Pleasure
Story of the Year- “Until the Day I Die”
Drake-“Best I Ever Had”
Finch- “Stay With Me”
Gym Class Heroes- “Cookie Jar”
Lil Wayne- “Lollipop” (Rated R)
Community Service
Jimmy Eat World “A Praise Chorus”
John Lennon” Imagine”
Michael Jackson “They don't really care about us”
Christina Aguilera “Beautiful”
Matchbox 20 “How far we've come”
This assignment actually surprised me at how easy and enjoyable it would be! I decided to try to use as many songs off my itunes as I could to make it as easy as possible. I feel like the aim that is more prevalent is pleasure especially in music that is popular today. I had such an easier time finding songs for pleasure verses finding songs for community service. An observation I made is that many songs are about pleasure in the sense that they are about sex because sex sells---this didn’t surprise me. And of course songs about pleasure are about things everyone likes. I was actually surprised at how relatively easy it would be finding community service songs. I tried to find songs that were about being positive or accepting yourself. I definitely think that the Hindu understanding of the four aims differs from what is expressed in American pop music. In the Hindu understanding things are taken somewhat seriously and they follow basic laws of morality and they seek pleasure intelligently. Most American pop songs are about anything from sex to drugs and more often than not they are not done in an intelligent way.
I'm glad that someone actually used the words "sex sells" because that's just what it does and in modern times people just look at the bottom line. About the community service songs i did find them pretty easy too but i think that a lot of artists just put those songs out just to increase their fan bas and build a good public image (not to say that all of them do that but certainly a lot of them do).
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to see you list Jimmy Eat World's "Praise Chorus" as a community song. Paying attention to lyrics such as "I wanna fall in love tonight" and "Started my rock 'n roll fantasy" I always thought it was more of a pleasure song and "I'm on my feet, I'm on the floor, I'm good to go." always seemed to give me a sense of liberation. I do see how it can be interpreted as a community service song though.
ReplyDeleteI like that you said that Hindus take the aim of pleasure seriously. I totally agree, because I feel that in Western society, pleasures (particularly sex) are just done without much thought or emotion. People seem to partake in them just to be part of the flow in this society.
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