Ich habe Deutsch gelernt

...well, level A1 at least. Now I'm going to improve my German through schlager music lessons.

This week I 'graduated' from my first intensive German course, finishing level A1 (elementary). I did pretty well on the final exam actually, so despite my fears about it being such a daunting language I think I'm doing alright. But, as I was warned, it is very challenging. 

It's been a very different experience from learning French at the Sorbonne in 2008 in Paris. For one thing, I started in July with absolutely no knowledge of German, whereas I had already taken French in high school. But even with this in mind, I found French to be a much easier language to learn because the sentence structure is quite similar.

Music wars on the Brussels metro

If you've ever ridden the Brussels metro subway system you may have noticed that your journey is accompanied by catchy pop tunes. In fact this past Monday was 'Lady Gaga Day' on the metro, when the gaag was played all day long, non-stop. I've pretty much gotten used to the music and I barely notice it any more, but there's one aspect of it I never thought to question - the songs being played are almost always in English.

I never thought to question it because, as is the case in most European countries, the majority of songs on the radio are always in English as well. But I had never noticed before that despite the fact that this is a Francophone city, I have never heard a song in French. Nor have I ever heard a song in Dutch, the city's other official language (spoken as a primary language by 7% of the Brussels population).

Apparently there is method to this madness. According to an article today in FlandersNews, the Brussels public transport company STIB has a policy of only playing English songs on the metro, with a smattering of Spanish and Italian songs thrown in for good measure. French and Dutch songs have not been played for fear of aggravating tensions between the two sides of the language divide here.

Who wants an EU Grammy?

I’ve just been alerted via a press release to the existence of something called the “European Border Breaker Awards”, which is apparently an award show put on by the European Commission for European music acts that “cross borders”. It’s an interesting idea but taking a look at it , I think the way its structured is kind of silly. It seems to ignore a fairly obvious fact – if they were being honest about the awards, almost all of them would go to British acts.

Apparently this award show has been going since 2004, and previous winners include France’s Carla Bruni, Germany’s Tokio Hotel, Italy’s Tiziano Ferro and Benito Benasi, Sweden’s Basshunter and Britain’s The Ting Tings. This year’s awards took place last night in the Netherlands, hosted by the BBC’s Jools Holland.

Intrigued by the concept, I did a little basic esearch and found that the objective of the awards, sponsored by the Commission and the European Broadcasting Union, is to “highlight the success of 10 debuting European artists in selling albums and touring outside their home territory” to “stimulate the cross-border circulation of artists' works”.

There is No Such Thing as Techno!

Ok so this has been a pet peeve of mine for awhile (one among many, admittedly) so I thought I’d devote an entry to it.

I’ve followed electronic music since I was 16. I’m a big fan, and have moved through the years from going to raves in high school early on in college, rocking out to disco house, trance, anthems etc, to today moving into emerging genres like electroclash.

Never, in all my years of being an electronic music fan, have I ever heard the word “techno” used except when preceded by the words, “I don’t like.”

In fact I’ve never heard the word used in a non-negative sense. I hear it a lot from people who don’t like such-and-such a club because they play “techno,” and they want to listed to hip-hop and pop music.