Pop Music and Literature
Working in a Junior High, I am never to far from the reminder that Pop Music plays an important role in our society. In fact, it could be one of the few environments where it is terribly un-cool to not be in the know of the latest Pop hits. As a Language Arts teacher, I feel Pop music is a really valuable resource to reach students. It is a part of their world, and it can easily be transferred into the world of Literature and the history of Literature. . As Sanjek reveals, taste is all relevant to the listener and what’s received as popular. No one can determine what will be popular, and Powers makes the connection that even the cheesiest music must hold value because the competition is too high. If Pop music is seen as tedious and repeating itself, then perhaps that is the greatest asset of all to making a connection with literature. Many of those ideas and thoughts first found their popularity in literature itself.
If I use a comparison of Film to lead into this idea, I think of the modern Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo and Juliet that was wildly popular when I was in high school. This version of the film reignited a spark and connection to Shakespeare as the 1960’s version had done before that. I tie this into Pop music as I remember my own 11-year-old self obsessed, as well as every other girl my age, with the Tiffany version of I Think We’re Alone Now. To my father’s horror, I was singing this tune, word for word, without a single knowledge of the Beatles. However, I loved the song, and while it didn’t quite live up to Tiffany’s version, I was intrigued by The Beatles version, and made a connection with this as well.
As I look at the age group of my students, I feel Pop music is a great resource to make past/present connections, literacy analysis connections, and make a step toward transferring knowledge with higher-level thinking. It is a resource they are so tapped into and so knowledgeable about that it is an instant attention getter. Pop music, in its different genres within itself, reaches all students in some way.
One way I see Pop music really holding value in my classroom is making the connection of modern Pop music to classic literary analysis. For example, in place of a traditional 5-paragraph essay on Catcher in the Rye, students would need to create an i-tunes play list using 5 popular songs, and explain, in writing, how these songs relate to a theme, symbol, or motif in the novel. As Powers states in Bread and Butter Songs, “music gives us a way of making sense of the world, and then it must include utter familiarity and even tedium as well as revelation.� These themes and ideas that are found in literature are not as outdated and archaic as they appear to the 12-year-old mind. Through this connection with Pop music, it is easier to see the connection these ideas and themes hold in our modern, popular world. As Beech has reinforced several times in his text, the importance of “choosing texts…that will engage students to the extent that they actually want to learn how to read them� is an invaluable tool that modern media, including Pop music, provides.