Week 10 - Music analysis
Like most people in this country and around the world, music is a natural, everyday part of my life. Music is always in the background in the grocery store, the elevator, the shopping mall; it is an integral part of advertising on TV, radio, and internet; it creates emotion, suspense, and meaning in movies, documentaries, and TV shows; it is an entrenched part of religious ceremonies and rituals; it is part of civic and social proceedings. Music in my everyday life is escapable—and that is before listening to music for pleasure through radio, iPod, CD, etc.
Most of my listening is on iPod while at the gym or on my home computer through iTunes. I rarely listen to music on the radio, but if I do, there is only one station—89.3 “The Current�. Most of the time, though, I listen to what I know and like—Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Phish, Regina Spektor, Trampled by Turtles, 90’s bands (Pearl Jam, Green Day, The Offspring), Johnny Cash, Ella Fitzgerald—lots of tried and true but with a few newer things thrown in.
My listening habits made this assignment particularly interesting because I was forced to face something I have sort of steeled myself against and pulled myself away from—what I think of as pop culture radio station music. I have no idea what is out there because I really don’t listen. I don’t have my head in the sand, so when I look at the Top 40, I recognize most of the names—I just don’t know the musicians’ work. Another struggle in working on this week’s homework? I work with deaf kids. I can’t really envision how music will be part of my classroom!
At any rate, I finally settled on a song for this assignment—“Mandy� by the Jonas Brothers. It is an upbeat song with a rock-ish sound and quick tempo. Here are the lyrics:
(Verse 1) Mandy used to be that girl
The one that never said a word
But she only sang
S Club 7 and all those boy bands
Now it's been a few years
It looks like things have changed
Now she's mine and I want to say
(Chorus) Mandy always laughs when I act stupid
I am unaware that I'm a nuisance
With her it's never wasted time
Mandy always knows exactly what I'm
Thinking she's always on my mind
And now I'm never gonna let her go
Cause Mandy always knows
(Verse 2) Mandy always tells the truth
Even when it's hard to do
And she always understands
Even when it don't make sense
Even though she is a blonde
I'm the one that feels so dumb
(Chorus)
(Bridge) When I have a problem
I'm sure that Mandy knows
When I'm feeling lonely
I'm sure that Mandy knows
When everything's crazy
She's always there for me
And I'm sure that she knows
I'm never ever gonna let her go
(Chorus 2x)
Never gonna let her go
Cause Mandy always knows
My adult self listens to this song and hears it as a poppy, cheesy little number for pre-teens and teens to listen to at slumber parties and school dances. It seems quaint, trite, and unremarkable—just another teeny-bopper song about simple, shallow teenage romance. When I try to put myself into those adolescent shoes and mindset, however, a part of my brain can relate. The importance and excitement of a relationship and the need to be understood are expressed in this song. As Powers points out in her article,
“Contemporaries of Langer, including Raymond Williams and John Blacking, similarly saw music's potential to help listeners grasp the subtleties of emotion. (…) What memorable songs offer, including banal ones, is a way not just to feel but to better grasp the structure of feeling, by re-creating the sense of becoming enraged, turning on, or falling in love.� The upbeat tempo of the song reflects the excitement, the novelty, the exhilaration of a fledgling relationship. The simple lyrics cut straight to the important parts in the relationship—Mandy understands, Mandy accepts, Mandy laughs at stupidity.
My adult brain comes back online during investigation of this song and I am tempted to write it off again as nothing more than bubblegum pop that points to overly simplistic views on relationships. Then I am drawn back into the world of the young adult brain by another part of Powers’ article: “And teenpop needs its candy clichés more than any other genre, since adolescence is all confusion, the time when music offers for many the first map to adult emotions.� The confusion and excitement of a relationship or the overwhelming feeling of peace at being understood may be difficult for an adolescent to sort out—friends may not be able to relate, it may be embarrassing to discuss, the adolescent may have the egocentric idea that nobody else had experienced the same feeling before—so to hear the sentiments reflected in music may normalize their feelings.
Even though I can understand how this particular song could evoke a response from young adults, I am still critical of some of the media messages sent in popular music. Young adults are constantly barraged with media messages about how they should think, dress, act, etc. This presents a great opportunity for a study of media representations surrounding music in a media studies classroom. This wouldn’t work for my population of deaf students, but I think it would be a worthwhile exercise for other classrooms. As Beach points out in his summary of chapter 5, “By examining media representations, students are learning to interrogate the ways in which the media construct versions of reality and to recognize that these constructions influence their lives and identities.� A close examination of a sampling of popular music could reveal to the students any implied or explicit messages about gender, behavior, relationships, etc. and how those messages may influence the listeners.
Conversely, a media ethnography study (Beach chapter 6) of popular music could help students explore how “the meaning of texts evolves out of the activity of audiences’ social participation with media texts.� A study of the Jonas Brothers’ music could explore how listeners and audiences have created their own meaning and helped shape the culture surrounding the music. Afterall, popular music wouldn’t be popular if a fan base didn’t exist. A media ethnography study could reveal the ways in which that fan base has developed and how it interacts with the music—blogs, vlogs, YouTube, fan websites, live in concerts, etc.
I am very interested in the idea of pop music in the classroom and regret that it won’t work for me at this point in my teaching!