New York is always a good option to travel.The Big Apple, The Empire State Building, The Statue of Liberty, ... This is a listening comprehension where a tour guide explains the schedule for the day.
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THINGS ABOUT LONDON: LONDON CALLING
ResponderEliminarNamed after the call signal of the BBC's World Service broadcasts, the title alarm of the Clash's third album was an SOS from the heart of darkness. When they recorded the song, the Clash — British punk's most political and uncompromising band — were without management and sinking in debt. Around them, Britain was suffocating in crisis: soaring unemployment, racial conflict, widespread drug use. "We felt that we were struggling," Joe Strummer said, "about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us."
Strummer and guitarist Mick Jones channeled that trial and worry into a song, produced with hellbent atmosphere by Guy Stevens, that sounded like the Clash marching into battle: Strummer and Jones punching their guitars in metallic unison with Paul Simonon's thumping bass and Topper Headon's rifle-crack drumming. Over that urgency, Strummer howled through a catalog of disasters, real and imagined. The "nuclear error" referred to the March 1979 meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The line "London is drowning/And I live by the river" — Don Letts' video of the Clash shows them playing the song on a boat on the Thames in drenching rain — was based on local folklore. "They say that if the Thames ever flooded, we'd all be underwater," Jones said — except Strummer was living in a high-rise flat at the time, "so he wouldn't have drowned."
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-20110407/the-clash-london-calling-19691231#ixzz1kBdiDhYQ
Now, organizers of the 2012 Olympic Games are using song to invite the world to come to London — a curious choice, given the tone of the lyrics.
"In the song, London's got zombies wandering around, the river's flooding, and the policemen are beating everyone up," says Connor. "So it's not much of a way of saying, 'Hey, come and watch our beach volleyball — you'll have a great time.'"
That said, there is some important history and symbolism bound up in the song's title. Before the band appropriated it, the phrase "London calling" was mainly identified with the BBC World Service and its broadcasts to occupied countries during World War II.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/07/30/138828051/london-calling-repurposed-as-a-tourism-jingle