Thursday, November 14, 2013

More song lyric language research

There's a pretty definite "north/south" divide apparent amongst some rock musicians. Following the research project I did for my OU module, I'm interested in seeing whether this is reflected linguistically in the lyrics. But I'd like some help ....

What I'm looking for are singers, and albums, that represent definitive "north" or "south" music. That is, music that self-consciously identifies itself as belonging to either "north" or "south". My plan would be then to create a language corpus from the lyrics of these songs, and carry out the sort of corpus analysis that is hinted about in my posts below about language stuff.

In a sense, I suspect that by "south" I may really mean London. The list I've been drawing up so far consists of:

  • South - Lily Allen, Madness, Blur, The Kinks
  • North - Oasis, The Housemartins/Beautiful South, The Smiths
Other ideas? And if you could pick one archetypal album from each band, which would it be? Your thoughts, please.

No comments: