I’m not sure if I was clear in my post. I wasn’t worried because it wasn’t about American culture, she said that it can be about any nationality, it’s simply the ambiguity of the prompt and the theme with the works we read about it that scared me.
“The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby is about race in a very obvious way.
“Games Without Fronteirs” by Peter Gabriel seems to be about international leaders playing at war as if they were children (or vice versa), and the names are very ethnic.
I’ve heard that the Beatles’ “Blackbird” is about black Americans but I don’t know if that’s true.
Hmm, the description of “Games Without Frontiers” reminded me of “Fun and Games” by the Barenaked Ladies. This is actually helping a lot, thanks and keep going.
It’s certainly a cultural grouping, and a big, obvious, and often discriminated against one in our society (especially at colleges not located in the South).
For America/race issues, try “WMA” (stands for White Male American) off of Pearl Jam’s Vs. I’m tempted to suggest “Glorified G” on the same album as it sums up a certain kind of American in the first two lines, but it’s probably a little too on the nose and the lyrical repetitions mean there’s not that much material to work with.
Although the songs from the Hedwig and the Angry Inch musical more obviously deal with sex and gender issues, some also address Hedwig’s East German background and Western/American cultural identity. In “Tear Me Down” the Hedwig character explicitly compares herself to the Berlin Wall.
ETA: How could I forget The Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen”?!
Little Pink Houses - John Cougar Mellenkamp
The Last Resort - The Eagles (could be twisted a bunch of ways)
Rock The Casbah - The Clash
Mexican Radio - Wall of Voodoo
Turning Japanese - The Vapors
Russians - Sting
John Walker’s Blues - Steve Earle
Dunno if it fits, but the first that came to mind was Billy Joel’s My Life - mostly because of that line about how he “couldn’t go on the American way”. You could probably build some bs thesis out of that…the American character, “Go west, young man”, etc.
Here’s a suggestion I bet no one else in your class come up with: “Celtic Aggression” by Tonic. It’s about the clash between Irish immigants and those they encountered after making the move, and how they lost their own culture as they tried to fit in to survive.
Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves by Cher Speak English Or Die by Stormtroopers Of Death Children Of A Worthless God by Exodus If I Had A Rocket Launcher by Bruce Cockburn