What are your earliest musical memories? <\/p>\n
For some, it might be The Spice Girls spicing up their lives; for others, it might be Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra performing together during the Second World War. For me, it\u2019s Perry Como singing \u201cCatch a Falling Star\u201d and \u201cMagic Moments\u201d. He released those songs in 1958, but I was only three at the time, so my memories are probably from 1959 or \u201860. My mum\u2019s extended family would gather every Christmas night and sing and dance and eat and drink (and smoke!) until four or five in the morning. One of the family owned a tape recorder and it\u2019s via the songs that came from that machine that I remember my \u201cmagic moments\u201d. I can\u2019t think of Christmas as a kid without hearing those two songs (and then I remember the tobacco fog \u2013 ugh!).<\/p>\n
My next really strong musical memory is from the summer of 1964 \u2013 The Beach Boys\u2019 \u201cI Get Around\u201d being played in an amusement arcade in Caister, on the east coast of England. My brother and I visited there in the summer of 2015, hoping to locate our old haunts, but alas \u2013 things had changed in the 51 years that had elapsed \u2013 go figure! I did play the song on my iPod Touch as we searched though!<\/p>\n
Next in line is a memory from 1965. My parents had purchased a small, older caravan (trailer) in a holiday resort on the south coast of England, and there was a jukebox in the games area where my brother and I played a lot of table tennis. That jukebox seemed to have been set to play The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cSatisfaction\u201d whenever there was nothing else playing.<\/p>\n
Now \u2013 music buffs among you will know that the Stones\u2019 1965 hit was actually titled \u201c(I Can\u2019t Get No) Satisfaction\u201d.<\/p>\n
And finally we\u2019re ready to address today\u2019s topic!<\/p>\n
Olduns down the ages seem to throw around comments about declining standards with gay abandon (and some would also lament their inability to use the word \u201cgay\u201d in the sense that they grew up knowing). I decided to see if standards really had dropped on the song title front, so I dug around the interweb for grammatically incorrect titles that predate me. While most examples I found are much younger than me (perhaps adding weight to the olduns\u2019 concerns), here are a few doozies from pre-1955.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re an \u201cain\u2019t hater\u201d, you could add \u201cAin\u2019t That a Shame\u201d to the list (1955). Personally, I\u2019m happy with \u201cain\u2019t\u201d in pop song titles and lyrics \u2013 it\u2019s an informal contraction, and to be honest, a very useful word when writing lyrics.<\/p>\n
Double negatives, such as the aforementioned Stones\u2019 hit on the other hand, do annoy me. \u201cHound Dog\u201d is a 1952 song made famous by Elvis Presley in 1956. The opening line \u2013 \u201cYou ain\u2019t nothing but a hound dog\u201d, contains a double negative as well as two style choices that I wouldn\u2019t have made. But it was and is a very popular song, so we live with its lyrics.<\/p>\n
The source of many of the examples I found seems to be cultures where a distinct dialect prevails. Whether it\u2019s jazz, reggae, rap, soul, surf, merseybeat, country, or folk, the lyrics reflect the language of that culture or sub-culture. Although all are English, the English spoken in many cultures and regions doesn\u2019t necessarily conform to \u201cthe Queen\u2019s English\u201d.<\/p>\n
I spent my later childhood years in east London dropping my aitches, using \u201cain\u2019t\u201d, and probably using double negatives too. My parents had taught me the proper way to speak, but they (my mum especially) were oases in a desert of cockney English. When I started school, I learned to speak like my school friends, so \u201cI can\u2019t get no\u2026\u201d really didn\u2019t sound odd to me. And any songs that I might have written back then (I\u2019m admitting nothing here!) would possibly have reflected the way I\u2019d learned to speak, just as my written English has been influenced by more than twenty years living in Canada.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s face it \u2013 if all popular music lyrics had been written with the same attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation as, say, Noel Coward\u2019s songs, the rich variety of musical styles we have today would be less authentic. Would Bob Marley\u2019s song have been as popular if the refrain had started, \u201cPlease, my darling, don\u2019t cry\u201d? Would rap and its derivatives have even made it off the ground?<\/p>\n
Yet the music, with its imperfect lyrics, infuses into the consciousness of the youthful mind, and without a \u201cGovernment English Quality Health Warning\u201d on the packaging, becomes normal, acceptable and natural. I am in no way suggesting that such warnings should be considered; I\u2019m merely trying to highlight a dilemma that occurs when so many varieties of English exist, and then each of those varieties makes incursions into the territories of other varieties.<\/p>\n
When I write dialogue, I have to think carefully about which words the character would use. I try to make my plays sound authentically Canadian, and to help me do that, I have a sign on my desk that says, \u201cThink in a Canadian accent\u201d. My internal voice still has an English accent \u2013 my external voice is kinda mid-Atlantic-ish \u2013 neither works for me when I\u2019m writing a play.<\/p>\n
Having grown up in an area that many Jamaicans immigrated to in England, I still remember the way they spoke. So next time I write a reggae anthem, I\u2019ll have a Jamaican Creole dictionary on my desk, and I\u2019ll be riddin de woaurrds in de dictionary out loud in m\u2019bes Ja-meekaan aaccent ya<\/em>.<\/p>\n I suggest you do too.<\/p>\n What are your thoughts about the effects of World English on your native variety? Does it matter if pop culture dilutes the correctness of formal English? If so, why? If not, why not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What are your earliest musical memories? For some, it might be The Spice Girls spicing up their lives; for others, it might be Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra performing together during the Second World War. For me, it\u2019s Perry Como singing \u201cCatch a Falling Star\u201d and \u201cMagic Moments\u201d. He released those songs in 1958, but I was only three at… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[490],"tags":[667],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-commentaries","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1577,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Your Turn<\/h2>\n