American music

At the center, I could tell that the middle schoolers were getting bored of all the English lessons/grammar lessons/etc and who could blame them? Then I had the idea to teach them about American music. Play them different popular songs that are current right now, and maybe some older ones. Introduce them to different styles of music, etc. The minute I started to talk about music, they all knew about hip-hop, and that is it. And not even current hip-hop but hip-hop from like late 90s, early 2000s such as Jay-Z. I played them lots of songs, but all they seemed interested in was when I played 2 hip-hop songs. 

It gave me the idea though to print out the lyrics to one specific song, and go through the song line by line with them to help them understand what the song means. I am finding this more difficult than I initially expected. 1) No profanities for obvious reasons 2) Easy lyrics with and easy meaning to the song. Most song lyrics are pretty....I don't know how to describe it, but pretty ambiguous 3) Up-tempo song to keep their interest 4) Not a song about love as there is 1-2 girls in the 2 classes, and they are 15 year old guys. Love songs arent something that interests them. 5) I have to like the song. This because I'm going to be playing it a lot and going over the lyrics. I wanna like what I teach :) 

I am currently going through my songs on my ipod trying to find a song. Wish me luck!