Our 5 favorite pop songs based on literature
We love literature. We love music. But try telling your English teacher that listening to music helps you better understand literature when you’re caught listening to your iPod in class…
Actually, the connection between pop music and classical literature isn’t as far fetched as it seems. Though it may not always be obvious, pop stars do read — at least, they occasionally read. How else would they be able to write such great songs based on literary works? Below, our 5 favorites with links to their music videos and descriptions of the work in question.
1. Kate Bush, “Wuthering Heights”
Kate Bush is one of our favorite pop stars of all time, and Wuthering Heights is one of our favorite novels. It’s so beautiful, so sweeping, and so romantic, that it makes the perfect subject for Bush’s flutey, trilling soprano. Listening to Bush sing really brings the novel to life. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte’s only novel, tells the story of Katherine and Heathcliff, who live on the dark and windy Yorkshire Moors, and whose passion and love, never resolved, torments them and ruins their lives. It’s an uplifting tale… not. Not a novel to dig into in your more depressed moments, Wuthering Heights is nonetheless a beautiful story that details the depth of human suffering at the face of star-crossed love and poetically captures the intricate, dark places in the human heart.
2. David Bowie, “1984”
Radiohead also wrote a song, “2 + 2 = 4,” about George Orwell’s novel, 1984, but our money’s on David Bowie. Most high schoolers read Orwell’s dystopian novel in high school, but not many are required to listen to David Bowie as a part of the curriculum. A shame, really. Bowie wrote the song for a stage production of 1984, and although the show was never produced, the song perfectly captures the paranoid, totalitarian world of the novel. Orwell’s novel depicts what he called the “perversions… which have already been partly realized in Communism and Facism” in the fictional setting of a future England, one which has been subsumed by a “super state” called Oceana. Without giving too much away, the story details one man’s struggle and eventual failure in fighting the powers of the State.
3. Leonard Nimroy, “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”
Not really a pop star, Leonard Nimroy is famous for playing Spock on the popular television series Star Trek. Nimroy, for reasons still baffling to me, came out with a song about Bilbo Baggins, from the novel The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit chronicles Baggins as he goes on a journey with Gandalf the Wizard to recover lost treasure at a mountain guarded by a dragon. The rest of the novel is too complicated to detail here, but rest assured that Baggins makes it back safe, with treasure and wealth, and is well-regarded by Hobbits (little hairy men) for the rest of eternity. Or, better yet, rather than listen to me, watch Nimroy sing about Bilbo Baggins in his gloriously unironic song.
4. Metallica, “For Whom The Bell Tolls”
For Whom The Bell Tolls is a famous novel by Ernest Hemingway about an American man who fights against Spanish Fascists in an outfit known as the “International Brigades”. The novel is drawn from Hemingway’s personal experiences in the Spanish Civil War and the struggle of Americans who volunteer to help fight the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco. Along with The Sun Also Rises, it’s considered to be one of Hemingway’s best works. Who knew metalheads read Hemingway?
5. The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil”
Based on The Master and Margarita, the famous novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, “Sympathy for the Devil” takes lyrical inspiration from Bulgakov’s masterpiece. The novel chronicles the adventures of the Devil as he visits the atheistic Soviet Union in the guise of Woland, a magician. This novel is considered by many to be one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. Influenced by “Faust,” by Goethe, The Master and Margarita is not really a novel about politics. Rather, the basic premises and themes in the novel revolve around good versus evil and the complexities of the relationships people develop with religion in the world.
