Incubus "Here in My Room"
And to motivate you to give back or make a change, some community service songs: 1.Coldplay "Fix You" Alternative Rock, 2005 2.Bob Marley "One Love" Reggae, 1977 3. U2 "One" Alternative Rock, 4. Beatles "Come Together" Britpop, 1969 5. James Taylor "Shower the People" Classic Rock, 1977
U2 "One"
The more prevalent aim established was, by far, pleasure. To find pleasure songs only took a few minutes, as the majority of what is available and popular to the public is focused around pleasure. Our media has an unwaivering focus on sex, love, capitalism, and self-seeking goals. This is not to say that such an indulgence in pleasure is wrong. It is, obviously, human nature. However, compared to finding songs centered around some form of community service, it proved much more difficult. Even then, the songs I attempted to relate to community service speak of an undercurrent of love. Pleasure is so much easier to find, I think, because we are such an individualized culture. We, in general, are brought up being taught to seek after whatever it is you want: achieve, accomplish, be successful, follow your dreams. I feel that the unity aspect of Americans falls by the wayside. Our culture is engrained with an idea to be self-sufficient, and to beat competition. Community service or unity does not hold the weight in the American culture, like it does in eastern cultures. I was not surprised at the amount of "pleasure"songs that could be used, but I was surprised that there were so few unity, service songs that could be found. The Hindu understanding of the pleasure and community service aims differs greatly from how these aims are expressed in American pop culture. In Hinduism, it is believed that you can have what you want, as long as you eventually let it go, so that for example, pleasure is perfectly appropriate to seek, for a time, and as long as you follow basic laws of morality. In American pop culture, there is no sense that pleasure-seeking will, or even should, end. Our culture sustains this wanting of more and more goods, services, and material wealth, and as time goes on, the culture seems to become more sexually liberated, but in some cases seems to deviate from what may be morally sound for some. The example presented of "Here in My Room" speaks of this promiscuity, as the end lyrics say "Thanks for being that kind of girl". Also, in reference to the Hindu aim of community service, American culture seems to focus more on loving your neighbors, but does not state very often to actually aid them. There some artists or bands that have taken the humanitarian route, such as Bono and Coldplay, but you see these visions of humanity more through their videos, while their lyrics could still be related to other causes, or more on a personal level of love and loss. I feel that our culture becomes increasingly impaired when trying to differentiate between selfish desires and altruistic behaviors, and trying to find songs to pinpoint both sides seems to solidify this.
I think we can all agree here that pleasure was the easier of the two to find, write about, and notice.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was pretty unique that you added the word "capitalism" under the subtext of pleasure, I never really thought of that! It's also important to note as you did that our culture is fairly individualized. Your conclusion presents an interesting distinction betweenself-desire and altruism that I thought was a great way to wrap things up. I enjoyed your style of writing, it made for an overall great read, nice work!