last class tomorrow. we’ll play back the theft songs. one of the last assignments was to take a famous song and vary it so it is not necessarily recognizable; theft songs. should be amusing to hear the lot of them. looks like i will be offered another course to teach next year, a popular music history class which i’m also encouraged to design. off the top of my head i’d rather take one random year, 1970, 1946, 2003 and study what was popular the whole time. who can do justice to a topic as big as popular music history? who could do justice to just one year? in some ways it might be better to take one song and spend the whole semester on who wrote it, how they wrote it, who plays on it, what’s the structure, what’s the meaning, what tricks happen in it, what happened to the performers, who published it, who hated it, who covered it, what became of them, who else was influenced by them.