If Only Everyone Could Hear The Music In My Head...

Basically, it's impossible for me not to use media. This weekend was no exception.

Saturday I attempted to not use media because I was going to be on a bus for 3 hours anyway. I thought, hey I won't use much media. When I woke up, I packed my bags, and hopped in the shower. Then I got a text from my ride saying she's here. There was the first time I messed up. I couldn't help it, it was too early to honk.

So we get to the bus terminal, and eat, then hop on the bus. We get to Atlantic City, NJ and go to the hotel. My best friend wasn't going to sit in silence so the TV was on while I got dressed and got ready to go. Our hotel's wireless internet wasn't working so that stopped me from inadvertently getting online.

We were in Atlantic City for the Boys Like Girls show, and we walked over. I have to give one of the opening bands (All Time Low) a gift, but it happens to be food. So I can't bring it in, so I have to call Alex to give him their gift.

Inside the show was 4 hours of no media, until the show was over. Then everyone was eating dinner so I was doing great without media, until everyone wanted to go dancing, which involved music, of course. When we finally made it back to our hotel room, I can't sleep without the TV on, which of course is media yet again...

Sadly, even the simplest of days required so much media in the end. I guess it's sad that I can't go a full day without media, but everything I do now a days requires it. Little things become necessities, like my alarm clock, a phone call to know it's time to go. Then entertainment-wise, in a lot of cases it's used solely as entertainment. I use media more of as an aid to entertainment.

Dancing, for example, isn't using media, just the music used to dance does. Going out doesn't require using a cell phone, but to know my ride is here does.

Media defines me in so many ways, from a cell phone number, to the software I have on my computer that logs the bands I listen to most. That defines me. Technology has the power to remember our identity in so many ways. Think about all the passwords that get you into certain sites with your own personal user name. Your online banking, your MySpace, your email, even your school account, they're all our different identities, and they all define me and you.

Paglia's Generation

For me, Paglia won on page 289. The use of metaphors all tied together perfectly, and drew me in. The comparison of playing football to watching TV or comparing driving to watching television. Paglia related to the here & now in every aspect of argument. The hair cuts in Charlie's Angels, and pop culture in general. Postman kept reverting to the past for his arguments. Paglia also talks about her generation as a whole "they can't understand how we who were born after the war can read a book and watch TV at the same time." With each argument Paglia makes television much more relevant and necessary to culture as a whole. Postman makes his argument strong but continues to make print sound even more outdated.

With Postman's generation he discusses focusing on one thing over anther. Postman looks at reading a book as a single action that involves your attention. Paglia lives for the here and now, the multi tasking. Paglia show's how television can be analyzed but usually isn't. I believe that television can be held to an equally as high esteem as literature if people were to sit down and actually think about it, rather than scanning it. In this day & age, our generation can scan anything, including a book, thus losing the imaginative aspects Postman refers to.

Chaplin's Optimistic Outlook

"It's Paradise," she says. This entire scene just made me very uncomfortable. It starts with the factory worker and the gamine standing outside of a tiny wooden shack, hand in hand, with the ominious surroundings of a barren field and a shallow pond. As they skip inside you realize that sadly, this is their new home. The house is literally falling apart at ths seams, "Of Course, it's no Buckingham Palace" the gamine says. The scene is a little over a minute, but it made the strongest impact on me.

It didn't make me uncomfortable that the house was falling apart, what really upset me was, she was so happy about this house. Believe me, it's far from paradise. However, sadly it's an upgrade from their living arrangements prior.

The 1930s was the decade of The Great Depression, and Modern Times is a commentary on just that. The two are poverty stricken and unemployed like so many others in the era. It's difficult to find work. Their tiny shack is equivalent to a brand new house with a picket fence and a garage. It's the best they can get and that's what makes me so uncomfortable. It's just hard to imagine life truly being like this. Granted, this is only a movie, but it was based on the reality of the times and it's a harsh one to say the least.

This scene is a part of the overall idea of what people will go through and put up with. Since it's a comedy there's humor in every scene, however, it really is quite sad. What keeps the movie so upbeat is the disposition of the two main characters. Nothing seems to break their stride. This is the message Chaplin was trying to place upon America in the 1930s. In an era where there was mass suicides, and families were falling part, it's still possible to look past it and see your shack as paradise.

What's The Last Thing Your IPod Sold You?: How Pop Music Affects Commerce

Josie and the Pussycats epitomized every aspect of the 90s into 93 minutes of cameos, product placement, and several MTV plugs. The movie was meant to make fun of mainstream America and their willingness to accept anything corporate America defines as cool. Watching the movie again, 5 years after it’s release, I remembered I started wearing my hair a certain way because of the way Rachel Leigh Cook wore her hair in the movie—I was 11. What’s pop culture made you do lately?

Chevrolet has just started a multimillion dollar marketing campaign centered around widely recognized rock and rap songs. "We have found over 200 songs written about America's love affair with Chevy. How many brands can say that? The Corvette and rock 'n' roll were both born in America 50 years ago. Coincidence? I think not,” Campbell-Ewald Vice Chairman and Chief Creative Officer Bill Ludwig of Chevrolet.



For every product strategically placed in Billboard’s Top 200, and every line that refers to something you can pick up in your neighborhood Wal-Mart, does it make the target demographic more eager to buy that product or listen to that song, or both? Maybe both is the point.

Don McLean’s “American Pie” with a reference to Chevrolet cars went to number one on the Music Charts in 1972. Within the same month as the song’s release, General Motors stocks went to it’s second highest position in 1971. When the song went to number one, GM’s stock peaked at a volume it would not reach again for several months. American's saw McLean's song as unequivocally patriotic, maybe because the identifiably American folk tale format, or maybe because the subject was about legendary American musicians. Either way, if that song was considered All-American, why not own something equally as All-American?

A pop song can also go in another direction. When Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” was released in September 1997, they had their CD peak at number 7 on the US Billboard Charts, due largely in part to Mattel suing them ironically, the same week as their CD entered stores. In this case, the brand name helped the song because Mattel was already an established brand, but there was more than the brand behind the song. Had the song been a folk song, for instance, it most likely, would not have been as popular as it is in it’s Euro Bubble Gum Pop format. The song relied on more than the pop culture reference to gain it’s popularity. You need something more than a recognizable brand to sell a song.

Today, as rappers are getting large checks to plug products in their song, it’s good to look at the grass roots of product placement. Run DMC’s hit single “My Adidas” was written and recorded without a dime from Adidas Clothing Company. “Initially reluctant [Adidas] execs promptly ink a $1.5 million shoe deal with the band and give them their own shoe line.” Run DMC’s album “Raising Hell” became the highest selling rap album in history (later to defeated as rap gained popularity), due to their collaboration with Aerosmith with “Walk This Way” and of course, “My Adidas.” “[Run-DMC] came at a time when rap was not fully embraced by [even] the urban culture. ... People can't understand how important they were in pop music history," said Jim Tremayne, editor of DJ Times.

Run DMC’s “My Adidas” is another example of the power of a song. “At one point during the show, Run stopped the music and asked everyone to take off a shoe and raise it to the ceiling. The sold-out arena swelled with the sweet smell of freshly purchased, shell-toed Adidas,” says Eric Parker of The Village Voice. A song about a few boys love of a certain brand of shoes not only sold over three million copies, sold out arenas and helped made Run DMC a household name, it also gave Adidas street credibility, in a way—something that at the time couldn’t simply be bought. More than twenty years later, urban youth and teenagers still identify with Adidas and what they came to stand for in 1986.

For the same reason why people like to say “Hi, Mom” if they have even a few seconds on television, songs will always have product placement, not because they get paid for them, although that is becoming a trend lately, but because we like to tell people what we love. If you like a brand referenced it might urge you to like that song. If you like a song, you might buy the product mentioned, either way—they need one another. One can’t say a pop song made a product what it is, neither can they say the product made the pop song.

As one line in Josie and The Pussycats says “We turn your world into one giant TV commercial.” Now, is that necessarily a bad thing?

That Deprevation Assignment Is Really Going to Suck

BLOG 2 (Due Thurs.) Analyze Your Media Habits - Think about the many different ways to define media. Focus on the things that are most important to you. (Possible questions to consider: What are your current media habits?  How and why have they changed over time?  Who has influenced your relationship with media?  How do you envision your media habits changing in the future?)

I have six email addresses. No, seriously, I have six email addresses that I check at least daily. In combination with Instant Messenger, and my glorious Gold Razr, I'd say it's pretty unlikely I'll ever be unreachable.

Media, to me, is anything that aids or enhances communication. The use of media is due to necessity (I really do use all six), if we no longer need it, we'll no longer use it. When was the last time you used a telegraph?

From the age of 12 my primary form of communication has been my computer. If you were to add up the amount of instant messages, text messages, and emails I've sent in my life the numbers would be astronomical--not to mention the social networking sites that I use more often than I should. Therefore, my computer is a very essential medium.

I've become very biased towards anything that makes things faster & easier. I bought one paper notebook for school, simply because I have a math class. I think I need to invest in a tablet notebook, though. The computer hasn't destroyed written word, it's enhanced it. Obviously, I'm currently writing a lot faster than I can in that silly notebook.

Since I was 15, print media has been very important to me because of my magazine. It was something I wasn't particularly interested in until I started doing it myself. In addition to my magazine, I've become very attentive of ads, and their involvement in day to day lives, as electronic ads become less prevalent due to pop up blockers, and tivo. The presence of print ads still remains relevant after all these years showing that media isn't completely digital.

In the future I expect more of the same progression, but like radio in comparison to television, print will always be relevant regardless of what's available online. I'll never revert completely to my computer (It crashes too often, and I like tangible copies of important things). Remember in sixth grade when they started making you type your paper and print in out? Notice how we're still doing that, even more now.

Just for the record: I'm still waiting on those awesome video conversations in every home like in Back To The Future, though.

{entry one}

Who are you? Why are you here? Tell everyone a bit about yourself—whatever you want to share. Think about the why you’re here at college, how you ended up in this class, and what you want to learn/gain by taking this class and getting a college degree.

Late January, 70 degrees, six bands, 400 people, five hours, and one dark humid church basement. This was my sixteenth birthday party.

I'm Christine, and I'm kind of a big deal, well--I want to be. At the age of 15 I planned, booked, and promoted the biggest local show the city of Baltimore had seen in a long time. Fast forward two months and I am now the creator and editor of Scene Trash Magazine & Promotions. In addition to running a magazine I am on the street teams of several major and indie record labels and I have become a prominent member of the Baltimore music scene.

The past two years have been a whirlwind of flyers, guest lists, concerts, roadtrips, bands, friends and enemies, and besides some mentoring and reading a few books, it's all been instinct, luck and a whole lot of determination. Thirteen issues & two years later, it's time to do things a bit more traditionally--not that a major in Music Marketing & Administration is traditional, but life by the book's a bit boring.

Some Less Important Things About Me: I'm seventeen years old, I have the best friends in the world. I have a livejournal, that I should write in more. I like Myspace way more than Facebook. I have famous friends, and will go to a different states just to see the same band for the third time in a week. I live near White Marsh, MD and I think you can tell alot about a person by the music they listen to. I'm think NYC & Chicago are amazing cities (the blog I chose to do is about NYC). I never want to work for someone 9 to 5, and I believe whole heartedly in this quote:

"Rock 'n' roll is a lifestyle and a way of thinking... and it's not about money and popularity... Although, some money would be nice. But it's a voice that says, "Here I am... and **** you if you can't understand me." And one of these people is gonna save the world. And that means that rock 'n' roll can save the world... all of us together."

If you know what movie that's from... we can be very good friends. If you don't... how bout we watch it together!?