On last week's episode of Glee, they were trying to find an anthem to perform for a competition.They went through Justin Bieber, a song from a broadway musical, a cople others, and finally settled on the song "Sing" by My Chemical Romance.
Music is a form of rhetoric. It's a form of effectively writing feelings or meanings and putting it to a melody. Sing talks about taking a stand for what you believe in and not just sitting silent accepting what happens.
The characters of the music video are supposed to be something close to super heroes, the Killjoys, that go on a mission to save the little girl (who is a part of the Killjoys). I think that this could be a metaphor to saving the little girl from the evil is meaning that standing up for what you believe could help overcome the opposition. "Be what tomorrow needs." and "Sing it for the one's that will hate your guts."
My Chemical Romance also has another video that features the Killjoys, who are again fighting evil. The Killjoys are again fighting for what they believe in, until at the end the little girl is kidnapped. (This is the one before Sing).
Even though music just seems like a melody with a string of words, it's more. It has a meaning, and the meaning of the Killjoy's videos is to stand up for what ou believe in, even if it's difficult. Rhetoric include arguing your point, but it also includes listening to the opposition and nderstanding where they're coming from. Not just attacking.
I think My Chemical Romance uses this in their songs because it's about sticking up for what you believe in even when no one else will listen, you should never stop trying to get people to listen.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Valentine's Day ♥
Valentine's Day. That depressing, romantic, possibly even unimportant holiday of celebrating love, or that special someone. To me, Valentine's Day is really just a day that the greeting card companies have just hyped up to sell chocolate and sappy love cards. How do they do it though? How do they convince people that romance and love have to be complete with chocolate filled hearts and glittery card that profess love? Through pathos, of course.
They use emotion to convince a consumer that in order to prove to that person that you care the only thing that will do on V-Day is that heart shaped box, flowers, a teddy bear, and a fancy card.
They use emotion to convince a consumer that in order to prove to that person that you care the only thing that will do on V-Day is that heart shaped box, flowers, a teddy bear, and a fancy card.
Even Heineken, a beer company, is selling Valentines Day. Romance for them is that ring and a beer. It has been ingrained in our heads that on Valentines we have to show how we feel. Everywhere we look in February there's red, pink, hearts. EVERYWHERE. It's cute, but it gives the feeling that love is needed. A woman needs that present on Valentines Day to know that she is the object of love, that the present is a reassurance of how important she is to him and vice versa.
Color Psychology is even used throughout Valentines Day. Red means love, passion, and excitement. Red is everywhere.
We are immersed in rhetoric; it runs the holidays and on this particular holiday, it runs gifts.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Civil Rights Deja Vu?
The CNN article here talks about how the violent rheotric that many politicians and activists use today has been used before. For Hayden, she saw it used in 1964, around the time that three men that worked with her in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee disappeared and were found dead after a forty-four day search.
Why haven’t political leaders, or leaders of any organization, realized that the words and tone of their speeches have affects deeper than just conveying a shallow meaning? Rhetoric has persuaded whole countries to commit violence; I has persuaded one person to commit violence. It happens again and again, and yet the violent nature of the speeches has not ceased.
The shooting in Arizona was one of the most recent effects of this, but it certainly wasn’t the first and it most likely won’t be the last.
During the civil rights movement, as described in the article, people were called un-American and beaten for it. In the pro-choice and pro-life movement today, Dr. Tiller was called Tiller the Killer and was eventually shot in church.
Maybe the words aren’t literally violent, creating pain and destruction, but they give others the ideas to create it, the reasons. Words can create actions and the leaders should practice care with those easily misconstrued words.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Gamefly
Part of rhetoric is using purposeful language or images to capture the attention of a "target" audience. In the case of Gamefly, a site that delivers games for people to try out before actually buying the games, they know their audience pretty well.
My favorite commercial by them is this one:
Anyone who has played a terrible game knows how frustrating it is to have bought that terrible game. You go to the store, excited at the possibility of playing this wonderful game that had such wonderful reviews; you buy it for approximately somewhere between the price of $40.00 and $60.00; you take it home, open it, put it in the gaming system, start playing it. Five minutes, maybe even two hours into it, you realize this game is absolutely awful.
Obviously the commercial is an exaggeration, but that feeling a gamer gets when a game is terrible is pretty close; it's pretty dissapointing, frustrating, and it really does make you want to throw a temper tantrum as if you've regressed back to the age of three. It makes you want to throw that game out the window and stomp around the house.
Gamefly knows that about bad games. They know that gamers are serious when it comes to games, especially good ones. They know their audience and create commercials that specifically target that feeling. A good game can make the players sit at home for hours, skip meals, not answer phone calls/text messages (we can thank Call of Duty for that a lot of times), and it can make some grown men even call out of work.
We live in a commercialized world; almost everything is targettig an audience and if the producers know this audience well enough, their product will sell.
My favorite commercial by them is this one:
Anyone who has played a terrible game knows how frustrating it is to have bought that terrible game. You go to the store, excited at the possibility of playing this wonderful game that had such wonderful reviews; you buy it for approximately somewhere between the price of $40.00 and $60.00; you take it home, open it, put it in the gaming system, start playing it. Five minutes, maybe even two hours into it, you realize this game is absolutely awful.
Obviously the commercial is an exaggeration, but that feeling a gamer gets when a game is terrible is pretty close; it's pretty dissapointing, frustrating, and it really does make you want to throw a temper tantrum as if you've regressed back to the age of three. It makes you want to throw that game out the window and stomp around the house.
Gamefly knows that about bad games. They know that gamers are serious when it comes to games, especially good ones. They know their audience and create commercials that specifically target that feeling. A good game can make the players sit at home for hours, skip meals, not answer phone calls/text messages (we can thank Call of Duty for that a lot of times), and it can make some grown men even call out of work.
We live in a commercialized world; almost everything is targettig an audience and if the producers know this audience well enough, their product will sell.
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