For this week, I refreshed on Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” and a little bit of Stuart Hall’s piece about “Encoding/Decoding” media, which is basically his theory on how messages are perceived, spread, and interpreted. I thought that it was useful information to refresh on because of the way people may interpret the messages of a medium. With this, I especially thought about the devaluing of certain music tastes, especially rap, and how that may affect people’s perceptions of what rappers are bringing up in their music. It made me think about preconceived notions of rap from non-listeners where they may only focus on the surface-level messages, such as sex, violence, and drugs, and not take into account the lived experiences of rappers. With McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” has also made me think about how I can effectively present my information and findings, especially since it’s supposed to be in e-Zine form and I want it to be accessible and digestible as possible.
In addition to the media theories, I decided to revisit some of W.E.B. Du Bois’s essays from “The Soul of Black Folk” – more specifically, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and “The American Folk Song.” It was important for me to include these two essays to consider Du Bois’s terms of “double consciousness,” “the veil,” and the Talented Tenth as these concepts are alluded to in rap and hip-hop, especially in songs by Kendrick Lamar, or other conscious rappers. In retrospect, it would have been easiest for me to have started with Du Bois as a framework, and not just the sociological imagination, because it would have made it easier for me in terms of organization and narrowing down the research. However, I also feel like having read this last, it allowed me to look at rap and hip hop more holistically. Although, to build up on last week’s readings about the myths and misconceptions of hip hop culture and rap as a genre, and made me think about the racialization of the genre with the history that Du Bois provided in his essays. I especially thought it was interesting when he said, “The musical capacity of the Negro race has been recognized fo rmany years that it is hard to explain why no systemic effort has hitherto been made to collect and preserve their melodies (98).” As we still see this today with rap and other genres that Black Americans are credited to creating.
I was also able to have a finalized(ish) outline of my e-Zine/Google Sites according to the information I’ve collected and want to go over. I’ve started to put content, as well as added more songs onto the Spotify Playlist.
For the last week, I’ll be analyzing more songs and music videos, as well as follow up on any other frameworks (such as refreshing on Mill’s sociological imagination) and information pertaining to the data I’ve been collceting. The next steps are basically just to focus on adding content to the e-Zine and making it look cohesive!