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Music and Culture

Music is a very important part of my life. It’s always been there for me to pull me back on my feet. Dancing is a very big part of my life as well and it’s one of the very big cultures I am apart of. You can’t have dance with no music. I mean you can, but it’ll be difficult to count and appear to be graceful and flowing. The song that I chose to write about for this assignment is called, “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley. Not only is my uncle a big fan, but I also find his music quite enjoyable. This song plays a very important role in my dancing life this year. It’s the song we are going to dance to at our annual dance recital. The music itself is slow and flowing. The beat of the music helps the dancers to stay on track and count their steps. In the world of dance we count our steps in 8. 1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…and repeat.  It’s easy for the dancers to get into the song and actually feel it. Plus it’s really easy to choreograph a dance to this song because it’s not too fast nor is it slow and boring. It’s just the right speed for experienced dancers such as myself. 

This was a pretty cool project. Most of my groups project was collaborative because we didn’t really want to break it up a lot, but instead do it mostly collaboratively. But there were some portions that were individual of course. My individual role was to get statistics and find places that would let us interview a few people and getting my things for the fund raising bake sale. Other than that I contributed to everything else we did as a group like get the slogan, make questions to ask the homeless people, helped with the overall idea, went throughout the city to go to these places…etc. There was a lot that actually went into this project, and there were a lot of challenges, but some could have prevented I guess. The overall design was also collaborative, but the design of the website was Cece’s idea. We had a few challenges with getting the bake sale organized, getting our posters printed, and the biggest challenge was getting in contact with the places and actually getting to interview the homeless people. On one day we traveled all over center city for a couple of hours and had no success.  But in the end we managed to et everything together and present our final project. We also managed to get an interview with a homeless person. We all came together to make the success possible for the bake sale and for the time to go running around the city, and for getting everything we needed to get to make our project a success.

 

With all projects come challenges and easy points. So, I’d say our group did a fairly decent job. When we first got our topic we told each other what our weaknesses are and our strengths, and planed accordingly. As a group we were split on what medium to use for our project. Eventually decided on using both a video and a website. We then split our group into smaller groups; Mabintu and Joe working on the website while Mat and I work on the video. Collaboratively we all gathered resources to put on both medias and shared the google doc so we could have access to it. 

A challenge for me was finding videos that go along with the facts. It was easy finding out what had been cut but for a video you need someone to say it, to be more believable. Also, I thought communication with in our group was a challenge since some people would be on at times and other not, but we over came that. 

I think our success was knowing what angle we wanted people to view the topic as. It is such a complex and broad problem to talk about so we ended up showing more about the struggles that the district is facing. Not so much that its their fault but its a system that we’re apart of and can improve.

All in all, I think our project was pretty decent. We’ll start getting the word out there this spring break to see the impact, if any, it has. Hopefully there will be. And continue on from there.

Featuring:
Robert Santore

Directed and Produced by:
Sam Sirochman
Emma Hersh

Inspired by:
Zoe Strauss
Douglas Herman 

For our group’s projects, there were plenty of downfalls but there were also some successes along the way. For example, when we first started planning what we were going to do for our project, everything sounded as if it was going to go well. In the beginning, we wanted to first go around the city and pay homeless people to do an interview with us but we then seen how that could be a problem beings though some homeless people may feel offended to the idea. We then thought of another idea, which was to visit homeless shelters and food distributions. When we visited one of the homeless shelters, we thought it was a hospice because of the sign in the window. We asked one of the few guys who were coming in and out of the building what exactly was the building for and who exactly lived there and the man had said it were for homeless men who were trying to work their way out of homeless. We thought that connected to our slogan since our slogan was  “Homeless not Hopeless”. We then wanted to set up something there so that we could buy them something to eat in exchange for interview questions. The director agreed to let us make sandwiches for them while we interview them and he gave us a set time. Beings though NHD took longer then we expected, we missed the time that the Director told us to come and he was not answering his phone. Another issue we faced was that we wanted to buy stickers with our slogan on it but we couldn’t purchase them in time so we brought posters from staples instead. One of the successes in this project was our fundraising bake sale. We wanted to raise money so that we could buy food for the homeless people who we interviewed and my group nearly sold everything and made a lot of money from it. In the end, our group managed to get interviews with homeless people. Ways that we got our issue out to people in Philadelphia was that we made posters with our slogans on it, both for the city and to put around in SLA as well. Also, we made a website explaining what our organization is and how to help and we also put the stories of the homeless people on the website as well.  

Hello, my name is Temperance Moore. My culture is Christianity. Christians believe in God. We believe that there is only one God. As Christians we don’t really call it a “religion” but a lifestyle. The artist I chose was Sarah Kelly and the song I chose by her is called “Take me away”.  Sarah Kelly is a gospel rock artist. My history with this song goes back to when I was about 9 or 10. My aunt first introduced me to one of Sarah Kelly’s albums. She would play it out loud in the car and my two favorite songs on that album were “Matter of Time” and “Take me away”.

We loved Sarah Kelly and would listen to her all the time. The song “Take me away” is basically about how Sarah loves God a lot and she expresses how much he did for her. Also how she just wants him to take her away so she can just be with him. What moves me about Sarah are the lyrics in her music. To me they are so genuine and true. Just by listening to her music, I can tell she longs for that closeness to God, like that’s all she wants. Also there’s a story behind it all. To me it’s a story that I can relate to.

 What also moves me is the fact that she’s not doing it for show; she’s doing it because she truly loves God. That’s what I really admire about her. This song is an important part of Christianity because it’s a Gospel song so it promotes God. Sarah Kelly is also a Christian who loves God so that’s also why it’s an important part of Christianity. This song shows Christianity because it’s talking about God. Not only is the song based on God but also the person who sings it is a true Christian. The song “Take me away” represents the life a Christian, the life of Sarah Kelly. 

 

 

The song that I have picked to represent my culture is Basketball by Lil Bow Wow. I grew up with him, when he was younger. He had a lot of popular songs, Like bounce with me and puppy love. I think lil romie and him is one of the youngest rappers to rap.

 

He was in a movie called Like mike. That is where is song came out. This song kinda moved me to go out and play basketball. The thing that moves me about him is that he put different basketball terms in a song to show what they mean. The importance of the rapper to my culture is that he put basketball in a song.

 

            This song shows represent a big thing to my culture because he is very big.

 

 

Music is important to me for many reasons. It can explain how I feel at any moment in time. Also its just a way of life using music to put yourself Black Star is one of my favorite artists ever. I grow up with a mom who was really into old school hip-hop and a lot of R&B no matter what year it was. So growing up I listening to them, tribe called quest, Indi are, tweet, etc. the way I grew up would be totally different due to music.

In the song “children’s Story” by “Black Star” it’s basically the uncle Mos def telling his nephews a bedtime story. I grew up listening to a bedtime story from my mommy “goodnight moon” and that was like my favorite story of all times. I relate to the little kids at the beginning saying they want a story before they go to sleep. In the song it talks about real life issues and things that some people may go through. As a young teen and child it was important to me to hear stories about these things as long as it bettered me. I am apart of the bedtime specials culture. I read my little sisters, and cousin and sometimes myself.

                        "LOVE HIGH"

My culture is Chinese. I use Korean music to describe my culture because many people think of Chinese people as people who study and who don’t have much fun like other race. In my culture, friendship, family’s bond and dreams are the most important things. We believe that dream is the most important thing because it’s our first step toward a goal and succeeding on becoming something. Our culture is also very big on education. My culture believes that education is the first step in everything because we believe that education leads our future. Our parent always educated us to go forward with our dream. This song called “love high” has no artist because it came from a TV show called Dream High. I found this song important because it is important to express feeling toward one another to make a better and stronger friendship and bond. In my culture we also believe that music is another way to escape darkness. In my culture, we always say, “No matter what stand in the way, always move forward toward that goal.”  Love high is a song about dream and how to always fly up. I choose this song because it motivated other people to fly up to their dream like in my culture.

 

Through the show called dream high, the two girl who high five each other was rival, but through music like this, it pulled them back together in a inch closer on becoming friends again. And in my household, whenever something happen we use music like Love high to sing and enjoy the time and creating the bond of the family stronger. During Chinese New Year, our family always prays through our god saying something about leading our children into the right path with their dream and let them succeed with that dream. And using that dream to created their future. That’s why I choose this music called “Love high” because it talks about dream, and dream like a key into our future in our culture. 

Here is the picture of one of the person who sing it. Click here for the video on youtube. You need to watch this video in other to understand the last paragraph. 
Thank  you 

The culture I am apart of is being a positive person, and not always trying to look at the negatives of everything and anything. I stutter very often, but you don’t see me walking around silent and not talking. Or always upset and angry at the world because of what my problem is. 

DJ Lil man demonstrated that perfectly. He’s makes party music to party to, and at party’s you are happy, excited, and ready to have fun. That’s the type of people who are apart of my culture. In his video flex, it’s a group of boys dancing and showing you how to do the dance, “Flex.” There’s flashing strobe lights in the back, and smiles on everyone’s faces. That screams Marcus. 

I can’t listen to the music that’s out now because it’s either talking about what new stuff, how much money, and how sex their artist is having. Personally, I don’t care about what you have because it won’t help me in any way. That’s also bragging as well, and I’m not one to brag. I let my actions do my talking. In the video “Flex,” DJ Lil man did a great job of showing that in his video, and he and the rest of the DJ’s out there are keeping music alive to me in my eyes. With out them I probably wouldn’t listen to much music.

Song: Flawed design

Artist: Stabilo

Culture: Family trust

Genre: Alternative

 

What moves me: Their voice, and the lyrics.

 

I’v been listening to Stabilo for 3 years so far. Flawed Design was my first song I heard by them, and I instantly loved their music. It’s got a really good beat, and the story behind the song is really interesting.

 

The lead singer describes the hardship of getting over imperfections and flaws, and making the best with what he had. He tells his girlfriend that even though he keeps lying, he’s trying the best he can to be faithful, and he’s still a good person at heart. In the video, it shows several different people lying about their flaws, including treason, cheating, bribery, trust, and temptation.

 

I feel this is a great song and is relevant to my culture because it talks about how hard it is to trust other people.  My family itself values trust a lot. This is the case because my Mom constantly thinks my sister and I are doing something bad behind her back; sometimes that’s true. But when everyone understands that we all make mistakes, we become a closer family.     

 

 

You have to take the time to become close to another person (and trust them) and even when they mess up, you have to learn to forgive. Every person’s imperfect, and once we realize that, a persons mistakes won’t seem as bad anymore. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2jwjmhJ2AE

First of all I would like to apologize, this was downloaded off of a YouTube video. Also I would like to say that this doesn't reflect my personal music preference, only my culture.

I chose to show the culture of D&D. To start with simple explanation, D&D was developed as a prelude to Videogames, and was a board game where anything could happen and you didn’t have to respond the way you normally do. It was played for fun, and also to give you a life where you felt strong. Now that videogames are out, it has less of a following. Instead of gaining a feeling of power by hanging out with people and rolling dice, it is gained by shooting Nazis in modern videogames. However, D&D still has the advantage of giving the player more options, and never really ending until you die.

D&D has a rather twisted culture, on that even the people involved in it don’t exactly revere.  The clip shows the women dodging the question for as long as possible before opening up. However, the clip also shows a few culture that aren’t necessarily involved in D&D. Sure it’s possible for everyone to dress up as their player, it just doesn’t need to or usually happen.

Before seeing the video I had no idea who the person was. That’s part of what D&D is about; you have no clue who’s involved, which’s shown by the beginning of the clip when the singer denies that she’s involved. I learned about the song from someone else that also liked D&D. He thought it was cool and showed it to me. The genre of the song completely shows what D&D is all about. After all, D&D loves parodies. The whole entire thing is made as a merge of all of the fantasy books in existence. It’s also directly involved to the game from the characters in the song, the terminology involved and also the monsters mentioned. I am not involved in the specific subsection of D&D that this song is interested in, since I don’t role-play as seriously, I just go and kill things and hang out. These people have stuff that they dress up in, which is way more serious then most of the people I know of.

I’ve been looking up to Kanye West for the longest. He’s so inspirational, and sparks so much controversy. This song illustrates who Kanye West is. He does what he wants, says what he wants, and doesn’t care about the consequences. His drive to say what he wants and get his point across “moves” me, along with his catchy lyrics and deeper meanings to his songs.

Kanye is known to be “the asshole” because he speaks his mind. Some of the things he says people don’t agree with. That’s just how it is. There is no one out there who will have every single person relate to what they’re saying, or even support what they’re saying, and that’s perfectly fine for Kanye in his situation. He has experienced pain and judgment from other people because of it, and apologized when he took it too far, but he never goes back on his word. That’s someone to look up to. Someone who can rap about sex and money, but also have records about diamonds in Sierra Leone, songs about Jesus, and songs that displays how great mothers are. He’s reached out to different genres, sometimes it could be about happiness, sometimes it could be about pain.

The song “Touch the sky” represents the outspoken culture I’m apart of. I’m part of the people who voice their opinion, and isn’t afraid to go against the crowd. I’ll challenge people’s ideas and I won’t just go with something everyone else is doing unless I find it right to me. It also represents the culture of people who have a hopeful future and have something to look forward to. In the song he describes his journey to where he is now, and is a person to look up to. 

Skyscraper- Demi Lovato

I loved Demi Lovato ever since I saw her on the movie “camp rock”(2008) and princess protection program (2009) and when I heard one of her first songs “LaLa land”. I liked her because she didn’t come off as a “fake person”, most people that are famous act like a robot, with know personality or is scared to let it show there afraid to be them selves. They act like they don’t have problems, or struggles in there life, but Demi Lovato is very different from them. She doesn’t try to hide her problems from the world, and act like everything is perfect, instead she speaks out about having depression since the age of 11, and that she had a bipolar disorder. She does not speak about it to be in the spotlight, she wants to let her fans that are going through these challenges know that they can make it just like her, and that they are worth it. She’s a remodel to me because she helps me get through the things that I go through as a person, and a teenager. The song skyscraper is about believing in your self, and know matter what your going through or what has happen to you, you can always rise and over come your struggles, like how a skyscraper rises over top of a city.

 The song represents my culture, which are sports. When you play sports there’s always going to problems you have to get through. If you playing basketball or football you might have to play defense on someone that’s faster than you or stronger than you and your going to have to believe in your self to “stick with your man”. If you miss a shot in basketball you can’t be discourage, nobody is perfect so your going to have to keep your head up high and try it over and over again.

 This song represents all different types of people and cultures. It doesn’t matter what you’re skin color is, what type of music you listen to, or even the religion you believe in, everyone goes through hard times in life. Because this song is so uplifting, and inspiring it came reach more than the “average listener”. The song just has one purpose and that purpose is to let everyone know that the matter.

 

An aspect of my culture is perseverance. I believe that perseverance is a major aspect of your culture because without it, life is dead. Perseverance is what makes you keep going each day as each battles encounter. I chose the song The Climb by Miley Cyrus. This song relates to my life a lot and others as well. When I was growing up, I never knew such thing like perseverance. I heard of it before but it doesn’t mean much until now. As teenagers growing up, like Miley Cyrus, never know the real meaning of perseverance. In The Climb, it is all about facing your battles. Keep you head up and lead your path, as it can lead you to somewhere special that you may never know. The objects in this song centers around imagery of a mountain, symbolizing the difficulties of life, and climbing, symbolizing the ongoing struggles of life. Although the lyrics are talking about the journey rather than focusing on the destination, many assume that it is about reaching a final goal. It depends on the mindset of the listener to judge whether the destination is in front of them or it is on the other side of the path. As a child, I have battled many battles during my childhood, especially the violence back them to now. That limits my childhood from spending time inside rather than outside due to the craziness of violence. As I was growing up, I began to develop the meaning of persevering. Each day conflicts come at you and you have to overcome it. In the music video of The Climb, it shows a mountain. That symbolizes the conflicts that you have to overcome by climbing the mountains. The mountains are the problems and you are the overcomer. The combination of both is what I call perseverance. “…Ain't about how fast I get there. Ain't about what's waiting on the other side. It's the climb…” That phrase is from the The Climb. This explains how you have to go step by step in life to get through the problem or problems. What moves me about them is the voice of the artist singing it. It is so demanding and convincing to start something new. In other words, if something is bringing you down, you should never quit. Never quit trying to quit is basically the whole purpose of this song.

I believe this song is a very important part of my culture. Without perseverance, I wouldn’t have made it to this day with all the battles coming at me. I persevere every day to get what I want in life. Challenges come and go, but it won’t go if you don’t persevere through it. Like the mountain, in the music video of The Climb, the mountain is still going to be there, if you don’t climb over it. Overcoming your challenges is the word to describe this culture, perseverance. This song has a lot of meanings and it speaks for itself a lot. But the main focus of this song is not letting yourself down when something encounters you. That would just make you a failure. Perseverance brings you up and guides you to do something better to get over the problem. It doesn’t matter how fast or how slow you overcome it, but as long it is overcome, you are leading your battles to where you want it to be.

 

“Inner Music is Meditation and

Outer meditation is music”

 

One of my cultures is Meditation. Meditation is an inwardly oriented, personal practice that originated from Asia. I meditate to turn all of my attention inward to the mind itself. I practice mudras to open my seven chakras.  Chakras are ach of the centers of spiritual power in the human body. There is, Root(pelvis), Sacral(above), Navel, Heart, Throat, Third Eye(between eyes) and Crown(top of head). There's also the hand test to see how long you have to meditate. When you hold your hand out still, don't move it. Some of your fingers will shake. If your thumb shakes, you need to meditate for five minutes. If it's your pointer, you need ten minutes. If it's your middle finger, it’s fifteen minutes. If its your ring finger you need twenty minutes, and pinky means twenty-five minutes. If all fingers tremble, it's best you meditate for an hour. 

My history with this song is that this song has been my favorite Carnatic musical performance for the past two years. There are multiple artists with very complicated names and I don’t listen to either of them on a basis, but I can say that Carnatic music in whole has been apart of my life since about sixth grade. What moves me about the song and the musical in whole is that when I am in a peaceful mood, I can play these songs or the simple instrumentals and find myself really relaxed. Also, this is the only music I listen to when I meditate.

This song is an important part of the Indian Hindi culture because it represents the spiritual and religious practices that the Southern Indians perform in their everyday lives. This song shows Indian culture by engaging in Indian language, attire, and musical instruments (vocalist, violin, mridangam, and tambura.) as well as religious and spiritual symbols and colors. It is important to my culture: Meditation because it sets me in a peaceful mood that relaxes everything inside of me and I feel at ease enough to have a stronger meditation practice or a more calmer yoga session. 

The artist I chose was Big Sean. His song “Memories Part 2 (feat. John Legend) really speaks to me, but before I jump into that, here’s a little back-story B.I.G. Big Sean, real name Sean Michael Anderson, is a young rap/hip-hop artist from Detroit (or D-Town as he calls it on most of his song.) In 2008 he signed with Kanye West’s record group “G.O.O.D Music.” Sean often raps about his experiences growing up in the rough city of Detroit and his never-ending dream to make it big and become famous. His first album “Finally Famous”, which debuted November 1, 2011. He often mentions in his songs “West Side” which is referring to his home-town of Western Detroit. I can relate to Big Sean because of his endless fight for popularity and to be noticed. In his song, “Memories Part 2 (feat. John Legend) he talks about how he would never want to forget all the times he has had and the people he loves, the people who aided and helped him throughout his journey, and his motivation to achieve success at what he does. He also never wants to remember all the negativity in his life and he uses his positive attitude to persevere through all of the adversity he faces. I can completely relate to Sean because he and I share many traits. We both are very upbeat and fun-loving people. His motive to become successful is what I and the rest of his listeners would want as well. He teaches those who aren’t successful yet or who are struggling to be to never give up and to keep on pursuing your dreams. This reflects on my culture because I always want to be someone that people can look up to and writing is my dream. I have always wanted to be an aspiring writer and become known. To achieve that goal would not only be the best thing that has ever happened to me and a dream come true, but to know that hopefully, people look up to you and follow your style. Sean’s music has influenced many to strive to become whatever you want to be and to never give up. Again, the way he acts along with the things he believes in are very similar. My appreciation of the arts helps me recognize and appreciate music more than I have before.

 

Monisha Das                                                                                                      3-29-12

Music & Culture

“Keep Holding On”

The singer of this song is Avril Lavgine. I have been listening to her songs for the past few years. I don’t know much about her but I do know that her songs are really encouraging n heart throbbing. She has been singing for many years but has done a few movies. I cannot really relate to many of her songs that well, but when I first heard this song it really touched my heart and I just kept listening to it.

When I listen to this song, I forget about all the bad things that has happen in life and replace them with positive thoughts. I noticed that Lavgine sings as though she has been though the thing that happened in the songs. I like when a singer can connect to a song, this lets me know that I can connect to the song too.

What moves me about this song is the way the song flows and how she talks about holding on and never giving up. In my culture SquashSmarts, everyone has worked together to help each other and tell them to never give up. It does not matter who wins or losses but it matters that you have a good time and that you have fun. We have a great family bond that, kind of, matches with the some of the lyrics in the songs. The lyrics also show sportsmanship that we always show in practice and when we have games.

No matter what happens in my culture, we will never give up on each other and we will always be a great huge loving family.

Music isn’t really my thing so I don’t think this would be very long. But ill try my best to make this thing longer. For example this sentence that have nothing to do with music at.

Anyways music to me is a distracting so I don’t really like it. The only time I listing to music am when I sleep because for different types of music make me dream about different dreams. But anyways one of the music I listen to is the arrogant worm.

I listen to any music so I don’t really have a favorite or any music that have to do with my culture. I just listen to what the radio plays for what I find on YouTube. Any culture of music is fine with me along it isn’t cursing all the way. Some of the music I listen to is dub stab because it’s weird and sounds crazy. I believe it was made in troupe I think not really sure.

But overall I prefer music that is upbeat yet soothing. I dislike rock n roll for I think that is just banging on things and I consider it noise. Well Imp not really sure what culture of music I listen to because it don’t really matter and I don’t listen to music much anyways. I don’t really like music in the 1^st place so why am I still typing about it, well I don’t really know I guess its just to fill up a page of words. Some songs that I like are dub step; I don’t really like any so the list is very short. In fact erase dub step too since its not like I love it.

 

My group was assigned the School District Funding topic. Initially we weren't entirely sure what we were going to research/ present, but for the most part we had a rough idea for what we were going to use. We soon found out that the more difficult portion of the project would be choosing the most effective way to present our campaign and put it into action. In my mind it made sense to draw up some posters and maybe write about the state of public school funding in Philadelphia.  After I learned that we had to take action and implement our campaign in a real life, I knew that my original thoughts wouldn't be very successful.  It would have required that I made copies and handed them out/ posted them in places around the city.  The word may have spread, but there would have been no quantitative way to check the success in that portion of the campaign. It was suggested that we should do a website, and the easiest way to do that was through weebly, a website that many people used for NHD.  With the use of a weebly, we could separate our campaign into different categories, for various group members and check the amount of visits the site gets.  Heather and I were responsible for the poster and artistic part of the campaign. I decided to draw a political style cartoon that shows money being pumped from a large vat (Government Funds) to required services.  The only two things that are clearly being fed in the picture are the school district and the correctional system. The man standing in the picture is Tom Corbett, and he's saying, "Seems right to me".  This is in reference to the school district  budget cuts that he is proposing for Pennsylvania. If you look at the tube connecting the school district to government funds, you notice that it is damaged, representing a more subtle way of saying that the school district is lacking the proper funding that it should be receiving.

            On of the biggest challenges we had as a group was that it would be pointless to do something in the school because our school already has a high graduation rate. This meant that no mater what we did and how we presented the information we would have to reach out to people outside of the school. This is what led us to choosing a web site because it is easier to get a web site to people we don’t know. Another one of our ongoing challenges as a group is that it was hard for us to agree on something because all of us are very opinionated. After some time I stopped caring about how we made the web site and what it looks like because I was tired of arguing over a color.

One thing that was nice was that I had this topic before so we had all of the previous research. This helped because we did not have to look for the information we needed for the project. We only had to show the current information in a different way. Also because I already knew about the current situation it was easier to know what we would need to look at, like attendance.

            Once we decided to do a web site we had to decide what each person would do. Over all everyone worked on their parts individually and put it together once everything was done. I worked mostly on the statistics because I felt confident in what statistics were the most important. Over all I am glad that the project is finished and hope that the web site will reach people who are at risk of dropping out.   

Shelby Harcher

Markia Johnson 

Steven Birkmire 

Ryan Francis