Using song lyrics as a chosen text for English (1 Viewer)

[VenomP]

Is anyone else doing this?

For our topic alienation, we have an exam coming up requiring us to choose two texts of our own, to go with our two prescribed texts.

I have a decent novel as a prescribed text, but I was also planning on using song lyrics as my second text.

The song is "Unforgiven" by Metallica.

I get the feeling that not many of the examiners will have heard this song. They claim that it would not matter too much, but I was wondering what your opinion was on the situation.

Had an examiner not ever heard of your text before, would he or she go and look it up?

I feel that without having heard the tune of the song, the lyrics are not enough to get my point across.

Anyway, ideas?

 

[Aerath]

Our teacher says that if we do songs (and we want to do it well), we have to analyse the lyrics, as well as the song itself (stacatto, crescendo and whatnot - I'm not a musical person). Needless to say, only the true musos did a song.

 

[how.to.explain]

I'd go with the song - though mind you, I'm not musical. I think that through lyrics you get a completely different perspective as opposed to plain poetry, you get different intentions (like how whenever we read Shakespeare, we get the "Now remember, this is meant to be PERFORMED. Not read." Doesn't change anything for me though ), because it's meant to be sung, and the way that the song is performed also adds to the meaning.

My teacher was mentioning something about using lyrics - he said he didn't really recommend it. But it's up to you, if you can do it well, do it. And if the examiner hasn't heard of a source, generally they do look it up. Because otherwise, they can't mark it properly, they'll only be going off plain assumption.

 

[Sarah182]

I was going to do a song in my speech but opted for a poem cause i found it hard to analyse how ideas were communicated because there wasnt many poetic techniques.

 

[Aplus]

I did John Lennon's Imagine for Extension 1 English last term. The topic was utopias and dystopias.

 

[ubermale]

I recently used a song as a related text. Like Aerath said, you need to analyse the lyrics as well as musical techniques. I'm only a semi-musical person but I went really well with my related text. If you don't know your musical techniques well, then this site may help: http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/glossary/glossary.html

Also, if you're not restricted by an unreasonable word limit like I was for my task, I would recommend to analyse a live performance, taking things like lighting and gesture into account.

Also, don't forget that musical techniques also includes vocals, such as tone, falsetto etc.

 

[sannous1]

not long ago we had to do an expostion on changing persepctives , and my friend chose a rap song , added a few words and made it an expositiion lmaoo, i dunno what she got though, i remeber she got alright loll

 

[Aplus]

I've done music before so it was pretty straight forward

 

[griffin86]

Its best to pick a song you know has a whole bunch of layers of meaning and you can spend pages interpreting its different meanings.



Quote from my english teacher;


"You dont have to be super smart, just as long as you can be a good pretender and pretend you're smart."

 

[x.Exhaust.x]

You'll be fine if you use a song as a chosen text .