How have you shoehorned your love of music into school assignments?

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

That question is phrased awkwardly, but hopefully you get my drift.

Inspired by Hstencil mentioning that he wrote his college entrance essay on the Minutemen on this thread. (He also wrote a thesis about Tony Conrad, am I right?)

In college, I wrote three papers about music. The first was for an actual music class (American Music), entitled "The Origin of Electronic Music in the U.S.," and focusing on Luening/Ussachefsky and John Cage. The second two, however, were for non-music classes that were very flexible in terms of what topics we could choose. For American Youth Culture, I wrote about "California Surf Culture in the 1950's and 1960's." And for Religion, Popular Culture, and Advertising (some weirdo sociology class), I wrote about lounge music and culture, with an eye on both the original incarnation and its mid-90s revival. Forget what the title of the paper was, but I listened to an episode of Talk of the Nation for research that featured some old dude who called in and talked about how great it was that "his" music was coming back, and then he launched into a rousing rendition of "Buckle Down, Winsocki" and proceeded to give Ray Suarez his recipe for a good martini, despite Suarez's attempt to end the conversation. Awesome.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 19 August 2004 23:11 (twenty-one years ago)

I shoehorned my love of music into an academic career. Not a bad gig.

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Thursday, 19 August 2004 23:16 (twenty-one years ago)

i wrote about Free Jazz for one of those incredibly boring "write an essay about something you know a lot about" papers - I got an A

I also wrote a paper on Reynols for my sign language class, but cliamed Miguel was deaf instead of retarded. That was a doozy. I should post it here.

Not completely on the subject, but my good friend Jeff Lewis wrote his senior thesis on The Watchman - and I think he won some kind of award for it, too. How cool is that?

― roger adultery (roger adultery), Thursday, 19 August 2004 23:16 (twenty-one years ago)

hey john, in our junior or senior year HS English class, we had to analyze a poem or something. does that sound familiar at all? I never read poetry so I chose Bjork's "Hyperballad". I remember getting an A but I don't remember anything else more specific about what I wrote.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 19 August 2004 23:21 (twenty-one years ago)

I somehow worked a big essay on Linda Rondstadt's Heart Like a Wheel into a paper for a Cultural Studies class....I can't remember any of it but I imagine it was complete pretentious bullshit....

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Thursday, 19 August 2004 23:22 (twenty-one years ago)

In 6th grade I did a report on British bands that took advantage of how nobody knew or gave a shit about any of it. Did you know that the Happy Mondays got big when Depeche Mode covered "Step On" at Wembley? It's true, ya know!

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Thursday, 19 August 2004 23:24 (twenty-one years ago)

I think I closed some essay in high school with a quote from "Under the Gun" by the Circle Jerks.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:02 (twenty-one years ago)

In HighSchool, I wrote a paper suggesting that Armed Forces was really about 1984. I got a 98.

― peepee (peepee), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:04 (twenty-one years ago)

I shoehorned my love of music into an academic career. Not a bad gig.

i am trying to do this. i wrote my dissertation about look blue go purple.

― The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylurex), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:07 (twenty-one years ago)

"i wrote my dissertation about look blue go purple."
WHA?!?!

― peepee (peepee), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:09 (twenty-one years ago)

― The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylurex), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:11 (twenty-one years ago)

Ms. Lurex, I need to know more. I've already posted on another thread about a possible move to NZ to continue this academic thing at Victoria in Wellington. Are you in NZ?

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:12 (twenty-one years ago)

yes, dunedin, in fact.

― The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylurex), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:14 (twenty-one years ago)

So you know Roy Shuker and Tony Mitchell's work on things NZ? I'm up for an interview at Victoria in a few weeks (where Roy is now). We might know some of the same folks then. Are at Otago? (I'm in Montreal/Berlin/Helsinki at the moment - kinda confusing). Wrote a piece on NZ music fans for Perfect Beat many years ago.

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I named each of the tenth grade English essays after whatever records I was into at the time. The Pleasure Principle was about life and death drives in AP Psychology, for example.

More explicitly, I opened my summer essay about Life, Truth, and Reality with a discussion about RoMo aesthetics. I've yet to see how he receives it.

― Atnevon (Atnevon), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:20 (twenty-one years ago)

I write about music I love in descriptive writing exercises all the time (I once wrote three pages on "Born Under Punches"!!)

There was this girl in my creative writing class last semester who worked music references into all her poems -- Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Radiohead. She is terribly, terribly hot. She talked to me about music after class a couple times. Once when I was really drunk I asked her to be in my band. She said, "No but I love your poetry." Thought I was gay. Then I wrote a poem that copped Elvis Costello lyrics about how straight I am. But relatively, I'm not very at all. Woe is me.

― Sonny A. (Keiko), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:21 (twenty-one years ago)

In year 11 i got 24/25 for an essay i wrote discussing the cure's interpretation of albert camus's the outsider in their song "killing an arab"

― gem (trisk), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:26 (twenty-one years ago)

I think the "Killing the Arab" thing was trotted out in my highschool existentialism class (it was the early 80s and our teacher was hip to it). And of course it was later singled out by an Arab-Canadian group so it had some life in it, courtesy censorship issues. Better than talking about the poetry of Simon and Garfunkel (I'm thinking of Wiseman's documentary "Highschool" here).

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Sorry: 'an arab'

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I was a psychology major in college and was (in 1995) writing my senior thesis on stigmatization based on "master status" (a centrally defining, usually negatively perceived characteristic) -- to help define the subject, I quoted all the lyrics to Steely Dan's "Barrytown" in the text. It was a great joy to include Becker & Fagen in my references.

― Joseph McCombs, Friday, 20 August 2004 01:33 (twenty-one years ago)

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE POETRY OF SIMON AND GARFUNKEL??

― Sonny A. (Keiko), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:35 (twenty-one years ago)

Whenever I got a creative writing assignment at school I would always try to fit in music lyrics etc. (Ok, Nick Hornby does it - I was 14, whats his excuse?) The only one I really remember was making one characters favourite song 'Suzanne' by Leonard Cohen, which was the name of another character too. hmmm. I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time. Anyway, my English teacher turned out to be a Cohen fan, which no doubt helped overcome the abysmal quality of the story to get me an A.

― Kevin Gilchrist (Mr Fusion), Friday, 20 August 2004 01:38 (twenty-one years ago)

I think the "Killing the Arab" thing was trotted out in my highschool existentialism class (it was the early 80s and our teacher was hip to it).

mine was english lit and early 90s, so it wasn't real popular amongst my classmates, and i discovered the connection on my own so i felt pretty excited about it, even though it may have been dead obvious to you. far from being hip to it, my teacher had never heard of it or even the cure, she was thrilled when i played it for her.

― gem (trisk), Friday, 20 August 2004 02:05 (twenty-one years ago)

I wrote a paper about Cabaret Voltaire for my freshman year intro to electronic music class.

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Friday, 20 August 2004 02:07 (twenty-one years ago)

I took an entire course in "Popular Music" in my 4th year. Best moment was our professor blasting "Temptation" by New Order over the speaker system while myself and a couple friends were dancing in our seats singing the "Oooh-ooh-oooh-oooh-oooh" part as loud as we could in the back of the lecture hall.

― J-rock (Julien Sandiford), Friday, 20 August 2004 02:42 (twenty-one years ago)

My last paper was for Drugs and Society, and was on five drug trends and the music that accompanied them. My prof freaked out to learn that 'La Cucaracha' is about pot.

― Doc, Friday, 20 August 2004 03:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Oops: I almost mentioned this! Yes, we had to either analyze song lyrics as a poem, or write song lyrics ourselves. (This was for Chuck Abn3y's class, natch.) I wrote and performed a song! I recorded the keyboard accompaniment and then sang over the tape. I don't remember much of it, though. I remember that Ad4m Reh analyzed a Smashing Pumpkins song -- "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" maybe?

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 20 August 2004 04:59 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh yeah, and Dan, I forgot to mention you at the beginning of the thread w/r/t your entrance essay on Stockhausen. And Monetizing Eyeballs' essay on Patti Smith, for that matter.

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 20 August 2004 05:01 (twenty-one years ago)

i used to work in zappa and bowie references to take-home law school exams. my journal note on the law regarding assisted suicide opened w/ some lyrics from gary numan's "life machine" (shame that the note was ultimately rejected for publication).

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 20 August 2004 05:02 (twenty-one years ago)

I compared and contrasted The Smiths' 'Miserable Lie' and 'Pretty Girls Make Graves' with Citizen Kane and 'Heart of Darkness' as the (ahem) "Loss of Innocence." At first, thinking that my AP English teacher was so very old and Oklahoman, I thought the references were just too over her head. However, just typing this out and reading this thread, I think now I deserved the B- I got.

― righteousmaelstrom, Friday, 20 August 2004 05:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Righteous Maelstrom is a Fall lyric damnit. Wait don't tell me don't tell me I will identify the song if it takes me all night...don't tell me. I won't check this thread again until I've figured it out. Don't tell me. Oh God I hope this isn't like the few years it took me to figure out that "New Puritan" was the Fall song I had stuck in my head for years. "We are the Fall! Righteous Maelstrom!" okay I got it...it's something he says at the beginning of a live bit. Okay. Now I'm getting somewhere don't tell me don't tell me... Wait I know what it is now..."used up all the allowances of your experiences/ba ba ba da da da da da....da da...." It's..."Just Step Sideways". WHEW I feel better now. Yeah, that's a doozy as far as Fall stuff goes.

You can't be serious. I would have died. My world would have been turned upside down. I would never be the same.

I wrote a paper about Cabaret Voltaire for my freshman year intro to electronic music class.

Would love to read that, honestly.

I wrote a story as a teenager about how Joy Division morphed into New Order. I think in the story it had all the band members as like cartoon shoes or something, but I do believe I might have actually turned it in.

― Bimble (bimble), Friday, 20 August 2004 05:58 (twenty-one years ago)

I did my GCSE presentation on why fifties rock'n'roll was the greatest genre of teenage music ever. It was mostly me quoting lyrics and then going 'do you SEE?'.

The most shameful thing is that when faced with an exam essay question that was something like 'write about someone who has CHANGED YOUR LIFE!', clearly expecting heart-tugging stories about sainted grandmothers and whatnot, I, er, wrote about Jeff Buckley. And how he was dead. Mind you, I've a sneaking suspicion that a friend of mine wrote hers about Richey Edwards, which is a mite more hideously embarrassing.

― cis (cis), Friday, 20 August 2004 06:21 (twenty-one years ago)

I was one of many who uncovered the Killing An Arab/Camus connection for extra credit in the '80s. By the time my cousin enrolled in this teacher's lit class about eight years later (amazing ex-beatnik whose claim to fame was teaching auteur theory to the Coens, he also ran TV and radio station) my transcript of the lyrics, in my handwriting, had become part of Pete's syllabus (and he'd play them the tune). Pete also spotted that Kelly was my cousin because of her handwriting (I have cool handwriting which Kelly admits she tried to copy the second handwriting mattered to her).

Gave mixed tapes of post-punk to college profs so they could soundtrack papers I wrote about Margaret Thatcher and thesis on countercultural peer groups in rite-of-passage literature. Wrote short stories with titles nicked from songs by Manchester bands (Fall and Magazine ones mostly).

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 20 August 2004 07:05 (twenty-one years ago)

I quoted loads of Britpop lyrics in a GCSE English "write your autobiography" project. I think I got props from the teacher for this.

― dog latin (dog latin), Friday, 20 August 2004 07:26 (twenty-one years ago)

Berkeley history thesis was disco-centric.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 20 August 2004 08:08 (twenty-one years ago)

i wrote an essay about suede for gcse english

― Robin Goad (rgoad), Friday, 20 August 2004 08:10 (twenty-one years ago)

In college, I wrote a paper comparing Ezra Pound to Morrissey. Also, I used Smiths lyrics as an intro to a paper in a freshman year high-school paper.

― frankE (frankE), Friday, 20 August 2004 12:02 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh ya...I made a minor connection between "Heart of Darkness" and the Gang of FOur because "We live as we dream, alone" is a line from it.

― peepee (peepee), Friday, 20 August 2004 13:14 (twenty-one years ago)

12th grade english (actually more anglo-american culture) class included a focus on popular music...we all got to do presentations on diferent genres. I was allowed to make mine about the connections between R&B and Rock & Roll in the 50's, it was great.

― Daniel_Rf (Daniel_Rf), Friday, 20 August 2004 13:44 (twenty-one years ago)

I managed to compare the principles of the deconstructionist movement (as spearheaded by Jacques Derrida and others) to dance remix culture. At the time I was obsessed with "Stars" by Dubstar, and happened to own about 12 mixes of the tune, so I made a short megamix with my own running commentary over the transitions, and put this on an accompanying cassette. The prof loved it and gave me an A+.

― Tantrum The Cat (Tantrum The Cat), Friday, 20 August 2004 13:48 (twenty-one years ago)

For my Inter Cert (Irish equiv. of GCSE) English paper in 1985, I wrote an essay on "The Velvet Underground and Nico". Three years later, for the Leaving cert, an essay on "my kind of music" which started with a giddy precis of the Timelords single and proceeded to trash all instances of late-80's rockist authenticity. I'm still slightly thrilled to think I got into university partly on the basis of describing Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel as "two short men in bad suits, one bald" (which is all I recall: the rest was all sub-Penman/Morley/Tom Wolfe). Years later: thesis epigraph from Eno: "The passage of time is flicking dimly..." etc.

― briand, Friday, 20 August 2004 13:53 (twenty-one years ago)

I once used college funds, the college hall and the fact that no-one else at the college who was doing an 'A'-Level English course at the time seemed able to suggest a single living British poet, as an excuse to organise a "poetry recital" featuring Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke.

The headmaster, a bunch of teachers, a few parents, several local poerty-lovers and a reporter from the local rag all sat in dumb incomprehension through Linton's set; and several (including the headmaster) subsequently stormed melodramatically out halfway through Chickentown.

― Stewart Osborne (Stewart Osborne), Friday, 20 August 2004 14:02 (twenty-one years ago)

Wait I know what it is now..."used up all the allowances of your experiences/ba ba ba da da da da da....da da...." It's..."Just Step Sideways". WHEW I feel better now. Yeah, that's a doozy as far as Fall stuff goes.

-- Bimble (mar...), August 20th, 2004.

I don't think that's correct. At least, it's not on 'Just Step Sideways.' Where I got it from is from a live snippet, but you know how MES likes to repeat himself. Now I have to go back and look for it!

― righteousmaelstrom, Friday, 20 August 2004 14:05 (twenty-one years ago)

For a lab course I used a few tone generators to find the resonant frequency of my residence's shower stalls. Once we removed the interference from the fans and the lights we got pretty close to two of them. The third was a bit screwed because the shower curtian didn't have the same ability to reflect as the tiles.

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Friday, 20 August 2004 14:17 (twenty-one years ago)

I got my best grades on papers that were about music.

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Friday, 20 August 2004 14:21 (twenty-one years ago)

In grade 12 I mentioned Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots (eeps) lyrics in my long essay for the English provincial exam, somehow I ended up with the highest score of the class (what could my classmates have been writing on then??). Someone in shop class tried to replicate the "U" and "2" rings from the cover of Achtung Baby, while someone else made a bowl out of a melted LP.

― Poppy (poppy), Friday, 20 August 2004 15:32 (twenty-one years ago)

I guess the LP bowl wasn't exactly "love" of the music on it though.

― Poppy (poppy), Friday, 20 August 2004 15:34 (twenty-one years ago)

not so much shoehorning, but in 11th grade for AP american history we had to do a large, multi-media group presentation on a particular decade in american history. we got the 80s, me and my friend covering music. we posited a clumsy dichotomy between rap and hardcore punk movements and new wave. the upshot was that we got to dress up like various bands and do horrible lip-synch/partially live instrumented cover version of songs such as a 'spray paint' and 'i ran so far away'. our teacher said it was the best music presentation he had ever seen since he'd assigned the decades project.

― jake b. (cerybut), Friday, 20 August 2004 16:13 (twenty-one years ago)

John: I guess I misremembered the assignment because I didn't think we were supposed to use a song as our material, but it being in Mr. Abn3y's class makes sense (Hyperballad wasn't released til summer of '95).
You didn't perform that song in class, did you? Cause I think I would totally remember that.

― oops (Oops), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:41 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, I did perform it in class! I think we have been in different sections, though? Weren't there two sections of AP English 12?

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:46 (twenty-one years ago)

And you may be right that it wasn't necessarily a song that we were supposed to analyze, but Chuck encouraged people to choose songs since he assumed we'd be more familiar with songs than poems.

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:48 (twenty-one years ago)

I think I read a paper I wrote about punk rock in front of my high school music class, playing excerpts of Propaghandi on the tape deck in between.

― n.a. (Nick A.), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:51 (twenty-one years ago)

Was this in Bombay???

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:53 (twenty-one years ago)

No, in Maryland, but since that school was like 90% African-American kids who didn't listen to punk rock, it was actually a somewhat original paper topic.

― n.a. (Nick A.), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:54 (twenty-one years ago)

I took a multimedia design course in college. We had to do various multimedia projects on topics of our choosing. For our final project, a friend and I made a flash-animated video for Ween's "Mister Will You Please Help My Pony."

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 20 August 2004 20:59 (twenty-one years ago)

This doesn't really count as shoehorning, but our sick-pony sprite sort of ruled.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:00 (twenty-one years ago)

Talk about shoehorning: the title to my essay on Prufrock was something tortured like "The Paranoid Android is Afraid of Himself" or somesuch ridiculousness.

― Leeeter van den Hoogenband (Leee), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:01 (twenty-one years ago)

"Shoehorning" is a pretty great word, innit?

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:04 (twenty-one years ago)

hmm I was sure we were in the same english class during senior year. I have a memory of you commenting on my Bjork shirt, and I went to that concert in November of '95, or first semester senior year. But maybe we did this assignment during second semester and weren't in the same section then.

xpost I was just thinking that it was, yes.

― oops (Oops), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:06 (twenty-one years ago)

i took a class on differing literary interpretations of new york city last semester and for our final project we were allowed to do a project where we created "historical liner notes" for the soundtrack of an imagined film version of the book we chose. i wrote about the pet shop boys, kate bush, prince, sting, bronski beat, and some others in connection with angels in america. grade: A! (my only regret is not making a cd to go along with it)

― joseph (joseph), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:13 (twenty-one years ago)

When I was 15 I did a speech on riot grrl at school, and I accidentally swore while doing it like the badass I was. I got 19/20 and a comment saying "watch your language".

― Elisabeth (Elisabeth), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:46 (twenty-one years ago)

So you know Roy Shuker and Tony Mitchell's work on things NZ?

i'm familiar with "north meets south" and "Popular music and local identity". yeah i'm at otago! good luck for your interview!

― The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylurex), Friday, 20 August 2004 21:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, I gave it some thought later on last night and figured I was probably wrong about that. Anyway, if you find it, do tell.

― Bimble (bimble), Friday, 20 August 2004 22:15 (twenty-one years ago)

A minor tenth-grade writing project I once turned in was composed entirely of the lyrics from "Living on a Prayer." My teacher told me it bordered on plagiarism and gave me a B+.

― My name is Kenny (My name is Kenny), Saturday, 21 August 2004 04:25 (twenty-one years ago)

I wanted to play Pavement's "Stereo" during my "rock music is poetry too" class assignment but I chickened out and played XTC's "Dear God" instead.

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 21 August 2004 04:40 (twenty-one years ago)

11th grade is when this shit went down, specifically.

― CeCe Peniston (Anthony Miccio), Saturday, 21 August 2004 04:41 (twenty-one years ago)

Hey Bimble,

'Spectre Vs. Rector': At least on the live version from Totale's Turns.

I actually nicked it from the sound collage from 'Putta Block' from 'In Palace of Swords Reversed' I guess it's a segue from that to 'Cary Grant's Wedding.'

"Hail New Puritan!
Righteous Maelstrom!
Have you ever heard new Bill Haley LP?!?
[band begins playing 'CGW']
"What is this shit?!?!..."

We now return to our regularly scheduled thread.

― righteousmaelstrom, Saturday, 21 August 2004 04:48 (twenty-one years ago)

In first year uni, for a subject on the Second World War I worked in an entire verse of TISM's 'Defecate On My Face' to an essay. Last year of highschool I tried to put in as many Fall tong titles into my final exams.

― Sasha (sgh), Saturday, 21 August 2004 05:42 (twenty-one years ago)

righteousmaelstrom: That's great! "Cary Grant's Wedding" is one of my favourite Fall songs of all time. That's probably why the phrase 'righteous maelstrom' rang such a bell for me, because I never bothered much with Totale's Turns as a whole, just taped that song and played it by itself many times. I regret to say I haven't played Totale's Turns in its entirety for about 50 billion years, and Spector Vs. Rector has always bothered me a bit. Thanks!!!
This means of course that it's about mother freaking time I got Totale's Turns on CD. I don't even have with me on vinyl, it's all the way across the country at my parent's house! AARRGH! Again, thanks for saving me from that nightmare that lasted years before I figured out that it was some lyric or other from "New Puritan" that I'd had in my head for no apparent reason. I don't ever want to go through that again. Sometimes The Fall just have WAY too large a back catalogue.

― Bimble (bimble), Saturday, 21 August 2004 06:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Sasha: What does TISM stand for?

― Bimble (bimble), Saturday, 21 August 2004 06:12 (twenty-one years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.