Guitar

Change. It is vital. It is necessary. It is a fact of life. Without it, inevitable stagnation ensues. Bands change their sound from album to album, altering with time and shifts in society. From cultural to personal reasons, these changes keep the music relevant. The Beatles shifted from a pop group, to a much more psychedelic and experimental group as their career progressed. Miley Cyrus started as living a double life as herself and Hannah Montana in her Disney Channel days. As she grew,…

It was the last day of school of my freshman year. I stood at the doorway of my world history classroom counting down the seconds as Kelcie and I repeated, “Summer, summer, summer.” The bell finally rang and everyone started running to the parking lot. Everybody was rushing to go eat lunch and hang out with their friends. I on the other hand included myself into my neighbor, Taylor’s plans. He asked me if I would like to help him build a slip n’ slide but he never would’ve thought I’d invite my…

Ah! I heard the excited screams of thousands of people. We all had one thing in common. We were waiting for my favorite artist to strut onto the stage wearing a pair of silver, glittery shoes with her short blonde hair and white sunglasses. Can you guess who we were about to see? Yes! We were at Soldier Field about to see Taylor Swift’s 1989 World Tour. On July 18th it was a sweltering 96° F with a dramatic heat index making it feel as if it was over 107° F. It had been raining on and…

The Grammy Awards this year started with “Out of the Woods” by Taylor Swift. Energetic and Powerful, she instantly attempted to command the crowd with her stage presence. Possibly an attempt to continue promotion for her album “1989”, or a performance to meet the standards of a “grammy moment” as mentioned by Host LL Cool J, the looks on the crowd at the beginning of the show showed great joy. From a Pop performance straight to Best Rap album award win by Kendrick Lamar, who later in the night…

Although there are many famous celebrities, if my school came together and chose a celebrity to speak at my school I would chose Taylor Swift. Not only is she humble, she is very selfless and talented. My lifelong dream has been to attend a Taylor Swift concert, so for her to visit my school would be the best day of my life. For a year's salary, Taylor Swift currently makes 170,000,000 dollars a year. In 2008, she donated 100,000 dollars the the Red Cross foundation to help the victims of the…

Taylor Swift: The Opposite of Bad Blood Taylor Swift, like many other celebrities, takes advantage of the use of technological platforms provided by forms of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to reach out to her fans on a worldwide scale and invite them into her life. Through the use of social media, Taylor Swift strives to portray a persona of a person who values friendship and is family oriented, is conscious and empathetic towards people who are struggling, and is gracious…

Music is the international medium that can link both mind and soul. From sophisticated, well drawn out classical music, to drums and rocks in Aboriginal tribes in Africa, music is a natural and seemingly God-given talent we all possess. “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent,” it is supernatural yet so uniquely human simultaneously (Hugo). Music elicits response; one main response it draws out is in-depth analysis. As popular as music is, music…

A strong theme throughout Swift’s work is her need to draw from personal experience in order to author her music – a theme, which many would argue makes her relatable, authentic, and the key to much of her success. For this discussion it is beneficial to look at Swift’s role as author through the eyes of theorist Roland Barthes: “(b)ook and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists…

Think of music, think of how it makes people feel when they listen to it. Sounds are vibrations that allow for humans to hear. The sounds people hear can be disliked, like the sound of nails on a chalk broad, or enjoyed, like the sounds of rain falling. Music is just like sound but with words and a specific type of rhythm. In the same way as sound certain people can hate classical music but can like rock music. Classical and rock music are classified into different types of genres. Genres are…

Chris Hamby proved that muckraking does still exist today. His article “Breathless and Burdened” exposed that law firms such as the Jackson Kelly law firm has cheated thousands of miners of benefits for black lung disease. Chris Hamby’s article shows that muckraking does still exist in 2016 in newspaper as demonstrated by Chris Hamby’s article “Breathless and Burdened”. Chris Hamby is the author of “Breathless and Burdened” and a noted journalist. Chris Hamby went to the University of Missouri…