Scouting in popular culture

Decision-making and finding truth are important skills that are necessary to be an active and participating individual of our culture. Not just one aspect of myself is sufficient to make well balanced and education decisions. When seeking truth, I rely on the trifecta of my biology degree, my liberal arts education, and my faith. Finding truth in American pop culture relies on the usage of all three tools to make decisions. When taking positions on controversial topics, I like to use science…

Paper Assignment #1 Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off is a song that is stuck in the minds of the majority of Americans, and many can recognize the songs just seconds from the beginning. It’s catchy tune and light-hearted and spirited lyrics leave the listener with a joyful feeling after hearing the song. However, looking more in depth and analyzing the parts of the song, one can find that it is more complex that you would think from just listening to it once. Looking at the overall structure of the…

In the film” the Great Gatsby’, Luhrmann aimed to construe the jazz age into the music equivalent to our times (the now). However, according to R. Bassil, Luhrmann failed in capturing the spirit and earnestness of Gatsby’s West Egg mansion parties and stated that it is more suitable for a twilight film or a headphone advert (Bassil, 2013). This essay will disagree with the statement made and will refer to the following three sound techniques found in the film: Diegetic, Non-diegetic and a sound…

In chapter 10 of Music, Performance, Meaning: Selected Essays, Cook (2007) aims to “spell out a way of understanding ‘at least some of the meaning ascribed to music as at the same time irreducibly cultural and intimately related to its structural properties’”. In this essay I will attempt to outline in detail, John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ and how cultural and structural properties of the track contribute to the ideology of world peace and harmony as well as a hint of anti-religion. The essay…

The music video of LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” is rich with cultural artefacts and statements. Despite their partying and free-of-care spirit, the landscape, depiction of gender, ethnicity and briefly religion could only be seen to be deliberate and well planned out. The music video is an intertextual reference to the genre of post-apocalyptic movies and dramas. The video plays with the concept of people being effected by a massive plague, which takes away your human nature upon infection.…

It is often the case that people will group together based on similar interests, styles, and personalities to form smaller cultures within the vastness of mainstream society. In a culture as diverse as America, there are many definitive groups which may be deemed subcultures, but perhaps the most interesting groups are those who find themselves at the fringes of what may be defined as a subculture. So, what exactly outlines the requirements that makes a group of people to be called a subculture?…

time Pop Art was emerging in America, a war-consumed society was transitioning into a mass cultural embrace of media and art. Pop Art was the art of popular culture. It was the visual art movement that characterized a sense of optimism during the post war consumer boom of the 1960's. It coincided with the globalization of pop music and youth culture. Pop Art was young and fun and hostile to the artistic establishment.…

of being tolerable, and sometimes leave us on the edge. So the question isn’t that we get lonely, but why we do. Let's look through a few lenses to understand the why behind this feeling so many of us put forth an effort to avoid. Lens one: Popular culture is become more and more influence for what I have observed in the world in the time period that we are currently in. There are more people in the world now then there were five…

of comic book character. One thing comic book grammar that I would use to determine the significance of these characters when circulated through different mediums would be visual metaphor, which Duncan defines in Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture as, “a picture of one thing to evoke the meaning of something else.” (Duncan, 2015) My argument in this area of rhetoric would be while comics do have powerful and meaningful text often. So, can the deeper metaphors that comic book literature…

Beyonce’s impact on the communication of popular culture and identity. Those two perspectives that we learned in class are that popular culture is a site of hegemonic struggle and wildly favored by population. These two perspectives help to give a better understanding of how to examine both the account of Beyonce’s performance, as well as the performance itself. The first perspective, a site of hegemonic struggle, is meaning that the creator of this culture is a position of authority. While…