Sam Cooke, "Don't Know Much About History".
It's a nice song, and it would give them a subtle hit that their teacher might know all that much about calculus.
1: *hint* not hit.
Don't know much about proofreading...
Probably "Don't Stand So Close to Me."
Ted Leo, Shake the Sheets.
1- Nice political protest-y song;
2- Captures the COVID/Trump-era sense of exhaustion
3- The fundamental message is about pushing through, no matter how hard or hopeless it seems, even if you can only do a little bit: a great message for math class!
All the ideas in the OP are good, as is Tom Lehrer, which makes me also think of Flanders & Swann.
"Ill Wind"
http://www.hornplanet.com/hornpage/museum/articles/ill_wind.html
Or
"First and Second Law"
https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/flanders-swann/first-and-second-law-of-thermodynamics
You just know one of the students is going to pick WAP so you need to head that off by introducing them to O.P.P.
Some piece of really up tempo soul music.
Garnet Mimms - As Long as I Have You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc2y9X08tN8
Smokey Robinson - Going to A Go Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWt4Hz1KGcQ
Sam Cooke (as per 1) would fit, but I'd use one of gospel songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaSmjdWEK9E -- the "woaaah ooah" refrain at about 45 seconds in is pure joy.
Or Tom Tom Club, Wordy Rappinghood,* because I've been listening to this a lot recently, and it has the same "joy" theme happening.
* Genius of Love would also be great.
9 is great ideas. The best I could come up with was Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator".
I would say "Genius of Love" also has the appeal that some kids will hear it and think it's going to be "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey, and then get confused. But do today's college students even know Mariah Carey songs?
Speaking of "Pure Joy" -- Ella Fitzgerald, "Airmail Special" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoT4CC0O-Xk
Probably not the right first impression, but maybe sometime.
You could just use music that sounds good as the theme for a TV show, like the immortal "Funky Fanfare" by Keith Mansfield or "Funkin Fever" by the Delta Rhythm Section.
Sometimes I like to upset myself by imagining how distant the music of, say, 1995, might seem to a kid today. No Diggity and Boombastic and Bjork's Post album were 25 years ago. So for a kid now, those songs are as quaint and historical as Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water and the Beatles Let It Be were, to me. Holy cow.
"Dancin in the Dark" with the explanation that that's where most of them shortly will be. Then, when you finally finish with the utterly confusing explanations of limits etc and they can forget all that and just follow the rote to calculate a derivative, "I Saw the Light."
In A Gotta Da Vida. Tell them they need to really, like, focus on the drum solo.
re: 16
I don't think it feels the same for them, though. With streaming and music on demand, I don't think the passage of time is quite as apparent to the younger listener. People's tastes are less segmented by genre, too, I think.* I might be wrong, though. I'm not even sure it was always that apparent to me, for that matter, when I was in my late teens. Hendrix, or the Sex Pistols, or James Brown didn't seem quaint. I know what you mean, though, as some stuff of a similar vintage definitely did.
* also, contra what pop modernists will tell you, popular music hasn't really innovated for 20 years.**
** and I don't think that's just me getting old. 20 year old Missy Elliott records would be bang on for the current charts.
As a pop modernist, my theory, which is mine, is that there hasn't been any innovation in music -arguably in any art - since 1970.
Since the invention of latch-hook kits.
21: bold statement, wiping out nearly the entire rap genre.
23: All just variations on sprechstimme, talking blues, "Ya Got Trouble' from The Music Man, and Subterranean Homesick Blues.
(please, no one take this seriously)
I live with a 19 year old, and while he'll tolerate my music, he usually doesn't like it much, especially stuff that's upbeat.
I like these for an upbeat move the room mood:
El Michels Affair cover of Shimmy shimmy ya, great horns and a chorus of kids.
Skatalites James Bond Theme
Stevie Wonder's I wish
There are contemporary sounding remixes of a lot of older tracks-- Kygo's backing track for Higher Love is OK.
Maybe Stevie-- it's a great song, explicitly about nostalgia, and brings back personal memories for me of when it was on every radio everywhere for a while when I was little, which was how I started learning about US pop music. I think actually a teacher played it on a record player she brought to class. Everybody danced.
I listened to a fair amount of Bob Marley right around when I was 18. Maybe Corner Stone, perseverance, biblical lyrics, not overplayed. I'd probably try to prepare two sentences explaining why I cared about the song, I personally have a hard time being meaningful or concise in spontaneous talk, managing both requires preparation for me.
Gilbert Strang's lectures on Linear algebra in data analysis are a delight (18.065)-- it's as if the man is just talking to you. I know a bunch of what he's talking about, but in my mind they're disparate results and techniques, so great having them arranged ionto an organic whole by someone who enjoys the material so much and so well.
Speaking of things that are related to music, James Blunt went on an all-meat diet and got the scurvy.
Fresh meat has a lot of vitamin C, so that's a pretty impressive achievement.
Maybe the problem is he cooked it?
Rap - Love "Bummer in the Summer" & Pigmeat Markham "Here Comes the Judge" both 1968. And the Last Poets 69 & 70.
And Bo Diddley "Say Man" from 59. Bo had an electric violin in his band in 1966.
I guess reggaeton & dubstep are new-ish but they're just variations on a theme maybe?
Let's face it when it comes to music, there's nothing since that Orpheus didn't do first and better.
"Here is a song that evokes feelings that I'd like to engender in this community"
I'm deliberately being a bit facetious, and I'm generally more on team "pop modernism" than I am on team "rockist", temperamentally speaking. But, it really does feel like the last 20 years have been quite flat for mainstream pop music, after a period of creative flowering, especially in hip hop and RnB, in the 90s and early 2000s. It feels like it's all mumble mumble late stage capitalism, in some sort of complex way. But not in a way that I can really articulate.
It feels like it's all mumble mumble late stage capitalism, in some sort of complex way.
One place on rock radio where Styles might have better luck finding a home is at Adult Alternative, where both "Sign of the Times" and "Watermelon Sugar" have received airplay. It's not a ton in either case -- "Watermelon Sugar" is currently only being played at two stations reporting to Billboard's Triple A listing, WCLX in Burlington, Vt. and KVYN in Napa Valley, Calif. But neither station views playing the song as all that out of character for their brand.
"It fits what we're doing, and we don't care where it came from," WCLX programmer Chip Morgan explains. "We like Harry... and that's it. It's a great summer song." Playing a song by a top 40 artist who comes from the pop world doesn't mean a ton to Morgan, because he says that they "don't pay attention to top 40" at WCLX anyway. "Before ['Adore You'], we didn't really know that much about [Styles]," he admits.
Despite his younger-leaning core following, it makes sense that Styles might also appeal to more Adult Alternative listeners, because his older musical reference points are actually much more in line with traditional Gen X and boomer sensibilities than the millennials and Gen Z-ers that mostly comprise his fanbase. "On KVYN, it wouldn't be a rare thing to have a mix of music where Harry Styles was donuted in between Tom Waits and the Grateful Dead," explains Nate Campbell, director of music and programming for the station. "I'm sure other radio programmers would laugh at this, and that's fine with me. But that's how we are choosing to try and entertain our market. And reception has been good, I'd say."
Wesley Willis Vampire Bat - REACTION VIDEO
There has been no innovation in Batman portrayals since Adam West.
I hate the Eagles as much as any right-thinking American but it's pretty classic to pair L'Hopital's Rule with Take it to the Limit.
38: All the possibilities for Batman were exhausted long before he ever appeared on the small or large screen.
Cell Phones Ringing in the Pockets of the Dead. Willie Nile.
39: Or for some 80s trashiness, you could Push It to the Limit.
35, 36. The economic situation of television and pop music have changed a lot in the last 20 years, social dynamics as well, not necessarily to pop music's advantage. Getting friends together because a radio station is going to play a new concept album in its entirety, explain that to an 18 year old. The stones were partly guys who started playing covers because imported blues records were expensive.
I don't get it at all, but maybe chiptone is an interesting development, a choice like oulipo. IMO focusing on pop, which used to be big business and the only way to get an audience but isn't either of those things any more, is unnecessarily restrictive. There are some multiethnic fusions that seem new to me-- electrocumbia and mongolian throatsinging heavy metal are two that I can think of sitting here.
I guess my fundamental perspective is that music is near-universal for humans, and even if the economics is in some ways worse than a few decades back (especially during covid), it's easier for audiences and musicians to connect than it used to be.
You can't get a real connection with Pandora.
A colleague who is one of the most ridiculously positive and cheerful people that ever existed played White Stripes "You and I are gonna be friends" to start her first class. [haven't read the thread yet]
How about the eight-minute version of a 14 minute Phish song? Tell them they can get bonus points if they can explain the deeper meaning of the lyrics.
An education-themed offering from a past inaugural ball
re: 44
Yeah. I don't think people are intrinsically less creative. There's lots of good stuff being made in lots of places. But I think that the current phase, in terms of what you'd hear on mainstream pop radio--and the UK is a more homogenous market, I think, so the big 2 or 3 radio stations are both quite dominant, but also quite representative of what's "mainstream"--seems disappointing. There's still some interesting stuff that breaks through, and some of the "formulaic" mainstream pop is still really well made, but there's _so_ much terrible lazy shit. I don't think this is nostalgia or some sort of bias. I'm comparing now to, say, 15 years ago, when I was already a decade or more outside the target demographic of Radio 1 in the UK.
This thread is reminding me that I had a great high school history teacher, a socialist who looked like Jerry Garcia, who used to start class with either a video of a song by the Clash or a bit of the Uncle Floyd show.
I am teaching zoom-calculus
Add "zoom-calculus" to the list of terms that would have been incomprehensible a year ago. What fun new concepts will we learn in the next twelve months?
What fun new concepts will we learn in the next twelve months?
Slack-Stats
Teams-Topology
Trello-Trig
Watching well-paid people loudly denounce basic human decency as unpatriotic.
What would you play for your calculus class of hopeful 18 year olds, during their very first global pandemic and potential dissolution of society?
Math rock, natch. Playing Slint's "Breadcrumb Trail" gives you the bonus of making your students think you're into QAnon.
Or Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit". (The forward slash was apparently, no joke, intended as a vinculum.)
Or maybe as a solidus. Who can say, in this topsy-turvy world?...
Math rock, you could play some Covet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaf1BDi5f3U
I'm not madly in love with her singing (most of their stuff is instrumental) but the video is fun. She's a really interesting guitarist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q1-ETuBg5A (full guitar nerd playing on show)
51 made me laugh. (Now that I'm going back and listening to all these songs. Besides that one.)
36: I can see what they're saying about Styles influences, but... look, a former boy band star whose current hit is a summery pop hit? Maybe not a real hard case for "why isn't this played on a rock station." (Pebbles is obsessed with the Watermelon Sugar song.)