Music and Lyrics

I know our generation is supposed to be really connected to music. Ipods filled with 1000+ songs, Spotify/Pandora/Grooveshark/etc, the rise of indie and the "you've-probably-never-heard-of-them" hipsters, and all that. We're compensating for the post-90's disintegration of MTV, someone once told me.

Relative to the musical stereotype of my generation, I feel very much like a square. I skip a despicable percentage of the songs on my mp3 player. Most of them are songs unconnected to albums (who has albums anymore? sooo pre-millennium) played by artists of whom I have heard exactly 3 songs. 3 of those are on my player.

(Yes, I'm one of those people:
"What kind of music do you listen to?"
"....uh, alternative rock pop indie folk-pop instrumental acoustic hard rock orchestral....music. Yeah."
"Well, who are your favorite bands?"
"....uh.")

So our musically-saturated generation goes through life with earbuds firmly secure. The most tedious task of our lives: homework. You could listen to teenagers' homework playlists for eons, and never reach the end. However, being the square that I am, the list of homework subjects I can successfully do to my typical range of music consists of only two subjects: math and physics. For anything else, I thought I couldn't possibly listen to a song with lyrics.

I mean, really. You're listening to that Foster the People song, writing your english lit essay, and all of the sudden your next sentence looks a little like:
"The latent symbolism in these pumped up kicks, demonstrates a clear need of the main character to better run better run...."

Editing that paper will be real fun.

I've discovered, however, that as long as I don't know the lyrics, I'm in no danger of accidentally transcribing the words in my ears instead of the words in my head. This has led to a rather obsessive use of Pandora and Spotify, and a strange compulsive addiction to new music.

As long as I've never heard it before, I can write to it.

Except if I'm writing in French. Word to the wise: the duality of listening to English lyrics while struggling to remember the word for "basement" in French is a very painful way to do homework.