Liberal Arts Lockdown Listening can be enjoyed entirely alone, with friends and family*, for pure pleasure, deep contemplation, as a soundtrack to accompany melancholy, and/or for catharsis.
*To enjoy with friends and family outside of your household try Houseparty.
Lockdown Listening Questions
For those who want to go a little deeper with their auditory contemplation Dr Tony Biondi has created a series of questions to accompany each song.
1. Hank Williams – “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (1949) – Solitude and isolation are often associated with sadness, heartbreak and pain. Why is that?
2. Simon & Garfunkel – “I Am a Rock” (1965) – Conversely, sadness, heartbreak and pain can drive some people to solitude; but is Dunne right that ‘No man is an island’?
3. The Beatles – “Eleanor Rigby” (1966) – In this time of enforced self-isolating and social distancing, where and with whom is our sense of belonging?
4. Tubeway Army – “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” (1979) – As we rely more on technology to maintain our relationships, can we live without the face-to-face and why?
5. The Police – “Message in a Bottle” (1979) – If we are “A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore”, then in what ways might this isolation help us to connect?
6. Talking Heads – “Life During Wartime” (1979) – Common responses to this pandemic include fear and panic, but what do we fear and why do we panic?
7. Joy Division – “Isolation” (1980) – The singer/songwriter was epileptic, and this song an insight to his life. How do we move from self-preservation to empathy and compassion?
8. R.E.M. – “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” (1987) – If ‘we’ve been sent to our rooms to think about what we’ve done’, do we need some time alone?
9. Leonard Cohen – “Everybody Knows” (1988) – “And everybody knows that the plague is coming, Everybody knows that it’s moving fast”. Was this all inevitable and, if so, why?
10. Bob Dylan – “Everything is Broken” (1989) – Did it take a virus to reveal the brokenness of everything? Now, and in the aftermath, what needs fixing?
11. Del Amitri – “Nothing Ever Happens” (1989) – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Externals will change, but will we?
12. Depeche Mode – “Enjoy the Silence” (1990) – If the silence is deafening right now, how might we come to enjoy it? What else might we come to appreciate and treasure?
This is the first playlist album by Liberal Arts Winchester and continues a series of posts that will come over the lockdown weeks/months/summer(s) that attempts to educationally engage us all in liberal arts related learning.
Want something to read? Try this Liberal Arts Reading List.
Want something to watch? Try this Liberal Arts Watching List.