South Wales - Culture

Culture

See also: Culture of Wales

The traditional pastimes of the area include rugby and music. Today music ranges from the traditional Welsh Male Voice choirs of the Valleys such as Treorchy Male Choir to the South Wales hardcore scene which plays a dominant role in the Cardiff music scene. Bands such as Lostprophets, Bullet for My Valentine, Feeder, Stereophonics, Manic Street Preachers, Funeral for a Friend, The Automatic, Skindred, Foreign Legion, Kids In Glass Houses and The Blackout all come from the South Wales area. In the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries there was a vigorous literary and musical culture centred round eisteddfodau held in the area. Despite a few timid attempts to emulate this literature in English, it can be argued that few writers seem to connect either with the landscape or the literary tradition The one exception, to some extent, can be considered to be Dylan Thomas.

Read more about this topic:  South Wales

Famous quotes containing the word culture:

    “Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
    —Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)

    “One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
    —Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)

    “The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.”
    —Richard Rodriguez (b. 1944)