What is SkyLark?

SkyLark is a concept more than anything but in a more practical sense, SkyLark is the name of a musical project I am involved in. 80% of my lyrical material is either on gender equality or media literacy. We're playing a show this Friday @ The Blackstone in Providence and next Thursday @ The Mediator Stage (also in Provy) If you're interested in hearing about shows and happenings comment with your e-mail address and I'll put you on the SkyLark e-mail list.

A SkyLark is a bird known for its song. I feel it is the best description for what I do, and why I do it. Songwriting and Song-singing are as natural to me as breathing, just as singing is natural to a Song Bird. I don't conjure up ways for people to like what I do, I don't sit down and decide, "I'm going to write a love song today" or "I'm going to write a song with a clever metaphor that explains the flaws of presumptuous thinking" It literally just happens, usually at really inconvenient times like 3am or in the middle of uninteresting classes. In any case...

See you tomorrow,

Tom

Soldiers of the Counter Culture

Sage Francis

B. Dolan

Jared Paul

Enjoy :)

Rihanna's "Rude Boy"

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way blaming Rihanna. She and many other girls are being exploited like this by executives in the music industry in order to make money. They are the people to blame for this tragic cultural norm.

Secret Education:

Sex is all that matters, listen to the lyrics and check out that objectifying shot at 2:57 where the camera zooms in on her chest. Its almost like a subliminal message... except the whole video supports that one shot will full conviction.

Rude Boy is the title of the song. The lyrics for the hook are as follows:

Come here, rude boy boy
Can you get it up?
Come here, rude boy boy
Is you big enough?
Take it, take it
Baby, baby
Take it, take it
Love me, love me

These lyrics get repeated verbatim 8 times... and a few more times with variation.

The fact that the boy she wants is "rude" seems to reinforce the stereotype of girls going for the arrogant alpha-male a.k.a. "rude boy" let me know if you know that "rude boy" actually means something else, or if you have different interpretation.

Also, these lyrics seem to reinforce the cultural importance that a man's penis is large, while at the same time speaking as a metaphor for the idea of being a "big man" or being "the man" as far as physical size and strength goes and additionally the attitude that is associated with men who are physically strong. This definitely leads to, and maintains, sexual as well as physical and psychological insecurity in boys with body types that aren't valued in our culture.

I think its important to realize that this video is one of many texts that simultaneously show one gender what they should want while showing the other gender what they should want to be.

after a couple of quick youtube searches it turns out that Rude Boy is a title of a Bob Marley/Wailers song... and the same situation occurred with various other Rihanna hits.

Rude Boy - Bob Marley/Wailers

SOS - Abba (not to mention the music is tainted love... exactly)

Rihanna's SOS - Soft Cell's TAINTED LOVE

(and the Jonas Brothers released a song with the same title)

Shut up and Drive - Chely Wright (music is blue monday by orgy... exactly)

Orgy's BLUE MONDAY - Rihanna's SHUT UP AND DRIVE

Paranoid - Black Sabbath (The Jonas Bros have a song with the same title as well)

I totally understand that Hip/hop is a sample based genre. But it takes no creativity to search back and find a hit song, grab the music from the chorus, change the snare sample, put it on loop and call it a day. The argument that this is original or expressive is a cover up.

So what does this have to do with teenagers and the media?

-The majority of mainstream music is tactical and psychological, and not creative. It is used as tool of control to maintain the status quo and as a tool to generate profit.

Some tactics include but are not limited to:

-Taking old song names to increase exposure via internet searches.

-Taking the old song names that someone already took in order to piggy back on their success and increase "accidental exposure"

-Using the music from a previously popular song to increase familiarity with a new song, which makes the listener immediately more comfortable and happy, which translates into conscious thought as "I like this song"

-Using Sexual images, lyrics and sounds to associate a song or artist with pleasure in order to boost popularity and therefore sales.

-Repetition. The world of popular music is so rampant with repetition that one 4 minute Rihanna song (as in SOS) can be boiled down to a repetition of a 4 second musical phrase. Easy math. 100 times per song you hear that same hook(melody) directly taken from Soft Cell's Tainted love. She could be talking about making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in her kitchen and you would still come away from the song feeling as though you liked it. This allows for songwriters to put out any message, bad or good, and it will be accepted and loved by the majority of people, in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK along with several other cultures around the world.

Like advertisements, the music industry has capitalized on the advances in psychology for selfish gains at the expense of the self-esteem and individuality of teenagers as well as adults. An important part of Media Literacy is a critical approach to music. I think it is important for us to look at lyrics of pop songs and see the secret education and how music is being used to drill it into the subconscious minds of teenagers. Just like it is important for us to approach Disney's Beauty and the Beast critically.

I could talk all day about this stuff. Sorry if its too long, I tend to get on these rants for a while. In any case, let me know what you think.

See you in class.

Assumptions About the Course

1. Youth is a culturally constructed category.

Ideas about youth are dynamic, permeable and elastic. They change over time, across geographies, and between communities. Though we have constructed a "cumulative cultural text" of youth that is historically and socio-culturally familiar to us, race, class, ability, gender, sexuality, and size intersect and interrupt the category of youth. Youth and youth cultures will forever be resisting and/or responding to the codes, texts and discourses of the dominant culture. We must know this in order to respond to it.

In the late 1800's Sigmund Freud developed an idea called the subconscious mind, and like many great minds his ideas were used for selfish means and in ways he never intended them to be used. I plan on doing more research on this particular subject of study in the future, but I do know that at one point or another advertising agencies and departments got a hold of his work and abused it to take over the american people, in particular the youth and the elderly, as their minds are in more vulnerable states than others. Using sex to sell cars and cigarettes, is one of the few ways in which Freud's findings were exploited for profit at the expense of the health and wallets of everyday people. Ironically enough it was Freud's ideas that got us into this mess and it will be Freud's ideas that will get us out. Freud wrote that in order to free one's self from the subconscious mind you have to bring it out into the conscious by discussion. This is why we are having this discussion now; This is why we must continue to have it.

2. Teenagers are not some alien life form.

We are/were all teenagers at some point in our lives. The person you are now is the same person you were then, albeit with new and different life experiences that shift and change your understandings and actions of the world. We do not "outgrow" our teenage identities. So, when we examine "youth" from the vantage point of adults, we need to resist the impulse to discuss it as though it is something outside of us, something exotic and "Other". We will not talk about "those crazy kids" or refer to "teenagers" as some alien life form.

I agree with this assumption in full. It is important not to take a perspective of elitism in any discussion, especially in regards to this particular topic because who we were shapes who we are. It is untrue to claim that past experiences do not affect present situations or states of being or thoughts. Despite the fact that we are always learning new things it is impossible to really expand intellectual perspectives without accepting that we too are being affected by the culture around us; by the water that we're swimming in.

3. Media matters.

Popular culture is not just a form of entertainment. The media plays a critical role in teaching us about the world. Film, television, music, advertising, fashion and other forms of popular culture shape the daily lives of all Americans whether we celebrate or resist their influence. We must learn to see the things that we most take for granted, to analyze and interpret the media around us in order to understand how these things contribute to how we think about what is "normal," "natural," and "good." In this class, we will take the media seriously as an educating force.

I think that in conjunction with gender equality, media consciousness is probably one of the most important things I think about, write about, and talk about. The people with money and power use the media with the help of Freud's Psychology to control people in every degree. Who we vote for, what we buy, who we buy it from are especially important powers of the people that have been for the most part taken away from us as a whole by the media, in conjunction with other tools of control such as religion. The world of human beings has a long history of people who distort the purpose of discoveries and ideas. Martin Luther wrote the 95 theses in protest of the western church. After his death people took advantage of these thoughts to break off a part of the church for their own control, Jesus of Nazareth was written about many years after his death in the New Testament of the Bible, which was used by Carl Rove as a political brainwashing mechanism to elect George W. Bush for 2 terms as president of the united states; sending the US into 2 wars(at least) and economic recession, Albert Einstein's pioneering of the study of Physics lead to the first Atomic Bomb , Sigmund Freud's Psychology is being used every day in every media outlet available to manipulate the masses... the list goes on. The important thing to remember is that education of the common person prevents things like this from happening. If every person in america was conscious to the methods by which those in power are attempting to manipulate them, then we would as whole disallow that manipulation and enable a more effective democratic system.

"The rich get richer till the poor get educated" - Sage Francis

Introduction

First Name: Cousin
Last Name: Tom
Occupation: Song Bird