lucie-krlsknd

[lucie-krlsknd]

Industry Baby - Lil Nas X

You probably all know this famous rapper that released Old Town Road, Montero… Today I want to deal with Industry baby, a song Lil Nas X released on July 2021. I discovered this song not a long time ago and liked it very very much. Therefore, I thought I could use it for one of my posts as I begin to really struggle to have inspiration… And I discovered many interesting things about this song that you perhaps do not know!

To begin with, Lil Nas X collaborated with Nike and MSCHF and created the “Satan Shoes”, which gained controversy through prominent satanic imagery. Nike sued MSCHF for trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, and unfair competition. The case was settled in April and on July, Lil Nas X posted a TikTok video sharing the date of his supposed court, day when he released the teaser for “Industry Baby”, a parody of the former lawsuit. On the video, he was judged for the Satan Shoes but shifted focus toward his sexuality; he was condemned to five years in prison.

Industry Baby is thus used to denounce the excessive imprisonment, even unjust, of several African-American people in the USA. The rapper’s aim was indeed to raise money and awareness for cash bail in America. He already collected 62 500$US, thus about 55 200 €.

This song could clearly be related to the chapter about politics in the Negus.

I am always happy to discover that a song I listen to actually very political is. Did you already experience this? With which songs?

[lucie-krlsknd]

My research project

Hi there !

First, thank you for the comments some of you put under my last post. It helped me a lot finding what would my final subject be. And therefore… I will dwell on the experience of popular music on children. I brainstormed many times, and every argument I had could actually be related to this specific subject. I thus thought it was what I needed to write something interesting and organized (I will try to, at least).

So, I may begin to share my guideline with you. As we said multiple times, popular music cannot be reduced only to songs. An entire universe is created around it, and is used for several aims. I will question this fact from an analytic point of view: how the world of popular music can interfere with the world of a child? The answers I will find will raise other questions: what are the produced effects? Are they good or bad? Can we have impacts on these effects, create or cancel them? Do we need to? Do we have to?

I guess that now, my project does not seem so blurred anymore.

In terms of sources, what I found was kind of funny. There are a lot of “perfect parents websites” on the internet, explaining in three points how to know if your child is happy regarding to his favorite songs, or sharing the best way to raise nice and calm children, making them listen to classical music. I was kind of happy to see that, as it shows that this theme is something very (too much) popularized. It will thus be a challenge for me to find reliable and professional sources, but it will be at the same time great to put some order in all of these ideas!

[lucie-krlsknd]

The psychological aspect of popular music

I would like to dwell, for my research project, on the psychological aspect of popular music. It is something less concrete than what we are used to talking about; I think though that there are so many interesting aspects to this: what is the effect a song produces on a person? Is it the same for a child? Can we find some marketing or political strategies related to that phenomenon? But in parallel, what if we look desperately for psychological meanings in songs and find some where there aren’t any? More globally, what do we learn from the kind of music a certain population listens to? To what extent can we relate popular music and historical phases?

This theme is, as you can see, very fertile. So fertile, it may be related to all the chapters of Popular music in theory by Keith Negus: Audiences, industry, mediations, identities, histories, geographies and politics. I thus still have to sort out what I am going to talk about and what I am not. Also, with this kind of subject, it is very complicated to give primary sources. I will indeed mostly dwell on articles and use songs as examples. But I do not know yet what examples I am going to use, as I don’t know yet what my arguments will be and which songs illustrate them the best. Therefore, I will only put here some articles that revolve around the psychological aspect of popular music and that will probably be some of the specific subjects I am going to study. This is absolutely not exhaustive, and I don’t exclude that I will maybe not even be using them in my final project. They are just here, so that you can see what kind of work I am going to do.

I hope you enjoy it so far.

Music as a Tool for Political Propaganda

Music and the unconscious

Impact of music on children

[lucie-krlsknd]

Popular music is rarely music

First, listen to this music. You probably don’t know it, but listen to what the singer says at 00:19. Does that ring a bell?

You probably all remember the Harlem Shake song; but can we even call it a song? What you remember of it is the weird movements of people in disguise “dancing” after the “CON LOS TERRORISTAAAS”, a sentence drawn from the song linked above. Moreover, you did not listen to this song as you were listening to other songs: you were surely not alone in your bedroom, and (it is time to admit it) you were scary when you were listening to it with your friends, because you were shaking your body strangely. For me, it is the song that made (with Gangnam Style), the strongest effect on people: there are billions of Harlem Shake videos on the internet, filmed in so many places, with so many different people…

But what do we like in this music? Probably not the music in itself. Contrarily to what Adorno says, explaining that music is codified for people to like it, I think that here, what is codified is more everything that surrounds the music. There is always one person dancing weirdly alone, and then all of the people around this person start to dance with her, and everything looks like a chaos. Without all of this, I do not think that the Harlem Shake song would have been such a success. To go back to Adorno, he probably would have hated this song; And I must admit that indeed, people dancing on it looked like mutilated animals, corrupted by primitive rhythms. But this was so good.

But let’s get back to business! What I want to show here, is that I do not think that popular music can only be analyzed as such; So many things revolve around it and are intrinsic to it. In this example, we can notice that the music kind of disappear behind the choreography, what makes the Harlem Shake song look more like a tutorial than a “real” music you could listen to. And this is what made it so popular, because you had a real and concrete way to consume the music.

By the way, this fact has already been thrown into relief by many people in this class: to make a music popular, one must sometimes use other tools than the music in itself: advertisements, featuring, streaming sites, social networks, codified gestures, particular signs… To create a real universe around the music and make it original and likeable.

[lucie-krlsknd]

I want to be a star!

Looking at all the rich and famous celebrities, I cannot help wondering: why not me? I would also really like to be rich and famous… Thus, you will help me, tonight, to find the reasons why I am not a star.

Let’s see what we need to become one!

1) To already be rich

Look at Taylor Swift: Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, is a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch. Thus, she had a lot of money since her birth. The main difference between her and me is that she was taking singing and acting lessons on Broadway while I was singing at the choir of my middle school in Rohrbach-Lès-Bitche. Well, we are not on the same level; and it is easier to become a star when you have money, as you can work very early with professional people.

2) To already be famous

It is easy to release music which will become very popular when you already have an audience behind you. Look at Eddie Murphy: he rose to fame in the United States thanks to his talents as a comedian, being part of the comedy show “Saturday Night Live” (from 1980 to 1984). He was ranked No. 10 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. Actually, not that bad! I could probably do the same though. Anyway, no wonder why his 1985 single "Party All the Time," reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

3) Okay, well, we missed some information

Farrell Williams, before becoming a singer, worked at MacDonald’s and actually got fired (not proud of you Farrell). Jennifer Lopez’s parents were unhappy with her decision to leave college to pursue a career as a professional dancer. Her mother thus asked her to move out of the family home and she moved to Manhattan, sleeping in the dance studio's office for few months. She was thus homeless at 18. In 1954, after Elvis Presley’s first performance, Jimmy Denny, the manager of the Grand Ole Opry, sacked him telling him "You have no future. You better get back to driving trucks.”. I also read in a post that Paris Hilton’s music career was catastrophic, even if she already was a really famous celebrity…

4) It is complicated to become a star

I think there is not any recipe to become famous, only obstacles or helping hands. Don’t you think so?

It is high time to answer the most awaited question: why am I not a star? Well, after having wondered a little bit, I guess that I am lacking of a very little thing: talent. Well, thank you for reading. I’ll think about finding me a goal in life. And a topic to do my researches on by the way.

Here are my main sources, but I actually looked for information all over the internet:

https://www.closermag.fr/people/jennifer-lopez-avant-d-etre-celebre-j-etais-sdf-177171https://references.lesoir.be/article/ces-stars-qui-ont-echoue-avant-de-devenir-celebres/

https://bestlifeonline.com/actors-forgotten-singing-careers/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Murphy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lopez

[lucie-krlsknd]

The Bed Intruder Song - The Gregory Brothers

This week, I wanted to share with you something less political and funnier. Music is thus not only a political device, but also a simple way of making people have a good time. Therefore, I chose to dwell on the famous “Bed Intruder Song” by The Gregory Brothers. This song is drawn from a musical web series called “Songify the News” popularized by Brooklyn musician Michael Gregory (hence the name of the band), whose goal is only humoristic. Indeed, The Gregory Brothers digitally manipulate recorded voices of politicians, news anchors, or political pundits to make them seem to be singing and finally create a music. The auto-tune they use allows them to create real melodies, on the one hand really loveable for the audience, and on the other hand really funny because it seems so artificial. Moreover, people speaking in the clip of the “Bed Intruder Song” have a strong American accent, what make them even less credible: “We gon’ find you”. What I find remarkable, is that nothing in this song, neither the lyrics, nor the clip, are taken seriously, even if the recording on which it is based is drawn from a news report of WAFF-48 (Tennessee Valley's First Alert breaking news) about an attempted rape in Huntsville, Alabama. The “Bed Intruder Song” could thus just have been a bad joke, but it actually became the most watched YouTube video of 2010 and reaches today more than 150M views on YouTube. What do people like in this video? Probably the fact that everything is presented in a dumb way, even if it deals with a bad event. Possibly, making fun about serious subjects discredit them, and consequently make them less likely to scare us; I don’t know. Maybe they just like this song because it is very offbeat.

This way of making joke about what is happening, this contrast between reality and how it affects us, is something on which we could dwell. What is sure, is that not everyone found this music funny: rape is indeed a very serious subject. Can we make fun about everything? I don’t know and I don’t want to try to give this question an answer, as everyone has anyway different opinions about it. What I wanted to underline is the capacity of music to be sometimes serious, sometimes totally silly (just look at the clip, it is so ridiculous). And that is especially what I like in popular music: its diversity. An even if I do not like a style or a way of creating music, I still find it great: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

[lucie-krlsknd]

Elton John: a marketing success?

          Elton John once said: “If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last forever because songs are the key to everything.”. And he seems to be right: who does not know about “A candle in the wind” recorded in 1973? This song is the best example of a music who remains world-known and loved throughout the years. Even twenty years after its output, it continues to gather people, as for example at Lady Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1997. Two thousand people met there, and the performance was broadcast live on TV and seen by no less than 32.10 million people. Elton John is therefore unquestionably a marketing success. But can we reduce him only to this title?

        From my point of view, Elton John’s songs must be seen from a different angle. When we analyze his lyrics for example, we can actually clearly see parts of his life, that we can reassemble to understand who he really was. The song Dear John, recorded in 1982, revolves around Elton Jonh’s first heterosexual relationship which ended up as described in the song; she left him without saying goodbye and he was not really affected by it: “I got home today / took a look around / trying to find that girl of mine / she could not be found” and “I don’t want her back”; Nowadays, Elton is known to be a committed homosexual who fights for the right of this community. Another example can be brought to the fore: “And I'm gonna be high / As a kite by then” in Rocketman recorded in 1972. In this song, the singer hints at his addiction problems. During 16 years he indeed was an alcoholic and took drugs every day. He thus shares his personal experiences and his weaknesses with all his audience.

       He is not ashamed of his background and even tries to dedramatize the kind of struggles he had. “Rocketman” is a movie produced by Dexter Fletcher in 2016 which shows the entire life of the star. Having all of these information, Elton John’s audience has no other choice than understanding and creating bonds with him. At the end, we learn that he has been sober for over three decades now, and it sounds like a victory that every drug addict or alcoholic can achieve. Whatever are your struggles, you can go over it. Even Elton John, who tried to kill himself, ended up happy, sober and in love. This world-known star is thus not only a marketing success but a symbol of sincerity and perseverance.

Do you know other artists that share parts of their life with their audience? Or on the contrary that are purely mercantile?