Music about Literature Trivia Quiz

Answer: Anthem

Rand, the founder of the Objectivist movement, began her look at the individual with the release of "Anthem" in 1937. The book focuses on the Ego as the driving force in all human life. It's a brilliant little read--highly recommended.

Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of RUSH, has been heavily influenced by Rand's work. This is especially noticeable in the song "Free Will" from the "Permanent Waves" album. However, "2112" is probably the band's most profound album and is based on that individualistic novel.

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan," described the splendor of Xanadu, the Mongol emperor's summer palace.

Some of the song, from the album "A Farewell to Kings," is almost verbatim from the poem:

Xanadu
To stand within The Pleasure Dome
Decreed by Kubla Khan
To taste anew the fruits of life
The last immortal man
To find the sacred river Alph
To walk the caves of ice
Oh, I will dine on honey dew
And drink the milk of Paradise.

Answer: The Grapes of Wrath

The highway is alive tonight,
But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes.
I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light
Searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad.

Joad was a main character of John Steinbeck's great novel "The Grapes of Wrath." This song, from Springsteen's 1995 album of the same name, began an album steeped in the ideas of Woody Guthrie and the Great depression.

Answer: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" is based on Lewis Carroll's (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) story about a girl falling down a rabbit's hole and finding a magical place filled with wild characters.

The song, however, is much more in line with the caterpillar that smoked the hookah. He teaches Alice how to become larger or smaller using the mushroom upon which he sits. Just a whole bunch of drug references in the song!

Feed your head!

Answer: The Odyssey

Well, the danger on the rocks is surely past.
Still, I remain tied to the mast.
Could it be that I have found my home at last?
Home at last.

Ulysses, to resist the temptaion of the Sirens' song, ordered his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast of the ship. As they sailed by, he could not move, and the sailors could not hear, and they were spared the deadly fate upon the rocks of others who heeded the Sirens' song.

From Steely Dan's 1977 album "Aja."

Answer: Edwin Arlington Robinson

"Richard Cory"--the story of the man who seemed to have everything and threw it away--is one of the better known poems from Robinson. It appeared in his collection "The Children of the Night" in 1921.

The poem ends:

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Answer: Led Zeppelin

From the song "Ramble On" on the album "Led Zeppelin II."

Many Zeppelin songs have references to Tolkein's masterpiece and to other myths and legends.

Answer: Johnson

Ambrosia sings the song based on Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle." In fact Vonnegut gets writing credit for the song, and he should since many of the words are his.

In the novel, the lines are part of the "Books of Bokonon." They were written by a holy man named Bokonon, whose real name was Lionel Boyd Johnson. He was later named Bokonon because, according to Vonnegut, that was how the natives of San Lorenzo pronounced "Johnson."

Oh, a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park,
Or the lion hunter in the jungle dark,
Or the Chinese dentist or the British queen,
They all fit together in the same machine.

Nice, nice, very nice,
Nice, nice, very nice,
So many people in the same device.

Answer: Murders in the Rue Morgue

From the album "Killers."

Someone call the Gendarmes.
Murders in the Rue Morgue,
Run before the killers go free.

This short story by Poe is considered by many as the origin of the modern detective story.

Answer: Johnny Got His Gun

The novel follows the life of Joe Bonham after he loses his limbs and senses in a bomb blast in WWI. Metallica's lyrics bring to life the suffering of the novel.

I can't remember anything.
Can't tell if this is true or dream.
Deep down inside I feel to scream.
This terrible silence stops me.
Now that the war is through with me,
I'm waking up I can not see
That there is not much left of me.
Nothing is real but pain now.

Hold my breath as I wish for death,
Oh, please, God,wake me.