Listening to oldies such as "Mr. Bojangles" and "What's Going On?" might be a fun music history lesson for schoolkids in King and Pierce counties.
But 413 free copies of "Greatest Hits 1971" might prove to be too much of a good thing.
And 387 CDs containing explicit lyrics by the late Puerto Rican rapper Big Punisher, along with 356 copies of "Staying Power" by the late Barry White, weren't high on the public schools' wish list.
But some teachers are not sure what they will do with, for example, 114 copies of Meredith Brooks' "Blurring the Edges," which includes the Grammy-nominated song, "Bitch."
"There were truly some gems in there," said Karen Farley, a library media specialist for the Puget Sound Educational Service District. "It's just that some of them, you'd look at and scratch your head."
Farley's regional district, which covers 35 school districts, received 1,355 copies of Whitney Houston singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." The hit single, which Houston sang before the 1991 Super Bowl at the height of the Gulf War, was 5 percent of the district's cache.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/179 ... ate24.html
As Washington school and library officials wade through thousands of CDs sent by the recording industry to settle a price-fixing lawsuit, one district can't help but wonder: Can a library have too much Whitney Houston?
The Puget Sound Educational Service District, serving 35 school districts, received 1,300 copies of Houston's soaring rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner," a disc that includes only one other song, "America the Beautiful."
Other discs have raunchy rap unsuitable for school libraries, and some librarians said it looked like the music companies were dumping stale inventory.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/06/25 ... index.html
