20.03.2007: don't worry – everything's okay (except the rice)

These so-called 'party pills' appear to be quite a big thing in Auckland. You see them in bottle shops, 24-hour convenience stores, superettes (a.k.a. minimarts) and occasionally even in dairies (what would be called corner shops in Australia). I haven't actually tried any myself, and nor do I have any intention to, but that doesn't stop me from having a favourite brand. The brand is called Hydropod, and their product sits in a little cardboard display box on shop counters. On the box is a picture of four slightly dense-looking people 'partying down' in a club somewhere, and underneath it is a caption which reads as follows: "Hydropod – Tested on Australians".

Hehe.

Apologies to my fellow countryfolk here, but let's face it: Australian-sledging is funny. I'm not 100% sure why this is, but as with most things, I have a theory. Would you like to hear it?

*ignoring the passing tumbleweeds*     Good :-)

See, whenever you find yourself on the receiving end of an anti-Australia polemic (which is not-too-rarely on this side of the pond), the criticism will either stem from political and social issues, or from the way 'Aussies' conduct themselves, or both. Themes that often emerge when Kiwis talk negatively about Australia include its immigration policies, its ingrained racism (not that Kiwis deny the existence of racism in NZ, but they do express surprise at how much worse it is in Aust.), its grand two-fingered gesture towards global environmental issues, its tendency to play schoolyard bully when dealing with Pacific Island nations, its inhabitants' arrogance towards Kiwis, their slavish obseqiousness towards the US, and the loutish, threatening behaviour so often encountered by Kiwis when they visit the world's tiniest continent and decide to go out at night for a drink.

By contrast, Australians' criticism of New Zealand usually takes the form of witless jokes about Kiwis doing nasty things to sheep, and remarks about their pronunciation of "fush'n'chups" *. And that's about it, really. I don't want to generalise, but for quite a few Australians the attitude towards NZ seems to boil down as follows: "You guys are next to us, but you're a little bit different and a lot smaller, ergo you must be an irrelevant and somewhat backward people who deserve our third-rate jokes". A reasoned argument if ever there was one.

But can this really be true? I mean, can Australians be so ignorant of their eastern neighbours that they can't come up with any informed criticisms? Well, not all of us are, obviously. However, a few weeks ago I heard an anecdote from a Kiwi teacher called Cesca that pulled me up short.

In 2006 Cesca spent some time working in Cairns (far north-eastern Australia), and one evening she found herself wandering into one of its innumerable divey bars to nurse a beer while she reflected upon her day. As it happened, on that day a significant piece of legislation had been passed in NZ, and Cesca – being quite a political animal – wanted to talk it over with someone. She was explaining the legislation to an Australian woman she'd met in the bar, when the Australian woman suddenly interjected: "Hang on a sec, I didn't think you had your own laws in New Zealand. I thought that, y'know, whatever was law in Australia was kind of automatically law over there as well."

True story.

Needless to say, Cesca was first shocked, then bemused, and then ... well, actually I imagine she probably just bounced between shock and bemusement for a while. Or at least, I know that's where my head would've been >:-[

Anyway, I'm starting to think that if I stay on this subject much longer, I'll probably end up launching into a full-blown rant about the ickiness of Big Country Syndrome. Before we get to that stage, let's move on to something completely different. I want to tell you about an interesting aspect of language teaching that you may not know about: teaching songs.

Songs, as it turns out, are extremely useful in the classroom, because for a lot of people the biggest challenge of mastering a new language isn't memorising the grammar rules or the vocab; it's learning to comprehend what the Hell native speakers are actually saying when they talk.

If you've learned a second language before (and provided you're not one of those annoyingly brilliant savant-type people), you know exactly what I'm talking about. Picking up words and phrases in another language and practising them at your own pace is one thing, but trying to keep up with the natives as they rattle off strange idiomatic utterances at a million miles an hour is quite another.

("What chuptoo this Froydienight?"
"Ah, d'know. Wanna k'mover frabeer?"
"K'mover what?")

Luckily, songs are here to help. There are squillions written in English, of course, and at least 0.7% of these contain lyrics which are vaguely comprehensible. So studying them is an excellent way of training your students' ears to an unfamiliar set of sounds.

One of the other handy things about pop songs is that they often contain bad grammar. This can be quite irritating at times - like in 1991, when Anthony Kiedis got rich by singing three minutes of drivel about being a junkie in a ridiculously sincere fashion, then followed it up with half-a-minute of incongruous ad lib that went "Yeah, yeah, no-no-no, yeah-yeah, oh no, no no no, yeah yeah" etc., making Under the Bridge both one of the silliest songs ever written and one of the most emotionally inconsistent. But aside from pop music occasionally providing a haven for the stupid, there are good reasons why it should sometimes deviate from standard grammar. For one thing, almost every song is bound by the strictures of rhyme and meter, whereas speech isn't. We intuitively know this even if we don't think about it, so we hold people to different standards when they speak than when they sing.

I'm suddenly aware that this may sound like the pseudo-academic babble of someone who's just started a linguistics degree and has fallen into his text book. But stick with me for a second, and I promise I'll steer it away from Wanketyville as quickly as I can. I'm just saying that, in everyday conversation, letters, emails and so forth, people usually aren't expected to create rhythmically pleasing sentences or to make their speech rhyme (which is the one and only reason why I decided against "Take off your pants and dig my rants!" as the opening line for my home page), whereas singers are expected to do those things. On the other hand, to help make their task more achievable, singers have our permission to produce sentences that lack important grammar words like "there" (as in "There's a post office nearby"), and to use dubious structures like double negatives. Which is why, if you write pop songs for a living, ain't no mountain high enough.

Also, it occurs to me that if you begin every conversation you ever have with the word "Yeeeeooowwwww!", people will most likely suspect you of being either a) mentally deficient, or b) just a bit of a dick. If you then go on to end said conversations by raising the pitch of your voice an octave or so and repeating the last thing you said a few times, only louder, this will probably serve to confirm their suspicions**.

James Brown, on the other hand, is a modern-day legend.

But to wind a little way back towards my original point: the ungrammatical bits of songs make them great for 'error correction'. All you have to do is provide a lyric sheet and, as they listen, get the students to find grammar mistakes in the songs, analyse them and correct them. The students get two birds for the price of one stone: they learn the 'right' way to say something, and they identify examples of how and when native speakers bend the language to their everyday purposes. Plus, you can zero in on more specific grammar points if you want to, or vary the task in dozens of different ways.

Yet another great feature of pop songs is that they're often peppered with slang and newly-coined functional language that probably won't make it into a text book in time to be current, but which will reach your students' ears as soon as they walk out of the classroom (if they're studying in an English-speaking country). Once again, there's a lot you can do with this, and it's relevant stuff for students to know. So altogether, songs are a goldmine of 'street language', colloquialisms, grammar mistakes waiting to be corrected, weak forms ("gonna" for "going to", "haftah" for "have to", "Whatcha ...?" for "What are you ...?"), listening practice and so on almost ad infinitum.

And yet, in spite of all that, some of the best things about teaching songs are not directly language-related. They're basically as follows: songs can be intense; songs can be fun (especially if you get your students singing &/or playing air guitar); songs can waft some freshness into the classroom after a long, tiring grammar session; and, if you can get a group of people talking about the lyrics of a song, you often learn quite a lot of surprising stuff.

("Oh no!", I can hear you thinking. "He's going to give us a frikkin' example, isn't he?". Well, yes ... 'fraid so.)

Last week I taught a song called Stray Cats, written by a now-defunct Australian band called the Deadly Nightshades. Unlike most of the songs I've taught, I chose Stray Cats partly because I love it. It's a brilliant piece of acoustic pop about the homeless population of Sydney, full of wisdom and empathy, with a stirring chorus that can still give me goose bumps more than a decade after I first saw it performed live at the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle Hotel in Rozelle.

But here's the thing: whenever I teach a song, I try to stimulate some discussion about its themes. And what I consequently learned from my students last week was this: firstly, in Saudi Arabia there are no homeless people. There are only beggars who bring their babies with them across the border from Yemen. Secondly, in South Korea there are technically some homeless, but the government finds shelter for all of them each night. Thirdly, in Japan it's not too uncommon for young men to 'hunt' homeless people for sport. And lastly, there are less homeless in central Sao Paolo than in central Auckland, and they're generally better behaved. (And I heard the same thing from Brazilians in Sydney – "The people on the streets here are crazy, man!".)

Bizarre, isn't it?

In spite of all this, I have to say that Stray Cats was not one of my better song-based lessons. It did get the class singing, but not with nearly as much gusto as they put into Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy a few weeks earlier. (Yes, it's true – this is what I do for a living now.)

For me personally, though, at this early stage in my English-teaching career one song stands out above all others for sheer topicality. I've taught it twice: once in Auckland, where all my students are foreigners suffering various degrees of culture shock, isolation, homesickness etc., and once in Moscow, on a night when the temperature outside was -17C and the central heating was working none-too-efficiently. It is, of course, none other than Gloria Gaynor's timeless masterpiece, I Will Survive.

I'd never given much thought to the lyrics of this song, because disco has never really been my thing (other than Boney M ... I mean, you have to love the unabashedly ludicrous bombast of Rasputin, do you not?). But trust me; hear it at the right moment in the right context, and I swear Gloria will make you feel like she's singing directly to you. Certainly on that night in Moscow, we were in no doubt about what it was we were meant to be surviving.

Meanwhile, while teaching my students to sing reggae, disco and acoustic pop, I've been learning some songs from them as well. Or at least one song. Okay, not so much a song as a chant ... but in any case, it comes with an odd cultural tale attached, which is always a bonus. The song/chant is called Eejanaika, and it hails from Japan. The lyrics are as follows:

Eejanaika, Eejanaika
Eejanaika, Eejanaika
Eejanaika, Eejanaika
Eejanaika, Eejanaika

(repeat until distracted by something else)

Ideally, the words should be accompanied by a slightly rave-esque little dance move in which you stand with one foot off the ground, push your palms upward slightly and gaze into the high distance, as though you've just spotted something on a far-off mountaintop that's making you feel a bit wistful.

One of my Japanese students called Mayumi taught the song and dance to her classmates – who perform it quite regularly now – and then to me. When I enquired about its meaning, another Japanese student decided to go away and write me a little mini-history of Eejanaika. He explained on paper that, about a hundred years ago, a small group of rice wholesalers in Japan had a virtual monopoly on their product, and of course like all good cartels they jacked up their prices to the point where most people couldn't afford to buy enough rice to survive. This eventually led to the infamous "rice campaign", in which ordinary folk protested on the streets about the over-inflated prices, and Eejanaika became their rallying cry.

Now for the odd part: the wonderfully quirky Mayumi (who I'm really going to miss when I leave Auckland) tells me that the song's title actually translates as "everything's okay". If this is true, then it makes Eejanaika more or less the Don't Worry, Be Happy of its day. Which in turn would make it one of history's most unlikely protest songs. But hey, who are we to judge? Certainly rice is affordable in Japan nowadays, so maybe the cheeriness of their protest music worked in the campaigners' favour. It makes a nice thought-bubble:

"These protesters seem like upbeat, optimistic folk"
"Mmm, I like them – let's just give them their rice discount, shall we?"
"Hai!"

Anyway, my time in Auckland is sadly drawing to a close, and so should this rather silly instalment of Ranting Manor. Hope you enjoyed my ramble, and watch out for multiple post scripts – they can give you a nasty bump. Bye!

(*Actually there are quite a number of different Kiwi accents. The one that gets sent up by Australians is actually a working class/country brogue that corresponds roughly to the broad Queensland accent in Australia. Which means that you'll only hear "fush'n'chups" pronounced like that if you hang out with farmers or westies.)

(**Still, it'd be fun to try it for a week or so, don't you think?")