OpinionCulture This article is more than 8 years old10 songs to play to children to teach them about life
This article is more than 8 years oldLaura BartonBritish schoolchildren are to have Haydn, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, and Santana foisted on them in the classroom. What popular music do you think should play a role in young people’s education?
1. Wonderful World – Sam Cooke
As charming as Cooke’s tribute to the powers and simple pleasures of love may be, this song more importantly provides an introduction to how much there is to learn in this life: history, biology, French, geography, trigonometry … Even the lovestruck Cooke concedes that knowledge is power: “Maybe by being an A student, baby, I can win your love for me,” he sings. Incidentally, a slide rule is largely used for multiplication and division.
2. You Can’t Always Get What You Want – Rolling Stones
This 1969 recording — the B-side to Honky Tonk Women — is a marvellous introduction to the changes brought by the 1960s, by the sex and drugs and politics of that decade, the optimism that infused its early years and the disillusionment that followed. Alternatively, you can leap straight to the chorus for a simple lesson in the contrariness of life and the rewards that may be reaped from perseverance.
3. Once in a Lifetime – Talking Heads
An unfashionable but helpful message to press into young, sweet minds, is the idea that material success does not necessarily lead to happiness. Here Byrne’s verses are weighed down by the accumulated objects – large automobiles and beautiful houses – but the chorus bursts with the joys of launching “into the blue again”. They may disregard this advice entirely of course, but being reminded that life is short and not entirely about chrome wheels and soft furnishings is not a bad lesson to learn.
4. I Touch Myself – Divinyls
In our increasingly sexualised society, where, if reports are to be believed, students now spend their algebra lessons snapchatting naked emojis to one another, Divinyls offer an essential lesson in sex education – the importance of desire, self-knowledge and seduction from those simpler days before the world Tindered itself into oblivion.
5. Independent Women Part I – Destiny’s Child
In 1999 Destiny’s Child released Bills, Bills, Bills – a song that suggested potential suitors would be given short shrift unless they could demonstrate their financial prowess. Under a degree of fire for the suggestion that women should expect men to pay for everything, the following year they released Independent Women Part I – a song that asserts the importance of financial independence for women: “I depend on me,” it insists. A vital lesson for young women everywhere – freedom comes from earning your own money and standing on your own two feet.
6. You Can’t Hurry Love – Diana Ross and the Supremes
One of the presiding features of youth, of any era, is its intense lust for speed – to rush onward and forward and further yet. Best, at an early juncture, to teach them that there are some things cannot be hurried: good pastry, completing your taxes, and falling in love.
7. I’ve Never Been to Me – Charlene
Sometimes it is important to know your enemy, and I’ve always regarded this 1982 hit (first released in 1977) for Charlene as being akin to a Daily Mail editorial set to music. The cautionary tale of a woman who has led a jet-setting life of sipping champagne on yachts and making love to preachermen in the sun, but somehow – and now to her great regret – forgotten to ever settle down and have a family. It is addressed to another, more domesticated woman who views herself as “a discontented mother and a regimented wife”. It’s utterly vile, obviously. In the classroom, this song could serve an important role as an example of antiquated thinking with regards to gender.
8. There Is Power in a Union – Billy Bragg
In 1913, Joe Hill wrote a song with this title to capture the attention and the hearts of migrant construction workers, imploring them to join a union to ensure better pay and working conditions. Seventy years later, Billy Bragg borrowed the title, but changed the tune (to that of Battle Cry of Freedom) and rewrote the lyrics for this impassioned appeal to workers to stand together for their collective rights. “Money speaks for money,” he sings, “The devil for his own / Who comes to speak for the skin and bone?” A lesson in the importance of caring for one another and not just ourselves.
9. Strange Fruit – Billie Holiday
As an example of how barbarically unkind human beings can be to one another, Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording provides an important lesson for the young. Strange Fruit began life in 1937, as a poem by teacher Abel Meeropol. A protest against racism in the United States and the lynching of African Americans, it contrasted the “pastoral scene of the gallant south” against “the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” of the “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze”. Holiday’s recorded version captures something of its early live performance: sung at the very end of her set, the waiters stopped service, the audience fell still, and save for the spotlight that fell on her face, the room lay in total darkness.
10 . Shake a Tailfeather – Ray Charles
This song has seen many incarnations since it was first recorded by the Chicago-based group the Five Du-Tones in 1963 – it appeared in the soundtracks to Hairspray and The Blues Brothers, and has been covered by James & Bobby Purify, Ike and Tina Turner and the Romantics to name but a handful. This version remains a favourite — largely for its inclusion of various 60s dance trends such as the mashed potato, the frug, the twist and the monkey. Young people should be taught from an early age that a life without dancing is really no life at all.
What music do you play to kids to teach them about the world?
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