product: music

Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron died Friday. I thought you might enjoy this video, sent to me by my friend Pete, of clips from YouTube set to Scott-Heron’s most famous piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”:

NOTE: For the record, reader Azizi believes that this video, and my posting of it, trivializes Scott-Heron’s point. Azizi points us to an interview with Scott-Herson posted at Racialicious.

Andrew Slater sent in an interesting example of the mocking of rap music.  The mocking occurs in a re-make of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” about the excitement of going on out Friday night.  Black’s low-budget music video went viral, shooting her into stardom, or at least celebrity.  The song is a standard teeny-bop pop song, complete with rap interlude.

The re-make, produced by the Community Christian Church, features a so-called “Sadie Black” singing about “Sunday” instead of Friday, and extolling the pleasures of worship. Slater noticed, however, that the entire re-make is more-or-less truthful to the original, except for the rap section. In the re-make, “BP” and “Master E” appear to make fun of rappers.  It’s a very different effect when compared to the straightforward mimickry of Sadie B.

Screen shots (original and re-make respectively):

Videos (rap sections starts at 2:30 and, um, 2:30 respectively):

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

When I teach Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, one thing I have to balance is disclosure of the horrendous history of racism in the U.S. and the risk of further traumatizing students in my classroom for whom these tragedies are not pure abstractions.  One of the these tragedies is lynching.

Lynching, or the killing of individuals targeted by non-police mobs, usually by hanging, became frighteningly common after slavery was ended.  It was a form of terrorism, designed to teach black people, and their white allies, that the end of slavery would not be the end of their subordination. Because a lynching need not be based on evidence that could stand up in court, all anti-racists were at risk of death. Thousands of people — most, but not all of them black — were violently hanged, their bodies often set afire.

Despite the importance of this chapter of American history, I do not show pictures of lynchings in my classroom.  These images are surprisingly easy to come by because the events were often gleefully public and photographs of the murders were sold as postcards. Sometimes, though, I think about showing Billie Holiday singing what is, perhaps, one of the most deeply troubling songs ever written, “Strange Fruit.”  Written by Abel Meeropol and Laura Duncan, it was first performed by Holiday in 1939, almost 30 years before lynching could be called “history.”

Strange Fruit:

Via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

“What’s the deal with all those songs in Bollywood?”

I’ve found that the most consistently misunderstood aspect of Bollywood (and, indeed, all popular Indian cinema) is the way lip-synced songs are used within the narrative of the film. American viewers in particular tend to find this an almost insurmountable obstacle to appreciating Bollywood films on their own merits. Why might Bollywood be ignored by the Western film community even as mass entertainment from places like China (kung fuand wuxia films) and Japan (anime) have been embraced?

I think the problem may lie in an association of Bollywood with Broadway-style American musicals and their sugar happy appropriate-for-all-ages content (due to heavy censorship during the heyday of the American musical). Bollywood films are not appropriate-for-all-ages. While they do have to pass through a Censor Board and explicit references to things like sex are going to be snipped if a film is to have an all-ages certificate, films can and do discuss a wide variety of serious issues using lip-synced songs. For example, the film Roti Kapada aur Makaan (Food, Clothes, and Shelter, 1974) is, among other things, a tough look at how the drive to stay out of poverty can lead a person to an immoral life. It has songs in which the actors lip sync and it also has a really disturbing rape scene and a bittersweet ending. Dil Se (From the Heart, 2000) is an intense film about terrorism. It has songs where the actors lip sync; it also has explosions and tough social commentary.

This clip from Dil Se, for example, shows how Amar is romanticizing the war zone he has been sent to cover as a reporter. We see his inner thoughts expressed through song in a way that couldn’t be easily duplicated in a Hollywood film (please forgive the advertisement):

 

So, Bollywood films are not all cheerful or what we might consider ‘family-friendly’ and the endings to the films are sometimes really unpleasant. Still, I still hear Western film buffs argue that lip-synced songs somehow make a film unrealistic. Let’s get one thing straight — the use of music in Western films is no more realistic than in Bollywood films.

Bollywood songs usually function like a soliloquy out of a Shakespeare play. The songs are designed to express a character’s inner feelings in a metaphorical way. A couple, for example, might be shown singing a duet in a lush meadow in Europe. Indian audiences implicitly understand that the couple has not actually been teleported to Switzerland or The Netherlands. The fantasy location and the song are designed to show how that first blush of love feels to the people involved. In another examples of a fantasy teleport song, in Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham (2001) you clearly see Rahul in a shop in India and then suddenly he and Anjali are cavorting around the pyramids in Egypt:

 

This, however, is no less realistic than your classic Hollywood movie song montage that features a couple falling in love using a series of different scenes set to “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” Likewise, previously recorded songs used as part of a background score are an accepted convention in Western film. We don’t walk around hearing music matched to our mood in real life, but Westerners accept the fantasy in movies because it’s familiar.

Soundtracks and falling-in-love montages do not happen in real life but we have learned to ignore the artifice of the tools to appreciate the stories told. The only difference between those things and Bollywood songs is that is that Western viewers have no experience with the Bollywood song form.

 

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About 15 years ago, a friend gave Filmi Girl a cassette tape with the soundtrack from the 1980s hit Bollywood film Maine Pyaar Kiye and she was hooked. A few years later, she began watching the films the songs were centered around, and after realizing that her real life friends were uninterested in hearing her gush about Aamir, Preity and Rani, she started a blog.  The 31-year-old librarian now spends her limited free time reading about her latest interest and watching large amounts of deliciously, over-the-top Indian films. Read more Bollywood for Beginner posts at Filmi Girl.

 

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

I was walking through the University bookstore today to pick up beginning of the semester office supplies, when this book, Grammar Sucks: What to Do to Make Your Writing Much More Better, caught my eye:


Back cover text:

Do you suffer from grammar phobia because…

  • You’re so used to IMing, you’ve forgotten how to write a normal sentence. :- )
  • You’ve started thinking in rap lyrics.
  • Last time you gave a report, your handout got you laughed out of the room.

What made this book seem blog-worthy to me is the not-so-subtle coded language used to refer to those speakers who the book cover authors (maybe not the book authors) feel are culpable for the degradation of language.  I want to consider the second point specifically: “…thinking in rap lyrics.”

Ok, of course not all rappers are black, but it is an art form that is so solidly identified with the African American community.. And, of course, they’re not really talking about “rap lyrics,” they’re talking about AAVE (African American Vernacular English). This is an offensive and transparently coded throwback to the linguistic inferiority of African Americans.

AAVE is a dialect of English just like all dialects, and has a fully articulated syntax, morphology and phonology. It is NOT a broken or mislearned form of the dominant dialect. And people certainly don’t speak AAVE because they failed to learn arbitrary writing conventions in school (e.g. “Don’t start a sentence with a conjunction”) , which appear to be the topic of this book.

But, let’s take them at their word. Maybe you have grammar phobia because you’re thinking in rap lyrics. Do you mean, like, you’re freestyling in your head all the time? Do you mean you’re kind of like this guy?

You mean, all your thoughts have flow, and rhyme, are creative, and drop properly formed Spanish imperative verbs? To the book cover authors: you fucking wish. I mean, I wish I could do that.

In the context of the book, it makes a clear point: If you are young, and black (and your hat’s real low), you’re not worthy of social respect, or economic achievement.

Needless to say, I went on to go buy my office supplies, and didn’t read the body of the book. I can’t really tell you if it gave any good advice that made any sense. This book is just another case where supposed discussion of language isn’t really about language. It actually ties in nicely with my previous post on how people discuss language in terms of morality. Here, the book cover authors are laying blame on the same groups of people that are accused of leading moral decay: youth, and racial and ethnic minorities.

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Josef Fruehwald is a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on theoretical models of language variation and change. He frequently blogs about the relevance of linguistic research to language attitudes (among other things) at Val Systems.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.


Hope H. sent a link to Riese’s excellent discussion of Jessie J’s new music video at Autostraddle.  Jessie J is already a superstar, writing songs for the likes of Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown, and Christina Aguilera.  But this is her first album where she writes for herself, and Riese describes the video for the song “Do It Like a Dude” as infused with “fuck you i’m fucking your face with my fucking song” energy.  I can’t disagree.

The song asserts it’s title, suggesting that Jessie J is as much a man as any man, as a sample of the lyrics shows:

Boom Boom, pull me a beer
No pretty drinks, I’m a guy out here
Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ money like a pimp
My B I T C H’s on my d*ck like this

Riese asks:

…“Do It Like a Dude” is, on the surface, an anthem of independence — the only reaction Jessie J expects from your wannabe-boyfriend is his acknowledgment that lesbian sex doesn’t need him.  But does singing that she can do “it” “like a dude” just play into the idea that a thing must be “male” to be valid? Or can “dude” be a term independent of its ascribed meaning — is she… employing “dude” as an adjective encompassing “male” traits like strength/power/aggression, freeing the term from its traditional application as a noun for “person with penis”?

That is, does valorizing masculinity in women liberate women?  Or would it be better to try to elevate femininity to match our admiration of masculinity?  And is it possible to liberate the word from its patriarchal trappings?

What say you?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.


In the 2-and-a-half-minute video below, sent in by Lisa G., a decorated concert violinist named Joshua Bell plays in a Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. for 45 minutes. Over 1,000 people walk by without turning their heads, 27 give money, and 7 people stop to listen for a minute or more (source).  Lisa G. summarizes:

Bell recalls that an awkward moment ensued every time he was done with a song because no one applauded or even acknowledged his existence because to these passengers he was just another street performer begging him for a dollar.

What makes Joshua Bell worth listening to?  The experiment points to the importance of context.   How do we know that we are listening to a master musician?   One important clue is where they are playing, and how expensive it is to have the opportunity to listen.   In a concert hall full of seats paid for with large bills, Bell’s talent is authenticated by the arbiters of taste who are the gatekeepers of the venue. Concert-goers do not necessarily know whether or why Bell is any good. They rely on the arbiters to determine who is worth listening to. And listening to who it is that is worth listening to provides them with expensive, and therefore scarce, cultural cred. They have seen Bell in concert (“oh and it was glorious!”); have you?

But in the Metro, Bell is no one. The context of the Metro fails to authenticate Bell’s music. Everyone can listen, thus hearing offers no distinction at all. And almost no one cares.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

…and more in this 3-minute TED talk by Derek Sivers, sent in by AJ S.   As AJ points out, the examples show that “…just because something is different doesn’t mean it is not logical in context.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.