Pop Culture: Music Culture Continues & Blog Options for the Week

We only managed two out of three today and that's ok.  We're going to make up for it on Thursday with piles and piles of songs and politics and country and hip-hop, though we did get started today by talking about the unifying nature of hip-hop and country as essentially storytelling.

It may be one reason why this song has found such an audience.

All of that thinking came about from mapping musical roots up on the board.  I'm  going to post you some post-game thinking of which you may want to take advantage in the service of your musical roots project.

Here is the explosion of lines and doodles that were my marker board today.  I was trying to rush.  Wish I had taken my time . . .  y'know . ..  I might just do a sketchnote today to capture what I missed and through which I rushed . . .

Um. . .  yeah.  This.  The cow in the middle is the US.  I think.  I was manic.

A big deal.  Taylor Swift. Kendrick Lamar.  Even when T.Swift goes back to her country roots & even when Kendrick Lamar goes back into M.A.A.D. City, they are both storytellers at heart.  

The 1970s were a pivotal time for underground music.  Punk in England.  Hip-hop in New York. All informed by the migration of sound and people from the Caribbean and the economic struggles.  Hip-hop grew out of street dances & emceeing & rap culture out of the need to share their stories -- later it grew more aggressive.  Punk grew out of rejection of normalcy and authority -- it was aggressive from onset but less a need to share story & more to express raw emotion -- though really, all music tells a story.

Jamaica.  Caribbean.  Huge, massive importance in music culture.  Colonialism and slavery brought African sounds to those islands where they collided with indigenous sounds.  Those beats and rhythms and instruments then made it to North American and the US.  Those formed the backbones of blues and jazz -- jazz especially the most uniquely American music form.  Blues was really the transformation of spirituals into song.  Once blues was recorded, it started making its way across the Atlantic to England where it had major influence on The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream and The Who.  All five of those bands established themselves first as cover bands, covering amped up version of blues, country and rockabilly records.  

A lot going on here but basically a focus on economic struggle times being a motivator of musical innovation.  I wonder if this is true in our first real digital era as well.  Who came about in 2007 or so and has had a major impact?   

Here are just some of the songs I got to and didn't get to.  Really check out that early stuff and see how much it informs the music you enjoy.  It gets to a place quickly where there are so many genres it become difficult to draw an exact timeline.

Music Culture Project Rubric.  

Project Due. Wednesday.  Oct. 7th.

Blog. 3+ Posts.

Due. Friday. 10.2.15.
Pinterest.  1 Post.
Due.  Friday. 10.2.15.

Here are three options for creative blog posts for the week:

1. Musical Roots.  Choose a band or artist and create a map of that band's musical influences back at least three layers deep.  Explain your thinking and post links/embed content that shows evidence of your thinking.  Use our work from last week and today to inform this.

2. Create a Beat for the News.  Use Beatlab.com, Garage Band or another beat generator to create a beat to be played while a news story (from this week) is being viewed, heard, or read.  Post the link to the news story, embed/link to the beats, and explain your thinking.

3. Musical Color Palette.  Use Colourlovers.com to create a color palette for your musical tastes.  Name each color and explain its association to the music to which you connect.  For example, I might create an off-white color & call it "Middle School Hip-Hop Mindset" when the depth of my hip-hop knowledge went to Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice (yup), and 3rd Bass with a little Fresh Prince and Rob Base on top of that.

Any of the the above could be expanded upon and further developed into your Musical Culture project due next week.  Consider this a way to build a first iteration or prototype for your finished project due next Wednesday, Oct. 7.