The hotel imposes on the inmates a bland collective culture of banal romantic pop songs and didactic playlets that dramatize the virtues of couplehood.
Amid these scenes – some dramatic, some didactic – are the original songs of Noble Sissle (Henry and Eubie Blankk (Dixon), choreographed in kinetic, hard-striking fashion by the tap mastermind Savion Glover.
The âşik (ashoog in Azerbaijani; from the Arabic ʿashiq, "lover" or "novice Sufi") was a professional or semiprofessional performer, singing a variety of epic, didactic, mystical, and lyrical songs to the accompaniment of a long-necked lute (saz).
Happily for the reader, Mr. le Carré has set aside the dogmatic, anti-imperialist, anti-Western ideology that turned books like "Absolute Friends" and "The Mission Song" into simplistic, didactic works, and he's instead focused here on fleshing out the personalities of Dima and Perry, as well as of Hector and Luke, the two British intelligence officers who have taken charge of the operation.
Rather than offering didactic observations, she simply sang songs she liked.
Her songs can be didactic, but she filled them with suspense, and in "Down Here Below," about spiritual longing, her calm desolation was haunting.
Hartmann hailed from Munich, and these lively pieces -- filled with sassy dance music and parodies of popular songs, and bristling with didactic left-wing commentary -- could well have been a Bavarian answer to the Berlin collaborations of Brecht and Weill.
But, though less markedly in Japan, the basic Oriental inspiration remains fixed in folklore (also, in China and Japan, in nursery songs and rhymes), and the didactic imperative continues to act as a hobble.
But the songs are never preservationist, much less didactic.
The Green Day songs are lyrically clear eyed and didactic and don't leave much to the imagination, and everything else is spelled out quite clearly by Mayer.
