Popular Music as a Reflection of Culture

Shifting between genres, today’s top songs have common themes, the artists of the top songs utilize themes of good and bad relationships, love and painful heart ache. The three songs that I will take examples from are “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift, “As Long As You Love Me” by Justin Bieber, and “Blow Me(One Last Kiss)” by P!nk.  The point of view is usually the singers’ perspective. The subject of the Taylor Swift song is that she was in a relationship that was on and off for a period of time and she loved the person the song is about, but she is going through heart ache and  she is stating that it is over for good. The line “We are never ever ever getting back together” is used as repetition. There is also alliteration, as shown in the line, “this time I'm telling you, I'm telling you” the “t” is repeated making this alliteration. The subject of the Justin Bieber song is that he loves someone who he wants to always love him. The song can be interpreted in a few different ways, one way would be that he wrote it about his girlfriend, Selena Gomez, and another is that he wrote it about his fans. He uses personification in this song as well as many metaphors. An example of personification would be the following, “smile on your face even though your heart is frowning/ But hey now, you know girl,/ We both know it's a cruel world”  Hearts cannot frown and worlds cannot be cruel. An example of a metaphor would be, “As long as you love me/ I'll be your platinum, I'll be your silver, I'll be your gold” He can’t actually become these things but he is saying he will. Last the P!nk song is about the bitterness of a break up. She is feeling heart ache and mad at the person that the song is about and is using the song as a way to take out her frustrations. The line, “I've been dying over you” is a hyperbole because if she had died over something like this she would not have been alive to write or sing this song. An example of personification is, “My head is spinning so (blow me one last kiss)” This is a commonly used phase meaning that you cannot get your thoughts together and are confused, heads cannot actually spin. These songs show that Americans enjoy upbeat music that they can relate their everyday lives to, everyone has relationships at some point in their lives and everyone gets their heart broken at sometime. Most of the popular songs of this generation are popular for being upbeat and relatable. In my opinion these songs are popular with my generation because music cheers people up, if you get depressed you listen to your favorite songs and they might be able to cheer you up. When it comes to music I don’t think that gender roles are very important because most people don’t say I like this song because the singer is a girl and I don’t like listening to male singers. I think that people base their opinions of music of lyrics and sound more than gender, although boy bands tend to sell more music when they are more attractive. Success is measured in music by the amount of people paying to listen to your music, if your song is the most downloaded on iTunes then you are usually very successful and if you have a lot of songs that hit number one than you are more successful for every song/ album. The three songs have a lot in common with all popular music of this generation.

Theme-Genre Declaration

The theme-genre that I am doing is love and loss in twenty-first century music. I choose this theme-genre because I listen to a lot of different genres but it is all from the twenty-first century. Most of the music is about either love, or losing love. Another reason why I choose this is because I grew up listening to a lot of different genres. My dad always listened to oldies rock and roll when I was younger and my mom listened to pop music, as I grew up both of those were incorporated into the type of music I listen to today. My music taste stretches from pop music to rap music to rock music. One commonality between every music genre is that there are songs about love and loss, and that is something i want to explore throughout this year.