Líderes da convenção de Seneca Falls (1848)

 

Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) e Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

Ver mais informações aqui (https://www.biography.com/news/seneca-falls-convention-leaders)

TPC para 4 de maio: cultura hip-hop

Escolha uma de duas perguntas:

1. Partindo da curta apresentação deste vídeo, discorra sobre a modalidade da cultura hip-hop que mais o(a) atrai (breakdance, graffitti, rap... ou até o vestuário), justificando e oferecendo exemplos.

2. Discuta até que ponto o "sampling" como método de composição e/ou o "rap" como estilo musical desenvolvem uma proposta alternativa de apropriação e afirmação de identidades criativas e culturais.

Análise da letra (com vídeo) de "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (MVG)

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is the opening theme of Bob Dylan’s fourth album, Bringing it all Back Home (1965), and it marks a transition from folk music and more obviously engaged lyrics (protest songs) to rock’n’roll rhythms (in fact a comeback, since this was Dylan’s starting point) and open-ended verse indebted to nonsense, surrealism, beat poetry. The fact that the song was made a film clip for Dylan’s British tour documentary Don’t Look Back (directed by D. A. Pennebaker) with Allen Ginsberg in the backdrop, reinforces the latter influence, as well as the word “Subterranean” possibly alluding to Jack Kerouac’s 1958 beat-novel The Subterraneans, though this word may also generally be interpreted as a cue for the “underground” atmosphere of the 60s hippie culture in the US.

The fact that the song lyrics start “in the basement” reinforces the underground message, and the introduction of a character “mixing up the medicine” suggests the process of codeine distillation for drug intake that was generalized among the “hip” youth of the time. The lyrical subject, in turn, places himself on the sidewalk, while he “thinks about the government”, an understatement about the street protests that objected to US politics of ethnic oppression (the Civil Rights movement), wars of power display (Vietnam) and competing world ideologies (the Cold War and the repression of Communism within the US). The next couplet of the first line continues in the political vein, conveying to a certain extent a continuity with Dylan’s formerly engaged career. Certainly, unemployment (“laid off”) and social welfare (“paid off”) are evoked, but they are compounded by a dissonant allusion to the figure of conspiracy, the spy, with the words “trench coat” and “badge”, triggering nonsense and a sarcastic tone that, throughout the song, will mark a disruption with Dylan’s previous more linear punch-lines.

The second stanza introduces a phrase, “Look out, kid”, a sort of warning to the youth of his time, which will weave a refrain with variation in every other stanza, remindful of the making of “the blues”, a genre indicated in the song title, though subverted in its content. The development of the phrases that follow this warning, “it’s something you did”, “don’t matter what you did”, “you’re gonna get hit”, “they keep it all hid”, points to a growing menace to youth’s carelessness vs. the plot of society. This crescendo accompanies a bi-part structure, where the first 3 stanzas mainly thematize rebellion against the establishment, whereas the last 5 gradually point to an ironic conformity. The latter, still, is dubiously first conveyed by another piece of advice, in the fourth stanza, “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose / Keep a clean nose”, where we mark a reference to the police strategy for clearing away demonstrators, through high-pressure water hoses, and another reminder against drug addiction, “keep a clean nose”, whose ambiguity and truth-value is meant to sound puzzling through the preposterous rhyme of “hose” and “nose”.

This kind of ambivalence pervades the poem, since the imperative formula, which may point to the structure of protest calls or banners (at once emphasized and undermined by the film clip where Dylan exhibits handwritten loose phrases from the song, but in a desynchronized manner and sometimes subverting the original sense), is twisted through humor and absurdity. These last two traits are also particularly evident in the most enigmatic of the stanzas, the third, where the character Maggie might or might not be growing illicit plants but persecution is a sure thing that arises from the paranoia of tapped phone lines and the haunting figure of the D. A. (District Attorney).

Two couplets are worth mentioning for conveying ideas that Dylan has clung to throughout his career: the image of the “blowing wind” as a mystery of nature to be deciphered by the hip individual – “You don’t need a weather man / to know which way the wind blows” – and the punch-line “Don’t follow leaders”, echoing the former protest songs where the villains were political and religious leaders (e. g. “Only a Pawn in their Game”, sung in 1963 on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom). However, the straightforwardness of this indictment, in the tradition of self-reliant Emersonian idealism that Dylan favored, is again thwarted by the dissonant follow-up “watch your parkin’ metters”, short-circuiting intelligence in a way that marks Dylan’s allegiance with the contradictory revelations of the Beat poets and their predecessors, among them Walt Whitman. Indeed, Dylan’s shift from the position of the “I” to that of the “you” throughout the song is also very Whitmanian, and a sign of his poetics of adhesiveness, in this case with the troubled “kid” being addressed.

The abovementioned appearance of the poet Allen Ginsberg in the song’s promotional clip points moreover to Dylan’s aspirations as principally a “word player” and a (song-)writer in his own right. Such a claim is made blatant by the stress on words throughout this clip, which marked the modern era of music videos and is justly said to have been an inspiration for rappers and hip-hop performers alike. Dylan’s preference for open-ended rhetoric, arguably a trademark of most of his career, is fully displayed in the song’s last line, my favorite, where deadpan humor, or sarcasm, prevails, subverting the commonsensical grudge against delinquency, through non-sense and a surrealistic vein bound to blow things up: “the pumps don’t work, ‘cause the vandals took the handles.”

Bob Dylan and the Macrosystem (30s to 1965)

1926 - National Broadcasting System begins regular radio broadcasting
1929 - Wall Street Crash
1930s - Dustbowl (the dirty thrities)
1933-1937 - New Deal (Frank D. Roosevelt): Relief, Recovery and Reform; Roosevelt's New Deal "Farm Security Administration" (FSA) project and documentary photography
1939 - Radio Corporation of America demonstrantes television at New York Wrold's Fair

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
1939-1945 - 2nd World War
1940 - "A Grapes of Wrath Evening" with Woodie Guthrie; Folk Protest Movement

1941 - US enters 2nd World War (Pearl Harbor)
Bob Dylan is born (Robert Zimmermann)
publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (by James Agee and Walker Evans); cf. The Dustbowl and the FSA photographs' program: https://www.lightstalking.com/photography-new-deal/https://www.lightstalking.com/photography-new-deal/
1941-5 - Television technology diverted to radar
1942 - beginning of Manhattan Project
1945, August - atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Franklin D. Roosevelt dies in office and is followed by Harry Truman
1948 - Alan Lomax (folklorist) edits The People's Song Book (left wing protest of the Folk Movement would subsequently be tuned down by McCarthyism
1950-1956 - McCarthyism (Eisenhower) and "Cold War"; mid 1950s - television sets enter family homes (movie attendance dropped, radio changed its focus to recorded music, the print press had to specialize)
1955-1968 - Civil Rights Movement
1955 - American involvement in the Vietnam War (lasts until 1973)
1956 - Chuck Berry's rock'n'roll thrives with "Too Much Monkey Business"

1958 - revival of Folk; Moses Ash and Pete Seegers' magazine Sing Out!
(new folk is arguably more idealistic and individualistic, while the 40s folk was more tuned with materialist orthodox communism) 
1959 - Dylan enrolls in the Univ. of Minnesotta and is acquainted with Beat Literature 
1961-1963 - JFK
1961 - Bob Dylan reaches New York in search of Woodie Guthrie; Greenwhich Village apprenticeship

JFK is elected president and faces the Bay of Pig's Incident (worse crisis of the Cold War); he also promises "The New Frontier" as his internal Government
1962 Bob Dylan's first album, Bob Dylan
1963 Newport Folk Festival and Dylan's hit song "Blowin' in the Wind" in The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1q9zea
1964 - Bob Dylan's third album The Times They Are a'changin
with "The Ballad of Hollis Brown"

... and Another Side of Bob Dylan (featuring "It Ain't Me Baby")

Beyoncé and the Hoodie - HW for April 27

Consider Beyoncé's concept album Lemonade and Troy Patterson's article "The Politics of the Hoodie". Write about one of the three topics:

- the role of the "hoodie" in Beyoncé's album

- semiotic interpretation of the video "Formation"

- text-analysis and/or semiotic interpretation of any of the album's themes

TPC - 21 de Abril: Análise de vídeo "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

Considerando a letra de "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965) de Bob Dylan, veja o videoclipe (um dos primeiros do género, produzido para um documentário de D. A. Pennebaker, Don't Look Back em 1967) e produza uma análise tendo em conta parâmetros estudados em aula.
Sugestão: faça pesquisa sobre as referências contextuais.

Like a Prayer - Madonna (1989)