Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"
Music is a form of media, art, and entertainment that has played an essential role in shaping society throughout time.
Media as a tool to connect with people
Artistic effect of music on the human brain
Music has immeasurable influence and it would be impossible to think about a society similar to ours that does not have music as part of its cultural values.
People's tendency to respond to a combination between music and ideas
Philosophical, psychological, and sociological effects of music
The producers and distributors of music therefore wield this power and influence.
Acknowledging the power coming along with making music
Using this respective power to influence the masses
Musicians have solidly demonstrated that they can use their fame and technology to effectively as well as ineffectively raise awareness and activism regarding issues they perceive to be socially or ethically significant.
Musicians' focus to make change possible through their music
" The drying up of the dream like a raisin suggests that the spirit of someone who is the victim of prejudice experiences a kind of living death, with all vital forces sucked away from his or her sprit like dried fruit. The dream can also "crust over" like something sweet, implying the false face that African-Americans must put on to live in America. (a Raisin in the Sun, the Lorraine Hansberry play that uses a line from the poem as its title, portrays one of the central characters, a chauffer named alter Lee, as a man filled with rage who must smile and cater to whites in his job).
This contrast between sweetness and reality is even more dramatically depicted in "Strange Fruit," where images of the old, genteel South of Magnolia trees are starkly juxtaposed against the image of a dead, African-American male: "Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,…...
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Works Cited
Allen, Lewis. "Strange Fruit." Lyrics Freak. October 14, 2009.
Social Analysis of the lues Music in the American Society
The blues, or blues music, has been considered an important and popular music genre in the history of American music. Its history goes back many years ago, during the black slavery period in the American history. lues music was said to have traced its roots in the cotton plantations commonly found in the South, and that blues music sang by the African-American slaves were their forms of protest against the slavery system that the white American society encourages. However, blues music did not proliferate and became prevalent among the black and white American society until after the Emancipation period, wherein most African-American slaves were now freed from bondage to slavery legally, and slavery was now abolished and prohibited to practice in the society, especially in the white American community.
The blues is defined as a "musical style created in response to…...
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Bibliography
David, Angela. "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism." 1998. George Washington University Newsletter Web site: "Women Writers Talk History, Feminism, and Politics." 3 November 2002 http://www.gwu.edu/~wstu/newsletter/spring98/writers.htm .
Douglass, Frederick. E-text of "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave." 1845. Afro-American Almanac Web site. 3 November 2002 http://www.toptags.com/aama/books/book10.htm .
Nelson's violent images call upon the reader to behold the corpse of Till, forcing the reader into a state of seismic cultural shock, as America has long been eager to forget its racist legacy (Harold, 2006, p.263). Trethewey's first lines of her book are gentler, but there is always the urge to remember: "Truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life" (Trethewey, p.1)
The calls her poetic collection an act of memory "Erasure, those things that get left out of the landscape of the physical landscape, things that aren't monumented or memorialized, and how we remember and what it is that we forget. I wanted to kind of restore some of those narratives, so those things that are less remembered (Brown, 2007). Her use of the sonnet form over her cycle of poems is not as perfectly consistent as Nelson's, but repetition and remembrance…...
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Works Cited
Black Soldiers in Blue: African-American Troops in the Civil War Era. Edited by John
David Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
(Cha-Jua, 2001, at (http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue31/chajua31.htm)
Another aspect of representation, however, concerns collective memory and the representation of a shared past. Through the context for dialogue they create, social movements facilitate the interweaving of individual stories and biographies into a collective, unified frame, a collective narrative. Part and parcel of the process of collective identity or will formation is the linking of diverse experiences into a unity, past as well as present. Social movements are central to this process, not only at the individual level, but also at the organizational or meso level of social interaction. Institutions like the black church and cultural artifacts like blues music may have embodied and passed on collective memories from generation to generation, but it was through social movements that even these diverse collective memories attained a more unified focus, linking individuals and collectives into a unified subject, with a common future as well as a…...
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Resources
Cashmore, E. (2003). Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies. New York: Routledge.
Climatology, in "semi-tropical" Southern California, a place that was as dry and hot as Italy although mercifully "without the Italians," tourists even from the United States "discovered that umbrellas were useless against the drenching rains of Southern California but that they made good shade in the summer; that many of the beautifully colored flowers had no scent; that fruit ripened earlier in the northern than in the southern part of the state; that it was hot in the morning and cool at noon...jack rabbits carried water on their backshere, in this paradoxical land, rats lived in the trees and squirrels had their homes in the ground" (96; 105) Economic fortunes seemed as unstable as the weather -- wharfs, railways, hotels sprung up only to be abandoned after the bubble of expectation in the real estate market went bust (116).
However, almost despite itself, the booms and busts increased the population density…...
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Works Cited
McWilliams, Cary. Southern California: An Island on the Land. First published 1946.
Gibbs Smith, 1980.
Rice, Richard B., William a. Bullough, & Richard J. Orsi. The Elusive Eden: A New
History of California. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.
How much feeling there is in the third and fourth stanzas! -- the panicked and fearful bird, heart pumping, the calmness of the man, the soft, loving strokes and upward lifting of the bird.
However, behind this calm and ease, is another emotion that Wrigley portrays. It is subtle, yet winds through the poem, so the reader knows that there is some kind of problem, challenge of violence that the man (and the outside world) is facing. Just the title, itself, foreshadows this. Who wants to listen to "news" these days? Is there anything positive and uplifting on CNN or in the papers? he poem explains it as the bird's frantic chirping and the line "even peace seemed possible."
What makes this so effective is the juxtaposition. In one case, is mankind en masse waging war and killing one another. Yet, in another situation, one man, stands alone, helping free and…...
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The man in the poem is trying to find a middle ground. He is attempting to escape into nature and away from the middle of a town or city where road rage threatens, depression and antidepressant increase, car horns blare, and gun shots blare. However, the radio, one of his concessions, keeps him in the midst of the violence with its news. And, ironically, even in the calm and beauty of nature, potential harm strikes, like the bird being trapped and frantically searching for a way out into the light. Violence cannot be left behind.
Simone and the Role of the Black ArtistNina Simone said quite simply that the artists duty is to reflect the times, and so as a Black Artist she saw it as her duty to reflect the times that black people especially were going through in her day and age (Nina Simone: An Artists Duty). She did that especially in songs like Mississippi Goddamn, which criticized society for its racism and violence (Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddamn). Or, as Loudermilk points out, Simone brought her identity as a musician to the protest identity of the Civil Rights Movement that was raging during her life. This paper will reflect on Simones role as a Black Artist and what she believed that should be, as well as on how her songs reflected that role. It will also discuss whether her music would fit in our present moment and what her ideas of the current…...
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Works CitedLoudermilk, A. “Nina Simone & the Civil Rights Movement: Protest at Her Piano, Audience at Her Feet.” Journal of International Women\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s Studies, 14(3), 121-136. Available at: Simone: An Artist’s Duty.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99V0mMNf5fo “Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddamn.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ25-U3jNWMhttp://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol14/iss3/9 “Nina
I thought of the millions of people living their lives and looking at watches and clocks. I could not help thinking that one day my life would end and I began to think about those people who had passed on form this life.
A picked up the watch and placed it on my arm. I tightened the strap and the watch no longer felt strange or irritating. I looked a the glass interface again and was pleased to see that the images on the surface had changed with the changing light and that there were new and interesting shapes that swam across the silver surface of the watch. With a strange sense of joy I realized that the word around me was not boring or dull and that watches don't just measure time.
My watch reminded me that there are infinite and ever-changing possibilities in life and that sometimes we become…...
Healthy Food Prevent Obesity?
Now more than ever obesity has become an immense issue in the United States. What used to be a growing concern has now become a topic of constant discussion and debate. It has received great media attention, with as far as getting celebrities and athletes to sponsor healthier food and more exercise. The President and First Lady of the United States have even made it a personal concern of theirs to get America healthier. Children are at an all time high for getting Diabetes from the unhealthy food that they are eating and that are being marketed to them. Adults are getting high cholesterol levels, Diabetes, and high blood pressure, from all the unhealthy fat and high amounts of salt and sugar in the foods that they are eating. In today's society, being healthy has become not only a way of living, but also a trend.…...
Billy Collins' poem is a lyric poem because mainly it expresses highly personal emotions and feelings. Many lyric poems involve musical themes or tones, and in fact in Shakespeare's era the word "lyric" meant that the poem was accompanied by a musical instrument (a lyre). But while Collins' poem doesn't give off a musical idea or theme (unless the sound of a fork scratching across a granite table is music), it does use metaphor and achieves a dramatic impact.
The metaphor has two people, presumably married and in a love partnership who have divorced. (It is known that although un-married couples who have been together for a long time and break up are also involved essentially in a "divorce" of their partnership.) The metaphor of "two spoons" shows two people locked together, snuggling would be a good word, in a warm bed. "Tined" means prongs on a fork -- or it…...
I even spoke with my friends there in English. It was truly a fruitful experience for me.
Eventually, my learning of the English language has proved to be very important to me and my education. It was very helpful especially in achieving my goals, even when I continued to study as a college student in an American university. Not only because it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for me to communicate with people from different countries without being able to speak English myself, but also because my experiences in studying the English language has taught me several skills and techniques in memorizing, analyzing, and understanding different lessons or issues. Unlike some of the students I knew, I tried to find the connection of the terms we used in class with real things I came across in everyday life. This made the lessons simpler and easier to understand for…...
Clara Peeters "Still Life with Flowers, Goblet, Dried Fruit and Pretzels" is a far more humble scene. However, the warm light the title objects are bathed in suggests great significance is given to these objects by the owner and the users of these everyday things. The Brueghel and Rubins painting tells the story of the painting for the viewer, but Peeters' leaves it an open question why the warm bowl of fruit has been assembled, why the handmade pretzels have been positioned with such care. Perhaps it is a festival day, that is why the best goblet is set out for the viewer's perusal and fresh flowers have been cut and arranged to delight the eye.
The viewer engages with the work, rather than marvels at the meaning or the masterpieces set before him or her, as if he or she has been invited into the artist's home and asked to…...
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Works Cited
Stokstad, Marilyn. (2005). Art History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Hook or Me This Time
Ideological changes of a Pirate and a former Lost Boy in two narrative essays)
Life is defined by the changes that take place during it. Our bodies change and we grow larger; time passes and we grow older; our philosophy and ideals change and we grow up. These metamorphoses compromise any coming of age story, whether the story be one of a small juvenile accomplishment or one of a complete maturation of character. Both "Labyrinthine" and "Happiness" are essays which tell coming of age stories. Both narrators recall past childhood events and recount them like scenes from a play where we have a behind-the-schenes, first-person perspective on the action. There are many similarities between the two stories told. Both essays feature adults whose childhood years are long ago and far away. Both narrators remember feeling isolated and removed from other characters around them. Both narrators use…...
" In other words, there will be land and between "firmament" there will be water. Continents and oceans were created this way. It is interesting to note that the Christian God spoke but the Sioux Creating Power sang. The Native Peoples had creative ideas.
Sioux Creation Story / Christian Creation Story: At first, the animals and people drowned in the Sioux story. Then the Creating Power pulled four animals from his pipe bag: a loon, an otter, a beaver and turtle. Soon there also came "the shapes of men and women." In the Christian story, God created heaven and then He also created: grass, fruit trees, seasons, stars, "great whales" and "every living creature" that moves, including birds. On the sixth day "God created man in his own image…male and female created he them." Then He "breathed" the breath of life into the man and humanity was born.
The similarities are obvious…...
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Works Cited
BibleGateway.com. (2010). Genesis 1-3 (King James Version). Retrieved Feb. 1, 2011, from http://www.biblegateway.com .
Native American Creation Stories. (1720's). Origins of Ottawa Society. Retrieved Feb. 2, 2011,
In turn-of-the-century America, there were some major civil rights advances for some groups, while other groups saw no advances in their civil rights and even saw advances that had been made begin to erode. The time period was well after the end of the Reconstruction era and the beginning of Jim Crow laws, the rise of the suffragette movement, and a continued assault on rights for Native Americans. There was also a significant increase in anti-Asian discrimination. Here are some suggested titles and thesis statements for an essay about civil rights in this era.
Essay Title....
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