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3009 / Wixson / Midterm Essay / Due to the D2L dropbox by Friday 3/5 at 11:59 PMMusic is another site where individual and cultural mythologies intersect, and, while studying, exercising, driving, hurting, and doing just about everything else, our lives definitely have a soundtrack. We feel as if our personal music is a unique expression of our individuality and speaks meaningfully to the specificity of our experiences and feelings, but I remember one summer, at three different weddings I attended, the exact same song was used for the couples first dance. So much for unique. There are a number of pre-writing steps to this assignment: 1) In the Prologue to The Song is You, Arthur Phillips presents his view on our relationship to music — what functions it performs for us. As you reread it, identify the three or four things Julians father gets from Billie Holiday at the concert. Then, pinpoint why the recording of that concert is so important to him when he is in the hospital recovering from his war injuries and later after he returns home and collects copies of the recordings, playing them over and over. Finally, what importance does finding a replacement recording on CD have for Julian? How do all of Phillips views about why music matters to us overlap with our explorations this semester of the work mythology/mythmaking does for us? Were you reminded of any earlier course readings?2) Consider the following: Theodor Adorno, in his essay On Popular Music, pours disdain on the way in which, when we hear a popular hit, we think we are making a personal possession of it (Thats my song, the song that was playing when I first kissed X), while in fact this apparently isolated, individual experience of a particular song is being shared with millions of otherpeople—so that the listener merely feels safety in numbers and follows the crowd of allthose who have heard the song before and who are supposed to have made its reputation. [He rails again such] a grave self-deception engineered by a mass-cultural product.–Shelf Life (New Yorker 11/7/2011): (43) Adorno views our claiming of any song as my song is as absurd as feeling as if the Big Mac youjust got at the drive-thru was uniquely crafted for you and possesses special meaning. For him, a song is no different from any other mass-produced item (like toothpaste or a toaster) and no more emotionally authentic than a Hallmark greeting card. He claims we foolishly invest what isgeneric with particular, personal meaning. Do you agree or disagree with Adorno? Does your personal relationship with music confirm or criticize his point of view? 3) Consider how Julian describes the feeling of listening to a favorite song from his past later in The Song is You:
This quake of joy, inspiring and crippling, was longing. But longing for what? True love? A wife? Wealth? Music was not so specific as that. Love was in most of these potent songs, of course, but theythe music, the light, the season implied more than this, because, treacherously, Julian was swelling only with longing for longing. He felt his nerves open and turn to the world like sunflowers on the beat, but. This desire could notachieve releases; his body strained forward, but independent of any goal, though he did not know it for many years to come, until he proved it. Because years later, when he had captured all that love, wife, home, success, child still he longed, just the same, when he listened to those same songs.  . . . Music lasted longer than anything it inspired.[Years afterward,] the songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. (14, 15)Does his view remind you of any other course readings about the function of mythologies? 4) Think about your own taste in music. Where does it come from? How is it useful to you? Think about what you would choose as your five desert island songs. Why those five? What connections can you draw between them and your story of yourself, your self-mythology? In other words, can you find ways this music dovetails with (perform) your own values/beliefs and ways that it perpetuates/critiques cultural mythologies (for instance, romantic love or gender etc.). —————————–Drawing upon your experience and personal relationship to your music and in dialogue with Adornos and Phillips ideas, write an essay in which you answer the following question:What larger insights about the workings/functions of mythologies can be gleaned from the case study of our relationship to popular music? Your paper should demonstrate your understanding of Adornos point about the grave self-deception of pop music and the claims for how we use music expressed in The Song is You. Approach your paper as entering and contributing to the conversation about our relationship tomusic and mythologies, and quote directly from the Adorno material above, The Song is You, and one other of our course texts to illustrate your points. Remember to be concrete, cite specific examples, and think for yourselfAs an example, a student from last spring discovered that his obsession with obscure, alternative bands was in part due to the self-image he wanted to promote; he liked to think of himself as off the wall and defined himself against what he called the Flitcraftian norm. As such, what he liked about the bands he listened to had less to do with the music itself and moreto do with his own personal mythology.
**Again, your thesis for this paper should answer the following question: What larger insights about the workings/functions of mythologies can be gleaned from the case study of our relationship to popular music? **In the past, students have found it useful to choose one or two particular songs or pieces of music to focus on in the essay rather than broadly generalizing about their own musical tastes. Formal Requirements*4-5 full pages in length / Quoting at least once from each of the three sources*Use Times 12 Font, double spacing, and one-inch margins all around.*The heading of your essay need only contain your name. *Since we are only using course texts, no works cited page is needed for this essay. *No summary of The Song is You or Adornos point is needed; assume your reader has a good understanding of both and is coming to you for your insights. Writing Guidelines can be found in the Critical Essay Prompt section of the course D2L