Zachary Backes - TP 4

6/12/12

After leaving Ms Devick's Listening Class, Talal and I found a nice secluded classroom to meet in. I had tried to be a little more prepared for this meeting. The night before I had picked out some different songs, everything from Notorious B.I.G. and The Voice to Mumford and Sons and The Decemberists. I had gotten the idea after talking with Dhugal during our Listening Lesson Plans, and had wanted to see it in action. so I printed out all the lyrics and had the songs que'd in my MP3 player.

I told Talal I just wanted him to listen at first, I didn't even give him the lyrics. I wanted him to just listen like he would to any other song, try and get what he could from it but mostly to just enjoy it. He is totally a Biggy fan now I am proud to say. After a few runs I gave him the lyrics and told him to just underline words he recognized but wasn't really familiar with and circle ones he had no idea about.

To my great surprise he knew a good deal of the words and recognized a lot as well. Some words, especially in the rap songs I knew would be tricky. explaining that "Toke" did not mean the past tense of take was pretty fun. But with a lot of the Mumford and sons and Decemberists songs it was the older English, and more specialized words like "mariner" and "roustabout" that he didn't get. And honestly I had to look some up the night before, "rake" outside of a lawn tool was one I particularly remember.

I think it was a good idea to spread the genres out a bit because he seemed to like the diversity in the music. He kept asking me to write down the band and song name after the ones he really liked. When we switched to trying to understand the content of the he was really impressive. The song "The mariner's revenge" by the Decemberists was one of the last songs I played for him  because I knew it would be one of the harder ones. but he was still able to get the jist of the story behind it. I had originally chosen it because it was more of a poetic narrative put to music than just a song. And he understood that the singer was looking for revenge on the man who hurt his mother, ill link the song below so you can see how impressed I was that he got that after only two runs.

We finished our session talking about the kinds of music we like and he promised to show me some good Arabic rap, apparently I have been listening to "dog $#!% rap" when I told him of the few bands I knew. So I'm pretty excited to increase my Arabic playlist a bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEmy2DBaeTc
The Decemberists, The Mariner's Revenge