Waiting on the World to change

Hello all,
Today I have decided to share my belief of how a single song can have majot influence on society and their behavior.John Mayer is one of my favorite artists because he often write songs with extremely powerful lyrics. While very powerful and thought provoking, most of his songs are about romance or self discovery and may change a person's personal view points they don't encourage people to take a stand against prominent world issues. However John Mayer's "Waiting on the world to change" does just that.It encourage other's to stand up for current issues.

"Waiting on the World to Change" adresses the fact that our generation is very misunderstood and is infact aware of what is going on in the world. It's just that young people do not feel as though they are credible to make any sort of change and it is up to the people in power which I completely disagree with. Therefore we are waiting for such people to make some sort of difference. This song was released during the Bush administration which makes perfect sense because we just kept waiting for Bush to make changes that ultimately never happened. What we as young people should have done is taken a stand on every issue we felt passionate about even if it was in the smallest way. The song also mentions that that "if you trust your television what you get is what you got because they own the information they can bend it all they want." Thia is very propagandistic and relates to the idea we discussed in class of biases in the news due to companies that own news corporations. The song also has a left wing slant saying that fighting for current issues was not fair because with the government body in office at the time nothing would ever get done. The song encpurages young people to take a stand because we are the future and need to start building a foundation for ourselves now

Imagine all the people

When I first decided that music was going to be the topic of this blog I immediatley thought of the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. To me it is the epitome of what a propagandistic should be. The lyrics try and persuade the listener to imagine the utopia described in the song, and given the era that it was written, many people dreamed of such a uptopia in this country. The song asks listeners to imagine a world free of war ( in this case the Vietnam war) and free of death. It also mentions a world with no countries to seperate us which is a frequent cause of war. A world with no possesions is also mentioned eliminating materialism from the world. I think this song is one of the most beautiful I have ever heard but I must disagree about Lennon's view of having a world with no religion. I believe that religon brings out an inner peace in people that they otherwise would have not noticed. Though this is a piece of propaganda Lennon recognizes that all people listening may not agree with his radical liberal views but he also acknowledges that many people do agree with him and want the war to end. Below are two links the first is a video of John Lennon performing the song live at Madison Square Garden secons is a more current cover by Jack Johnson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q0Eyw3l3XM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoeHcgQiG_s

First Entry

Hello everyone!
Welcome to my blog. At first I wasn't exactly sure what to do for this class assignment so I got to thinking about the true meaning of what I think propaganda is as well as it's goals. When I first registered for this course for some reason when I thought of propaganda I thought of the Beatles and the messages embedded within their music. Then the idea came to me to dedicate this blog to analyzing various songs from today and yesteryear. I will look at the message that the song is trying to present and relate it to an issue that comes up in class , in the news or in my own life. The goal of propaganda is to persuade people to believe in a certain something and in my opinion music is extremely if not the most powerful method in getting a message across in a 2010 society.