Literature teachers and professors keep looking for ways to be culturally relevant. It's kind of a buzz word these days, and everyone thinks it's going to keep students interested, attentive, and learning.  So, teachers use memes, cultural references, and examples based on Star Wars or Taylor Swift to get points across to their students seeped in entertainment and culture. Well, I'm here to tell you that studying popular music in your literature classroom won't just be "culturally relevant"; it could revolutionize the ways your students think about literature and culture. Pop music is everywhere,  and it has a lot to say to us about who we are and where our culture is; thus, we need to understand it. And since our students probably listen to it more than we do, they need to understand it even more.

The most fought over question I've come across in my sixteen months of song explaining is this: Whose interpretation matters more--mine or the writer's? And it's a good question. Chronicles of Narnia and Cambridge English professor C.S. Lewis writes in An Experiment in Criticism that people wonder, "Why . . . should I turn from a real and present experience--what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it--to inquiries about the poet's intention or reconstructions, always uncertain, of what it may have meant to his contemporaries?"

I usually respond to comments on my blog every week. It takes me about an hour, and every time I do it, I wish I had started sooner.

The kinds of comments and questions that I get inspire me to think, to write, and to keep listening to songs with deep meanings.

It definitely seems like Coldplay's taking a satirical jab at Donald Trump's proposed "giant wall" between the United States and Mexico.

2015 gave us a LOT of good music. If you're here on the blog, chances are that you've enjoyed it too. What were your favorites? The Weeknd? Mumford & Sons? Ellie Goulding? Macklemore?