Description

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Sing Up is a collection of comic and satirical lyrics that comment on recent changes and developments in Irish society. It is, in the editor's own words "a gather-up of intolerance, irreverence, slagging and sedition"-and all the more welcome and necessary for that. "Most of the events commemorated in the lyrics took place over the 1980s and 1990s. The songs document the huge changes in Irish culture and society inside a small number of years. The territory is mostly modern Ireland in all its miseries, elations and protest, change and no change." Sex, National Politics, Drink, Fast Food, Traditional Music, Religion, Recreation, Agriculture, the Weather-all are analysed in depth herein through the medium of the direct slag, the obtuse dig, the dry remark. Fintan Vallely is a musician and writer on traditional music. From Co. Armagh, he has taught flute at the Willie Clancy Summer School in Co. Clare since 1986. He is the author of, among other works, the major reference volume, The A-Z Companion to Irish Traditional Music (1999). He is currently lecturer in traditional music on an innovative undergraduate music degree programme in Ireland at Dundalk Institute of Technology.