Oral Anglais

I am going to talk about the notion of Myhts and Heroes. To begin with, a myth is a popular story which tries to guide the society toward certain values or an eventual ideal. Usually, a myth contains a part of unreal facts or actions, often led by a hero. A hero is a person who, in the opinion of others, has noble qualities or has performed brave or distinguished deeds and is regarded as a model or an ideal. I decided to talk about heroes who contribute to the wars thanks to their music; indeed, how can musicians be perceived as heroes?

To illustrate my reflexion, I've chosen "A Magical Ride" as a first document. The text is an extract by Sherman Alexie and tells the story of a teenage Native American and his father, communicating for the very first time while listening to Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner live at Woodstock. Music is very important in this text, first of all because it creates an emotional connexion between the father and the son who talk about their roots and bridges the generation gap since they never really talked before like they did that night, and also because the young boy has a sort of epiphany. Indeed, he suddently realizes that music is an actual way of fighting against war, it has no boundries and it's limitless, eternal even. The myth of musical legends is obviously present in this text, Jimi Hendrix being one of these legends.

The second document I've chosen is I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag, a song written by the band Country Joe and The Fish and played live in acoustic version at Woodstock in 1969. The song is very catchy and easy to remember, like a counting song in fact, but there's also very harsh criticism behind it since it denounces the horror of the Vietnam War aswell as the bad aspects of communism and of the American government who was making benefits of the war thanks to weapons. In this song, the lyrics are very strong and particulary meaningful, which is why we can say that Country Joe is actually a sort of hero along with Jimi Hendrix.

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