Sometimes I find myself free-falling without ground in sight. During my descent, I begin to forget about what I fell off of and I wish a branch of reason could slow my pace. It's crazy, in my own head I could hardly explain the depths of my feelings through words. Good or bad our emotions define us and guide our bodies through life as we know it.
Tom Petty's song "Free Fallin" exemplifies the experience of a wake-up call.
Susanne Langer, an American philosopher who specialized in art and music, believed that music was capable of expressing emotions in a way that words could not. Renowned Scholar Bronwyn Davies described Langer's theory on how music was able to articulate complicated emotions by way of a non-discursive, symbolic conduit redescribed as an illusion of life that sounds the way feelings feel (Sellnow, 2010).
For some, finding the reason our tastes in music differ so much could be a confusing road that might not be worth traveling down, unless you are a scientist, philosopher, or marketing guru.
So why confuse things?
You either like a song or you don't, but if you want to scratch the surface a bit and come up with the types of music YOU desire. Well, then perhaps you could look at the moment you have found yourself in, and focus on YOUR own taste. In Susanne Langer's opinion, music communicates emotion through symbols of intensity and release patterns we experience in our daily lives. Meaning, you search for the way you want to feel through music. When people listen to music more often than not they are searching for inspiration and or answers. So what would be your poison as you drive to work or hit the gym? Through an artistic lens, the experience of life is more enjoyable when we have a soundtrack that makes our narrative glow.
Henry Winkler quotes Friedrich Nietzsche in "Here Comes the Boom."
" Without music, life would be a mistake."
What do you think Nietzsche meant by this? I mean how would life be a mistake without music in it? Would the world stop if Kanye West didn't exist? Would air become unbreathable if Phil Collins didn't help us through tough times with his relay of "comic' and or "tragic lyrics? The answer is no, but great minds like Langer, and Nietzsche believed that truth could be found through music without the veil of perception (confusion).
"Everybody's got an angle," said Bing Crosby's character in White Christmas , the holiday classic movie. That phrase can be true on so many levels. Though the movie goes on to show that not everybody has an angle, that doesn't mean all people are like Bob Wallace. There is always an angle when watching a film or listening to music. The writers or directors are attempting to influence people's perspective of the social class system. Either they want you to think that the class system is not there or that it is very distinct. This neo-Marxist perspective also says that any story throughout history, in essence, has been about class distinction. I'm inclined to agree. While looking back at various movies, commercials, and stories, they all can have the neo-Marxist perspective applied to them. I even went back to the oldest story discovered, Beowulf. Even that story shows that if we are subservient to the upper class eventually we will be given riches and roya...
The hit show How to Get Away with Murder aired in 2014, nearly one decade ago. The six seasons included a variety of characters, new adventures, and one storyline that kept the audience coming back for more. This series takes numerous hegemony stances and reinforces a message that ties in with Sellnow’s Feminist Perspectives. The main character - Annalise Keating - is a black, highly educated, single woman. Throughout the series, Annalise Keating defies typical gender roles and strengthens her role as a successful woman. She deals with hardship, loss, and sexism, yet perseveres into a stronger educator. All of these attributes seem to contribute to the series’ success. While this is just one example of one series that takes these positions, this leads into the main question - are more shows likely to take this storyline position? Sellnow (2022) points out the sites of struggle when it comes to taking a feminist perspective. She also states that oppositional readings may inc...
In this module, the theory of Marxism is introduced to describe how pop culture and media push forward ideologies, whether hegemonic, occluded, or oppositional. Through the video examples including Titanic, Good Will Hunting , Pretty Woman , The Matrix , and many more, these texts describe how the world might be seen by the average person. As I was watching these videos, I wanted to take the chance to reflect on how my feeds were pushing any of these Marxism concepts. With movies, they are bound to have themes, issues, or ideologies demonstrated. They have to be spotted in a movie, or else why are we even watching them? It's obvious that much of the content we see online has some sort of view, ideology, or stance, but I was interested in the "average Joe" content or content that doesn't seem to have a reading on it - but alas, it does. In recent years, as TikTok has pushed forward content with its thousands of new users a week, these Marxism themes have appeared i...
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