Tuesday, October 26, 2010
blog 34
Today we spend twenty minutes coming up with possible topics for our common place essay and out of the 50 sum things I wrote down I had to choose one. The topic I chose was, history through music. This relates to the Jaynestown episode of Firefly when the crew is in the bar and they hear the man singing the ballad about Jayne. Much like music was used in that scene to tell a story of the history of how Jayne came to be a hero I want to write about how music is used all over the world to tell stories. These stories told through song are called ballads. There are many popular songs that most people don’t know are considered ballads such as: Hey There Delilah, Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, 21 Guns, and many other popular songs. I’m not really sure what type of ballad I want to write about but we still have a lot of time to work out the details. Another idea that I thought about writing my common place paper on is dictatorship. Dictatorship is a pretty common topic so it wouldn’t be hard to find supporting information to help my paper and it relates to the Jaynestown episode because the government in the town that they land in is communistic in many ways. Communism is my backup plan incase the whole ballad thing doesn’t work out but I want to write about ballads rather than communism because I fell that communism is just to broad of a topic.
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I really like your idea. I think if you find the right song you can really expand the topic! You'll probably have to look for songs that aren't as mainstream to find ones that have a "story" though. I guess I say this because when I think of mainstream music I think of kind of song that have really repetitive lyrics that don't really develop.
ReplyDeleteI think they are both great ideas but my favorite is the song one. It will probably be more challenging but in the end i think it is way more interesting. If i had to read about either music or dictatorship i would most likely pick music!
ReplyDeleteI've always thought it would be cool to do study of history through music. If you really want to see the songs that correspond to what was going on in our world, take a look at all the great 20th century folk singers. People like Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie all wrote songs that basically spell out what was going on in the world at the time. Musicians tell us something about history that textbooks can't. Not only does music capture the events that happened, they also convey the emotions that were felt by society, and you can learn more from that than from any scholar.
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