Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Evelyn Faithfull (born 29 December 1946) is an English singer, songwriter and actress, whose career has spanned six decades.

Her early work in pop and rock music in the 1960s was overshadowed by her struggle with drug abuse in the 1970s. During the first two-thirds of that decade, she produced only two little-noticed studio albums. After a long commercial absence, she returned late in 1979 with the highly acclaimed album Broken English. Faithfull's subsequent solo work, often critically acclaimed, has at times been overshadowed by her personal history.

From 1966 to 1970, she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with the Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger. She co-wrote "Sister Morphine", which is featured on the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album, and had an early hit with the Jagger/Richards composition "As Tears Go By."

Early life and links to nobility

Faithfull was born in Hampstead, London. Her half-brother is Simon Faithfull. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British Army officer and professor of Italian Literature at Bedford College of London University. Her mother was styled as Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso and was originally from Vienna. The family of Sacher-Masoch had secretly opposed the Nazi regime in Vienna. Glynn Faithfull's work as an Intelligence Officer for the British Army brought him into contact with the family, and he thus met Eva. Faithfull's maternal grandfather had aristocratic roots, in the Habsburg Dynasty, while Faithfull's maternal grandmother was Jewish. Erisso was a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Faithfull's maternal great great uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the 19th century Austrian nobleman whose erotic novel, Venus in Furs, spawned the word "masochism".

Hero

A hero (masculine or gender-neutral) or heroine (feminine) (Ancient Greek: ἥρως, hḗrōs) is a person or main character of a literary work who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through impressive feats of ingenuity, bravery or strength, often sacrificing his or her own personal concerns for some greater good.

The concept of the hero was first founded in classical literature. It is the main or revered character in heroic epic poetry celebrated through ancient legends of a people; often striving for military conquest and living by a continually flawed personal honor code. The definition of a hero has changed throughout time, and the Merriam Webster dictionary defines a hero as "a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities". Examples of heroes range from mythological figures, such as Gilgamesh, Achilles and Iphigenia, to historical figures, such as Joan of Arc and Gandhi, to modern societal heroes like Rosa Parks.

Etymology

The word hero comes from the Greek ἥρως (hērōs), "hero, warrior", particularly one such as Heracles with divine ancestry or later given divine honors. (literally "protector" or "defender") Before the decipherment of Linear B the original form of the word was assumed to be *ἥρωϝ-, hērōw-; R. S. P. Beekes has proposed a Pre-Greek origin.

Working class

The working class (also labouring class and proletariat) are the people employed for wages, especially in manual-labour occupations and in skilled, industrial work. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, some white-collar jobs, and most service-work jobs. The working class only rely upon their earnings from wage labour, thereby, the category includes most of the working population of industrialized economies, of the urban areas (cities, towns, villages) of non-industrialized economies, and of the rural workforce.

In Marxist theory and in socialist literature, the term working class usually is synonymous and interchangeable with the term proletariat, and includes all workers who expend either physical labour or mental labour (salaried knowledge workers and white-collar workers) to produce economic value for the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie. Since working-class wages can be very low, and because the state of unemployment is defined as a lack of independent means of generating an income and a lack wage-labour employment, the term working class also includes the lumpenproletariat, unemployed people who are extremely poor.

Working Class Hero

"Working Class Hero" is a song from John Lennon's first post-Beatles solo album, 1970's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

Theme

The song is a commentary/criticism on the difference between social classes. It tells the story of someone growing up in the working class. According to Lennon in an interview with Jann S. Wenner of Rolling Stone in December 1970, it is about working class individuals being processed into the middle classes, into the machine.

The refrain of the song is "A working class hero is something to be".

Sound

The song features only Lennon, singing and playing an acoustic guitar as his backing. The chord progression is very simple, and builds on A-minor and G-major, with a short detour to D-major in one of the lines in the chorus. Lennon's strumming technique includes a riff with a hammer-on pick of the E note on the D string and then an open A string. The tone and style of the song is similar to that of "Masters of War" and "North Country Blues" by Bob Dylan, a known influence of Lennon. Both are based on Jean Ritchie's arrangement of the traditional English folk song, "Nottamun Town." The recording is the composite of two different takes: the sound of the guitar and vocal changes at 1:24 prior to the verse "When they've tortured and scared you."

Broken English

Broken English refers to a poorly spoken or ill-written version of the English language, sometimes considered a pidgin. Under the strictest definition of the term, broken English consists of English vocabulary grafted onto the syntax of a non-English speaker's native language, including word order, other aspects of sentence structure, and the presence or absence of articles in the speaker's native language. Typically, the non-English speaker also strips English phrases of linguistic markings that are not shared with the speaker's native tongue, such as definite articles or certain verb tenses.

In some communities, young people may intentionally adopt versions of the English language that older people consider to be broken English. This has been documented, for example, among the Māori of New Zealand, where the younger generation was more proficient in English than the previous generation, but intentionally made modifications to the language to assert their own sense of cultural identity.