A Rhetorical Analysis Of Jack Johnson's Song Upside Down

Improved Essays
In the song “Upside Down” by Jack Johnson, the author, who is also the artist and performer, expresses the feeling that turning over a new leaf or taking a new angle is a good way forward when you feel trapped or overwhelmed in your present situation. Throughout the song, the author conveys to the audience that when things are changing, sometimes memories of how life was before the change, fade, in lieu of new memories and experiences to come using the lines, “I can feel in change in everything/And as the surface breaks reflections fade”. Using this line, he uses metaphorical devices and an allegorical aspect to the song to convey his message and purpose. Another thing that Jack Johnson attempts to convey within the song is that nothing is

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    Loren Eisley’s “The Bird and the Machine” takes a deeper look at the gap between rapidly developing technology, and the subsequent place that it’s taking in the world, as compared to the natural order of things. He expresses his opinion passionately and portrays the urgency of what he is saying using several effective rhetorical strategies. Though this essay includes strong appeals to pathos and is based on an interesting juxtaposition, he has created an overall weak piece because of an extremely lack-luster pattern of development, as well as a glaring absence of an appeal to logos or ethos. Though the content is strong, it lacks credibility and the reader quickly loses interest, and feels unsatisfied by the ending. That is not to discredit the content itself.…

    • 547 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Q: You have stated before that you create music to inspire people, to motivate them. Do you believe you have achieved that to an extent that would satisfy you as an artist? Go listen to all my music. It is the codes of self esteem; the codes of who you are. If you are a Kanye West fan, you’re not a fan of me but you are a fan of yourself.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In asserting that he has not written his book to extract revenge on his coworkers, Goldberg declares: "Anyone who writes a book to be vindictive is almost certainly insane.... my guess is it would be easier to give birth to triplets than write a book, especially if you've never written one before." (By this logic, perhaps Goldberg should have given birth to triplets and really made the network brass squirm.) This statement is unconvincing, though, since literary action was probably the best--if not only--avenue of retribution open to him. It is unclear to what extent anger steered Goldberg's pen (if he indeed wrote Bias for retaliation, he would certainly have had rationale) but even if he is sincere in his protestations of neutrality, could…

    • 348 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There is no doubt about the Jackals reading’s intended purpose. To put it simply, Han Sorya is trying to drum up Korean pride and Kim Il-Sung’s communist ideology. On the surface, Sorya appears to have written a touching story about a mother’s devotion to her dying son. But dig deeper and the underlying message is clear. This response paper argues that the Jackals reading is strategically designed to promote the “eternal struggle” rhetoric.…

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Why is unplanned pregnancy a thing? Why is abortion so wrong in this world or country today? These are unexplainable questions, split on the issue of abortion, some believe in abortion and see nothing wrong with it ,but others hate abortion and see it as taking away from God’s power and basing their campaigns against it as an “act of God” to bring life within you and give you the chance to be a mother but what if they aren’t financially stable enough? Or it just isn’t the right time for a child or another mouth to feed? There are many pros and cons that support both sides.…

    • 1732 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Yes Virginia is an editorial from a writer of the New York Sun. It was written by a little girl named Virginia who is eight years old in 1897. In her letter she is explaining that her friends are telling her that there is no Santa claus so she asks the writer to tell her the truth. She also adds in her letter the reason she is writing to the sun. She states in her letter that "papa says".…

    • 1483 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    On April 14th, 2017, proclaimed artist, Kendrick Lamar, released his fourth studio album, titled Damn. This fourteen track album was possibly Lamar’s most personal and most in-depth project yet. However, no song on this album, perhaps, reaches the personal level of the fifth track titled “FEEL.” In this song Lamar gives a super in-depth look at what he believes his biggest issues are and allows the listener to realize your own by confessing his. The purpose of this essay is to conduct a rhetorical analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s “FEEL.”…

    • 729 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Johnson’s letter is a response to a woman who asked him to obtain support to have her son sent to the university. The prompt crafts his denial of the woman’s request using rhetorical strategies to deliver his message to the women. He uses a number of methods of getting his point across using things such as juxtaposition, setting her up by giving her hope then letting her down with the disappointment. In the letter, Johnson says, “Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment.”…

    • 447 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    On June 8th, 1762, Samuel Johnson wrote a letter to a woman who had requested his help. The task for Samuel Johnson was to ask the archbishop of Canterbury for patronage to have the woman’s son sent to a university. This was certainly a big and almost impossible task for Samuel Johnson. Therefore, Johnson replied to the woman who had requested his help with great denial. But how can people craft their denial to someone who is possibly in great need of help?…

    • 1574 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “A man who has given away a small fortune, forsaken a loving family, abandoned his car, watch, and map, and burned the last of his money before traipsing off into the wilderness” (71). The national best selling book, “Into the Wild” written by Jon Krakauer tells the story about a man name Chris McCandless. The story takes place in 1990’s and tells the adventures of the a man who changes his name to Alex Supertramp. The story tells the readers of the book:all the different people he met on his journey, where he want and how he died. As the author writees about Chris’s life and his connections with the story he includes many different types of writting styles including rhetoricstragides.…

    • 1046 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    During my first week of WRD 103 we discussed what the basics of writing a Rhetoric Analysis. We learned to pay close attentions to the author’s tone, diction and use of rhetorical appeal ,(logos. ethos, pathos) and how the use of these literary devices worked to convey the authors message to the reader. After an introduction on how to analyze an authors work we were assigned our own Rhetorical analysis paper. For this assignment we picked an optioned article and had to analyze it’s rhetoric appeal.…

    • 703 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The media perceives Taylor Swift as nothing more than a clingy, manipulative, and crazy young woman who jumps from relationship to relationship. Being the lyrical genius she is, Swift created the song "Blank Space" in 2014 to defend her position with this preconceived notion. She uses many rhetorical devices to explain her position in this argument against the media. With the beneficial use of rhetorical devices, Taylor Swift shows that boys will only stay if it is worth a fight, and that she is fully conscious of the media representation.…

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mere months after the September 11th attacks on the United States, Alan Jackson released a song that he titled, “Where Were You?” He debuted the song on the Country Music Awards stage in November of 2001. The nation was crying out in shock and despair and Jackson joined in that cry with his song. In writing “Where Were you?” he did so in a time of national confusion.…

    • 1174 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In February 2016, Beyonce did a super bowl halftime show performance that provoked controversy all over the world. An editor from Salon Media group named Natasha Lennard, wrote a commentary named, “Why are cops taking Beyonce’s black affirmation as an attack?” after hearing that multiple police officers made the decision to boycott the halftime show. Lennard was puzzled when society began to say that Beyonce’ was attacking police officers during her ‘Formation’ performance. She suggests that Beyonce was simply being an advocate for African Americans not attacking the police force.…

    • 802 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, is about the Problem of middle-class people ideas of beauty on a female of an African American girls. Her novel came about after Morrison talked with someone who wanted to have blue eyes, the novel shows a girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wanted love and to be taken into a world that doesn’t care about people of her race. Author Shelley Wong’s in her Article Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye talks about the different ways in which Morrison wrote her novels such as main ideas, main arguments, rhetorical strategy and the style in which Morrison use to keep her audience engaged. In her Article Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye Shelley Wong’s starts by saying how Morrison passage “rendered in the style of the Dick and Jane series of primers, and how the novel lays bare the syntax of static isolation at the center of our cultural texts.…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays