Hotel California Meets the Great Gatsby – New music As a Instructing Useful resource For Literature

The most well-known artistic products of the boozy 1920’s is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Fantastic Gatsby, a novel about a gentleman attempting to recreate an best earlier in a drunken, materialistic existing. It truly is a person of individuals textbooks just about everyone has a solid impact of regardless of whether or not they’ve essentially study it – which tends to make it tricky for many to approach the story with new eyes.

If you might be a instructor on the lookout for intriguing, appropriate ways to dig into The Good Gatsby, why not check out anything like this on for sizing: the 1920’s had been to WWI what the 1970’s ended up to the hippy motion. The unparalleled global carnage subsequent the so-named “War to Finish All Wars” turned disillusioned People inwards, location their priorities on dollars, bootlegged liquor, and partying. In the same way, just after the hippies failed to elevate throughout the world consciousness with peace, like, and patchouli oil, 1970’s The us drowned its sorrows in disco, medicines, and polyester pants.

As an assignment, have your college students assess The Great Gatsby to a 1970’s music in this same vein. Choose, for example, The Eagles’ Hotel California, 1 of the ideal-offering and most recognizable tunes from this (or any) era of American heritage.

Hotel California features some of the most analyzed and memorized lyrics in rock and roll. If the aspect of thriller implies a whole lot to you, you’ll most likely be let down to listen to Don Henley’s two cents: “It is basically a song about the dim underbelly of the American dream.” Not that a bunch of rock stars would know anything about that. In other words, the image of Californian prosperity (again when that still existed) stands in as a microcosm of American decadence in the 1970’s.

The “hotel” (wink, wink) California is no Motel 6. It has mirrored ceilings, courtyards, master’s chambers, pink champagne, and significant-falutin’ attendees. The narrator can not assistance but notice the seductive female with a Benz, a head that’s “Tiffany-twisted,” and a whole lot of hot guys adhering to her all around. He asks for wine, to which the captain famously replies, “We have not experienced that spirit here due to the fact 1969.” Since wine is not a spirit (and we’re betting The Eagles have a fundamental understanding of liquor), we are going to go ahead and assume Henley is referring to some other spirit of ’69.

In a creepy transform of occasions, there is then a beast-killing ceremony involving “steely knives,” which prompts the narrator to large-tail it “again to the place [he] was in advance of.” Only when it really is far too late does he notice that he can “verify out” but “never depart.” How, pray inform, can a person be checked out without the need of going wherever bodily? We are contemplating there may possibly be some chemistry concerned.

So let’s review: luxury, substance abuse, a beautiful temptress, materialism, violence, residing in the previous, and currently being trapped. Remind you of any individual?

As a rule of thumb, new music is one particular of the ideal trainer sources due to the fact it can be deeply personalized and simply relatable at the very same time. As well as, the point that lyrics are usually hugely open to interpretation means your college students will be placing in a ton more operate than they assume.