Week 1 Music Journal

One Reply to “Week 1 Music Journal”

1. This week delivered a topic that can be very difficult in how we can think of what’s the pinpoint correct action when asked about what we believe: generalization. Generalization exists popularly in terms of how we generalize people of different ethnic backgrounds and racial backgrounds. We talked about how our maturity and growth within our backgrounds and involvement with people of different backgrounds have shaped the visual spectrum of who we see and where they belong. A wrongful way of growth that we can learn to grow out of through the awareness of the damages it causes to the people affected, such as myself. A musical example I like to distinguish generalization is J. Cole because his music has always been deemed as “black people music”, but looking at his last album and actually listening to the lyrics and emotion, he sends a message that isn’t normally what you expect. Instead, he writes a story of his life and how it’s not like the generalizations that exist, similarly to how the minorities of America look to draw the spectrum in the right direction rather than the unjust direction that exists in the form of generalizations.
   I want to add something from this week that also allowed me to take a different subject to generalize: actions. Many of us look to “Act first, Think later” and that’s because we tend to look at music as a temporary escape for the moment that happens currently; a song can capture a similar essence at the moment and you perform the same general idea the song does and move along as if the problem is complete. The only problem is that none of these situations are temporary and the possibility of a reoccurrence is high. Similar to the reading by Hirschkind about cassette recordings of sermons, I learned that many of us have to try to adapt and practice the proper idea of “Think first, Act later”, so many of us won’t drag ourselves into the same general idea over and over again. Just like the men who listen to the sermons, a better way to live life is to connect and live within the experience to the point where it’s second-hand instinct.
   So to end this entry, I’d like to connect both ideas of the generalization of backgrounds and actions; they both can only work well if we don’t look towards the generalizations of life and look towards living the actual things we look at and understanding the real perspective, like how J. Cole and the men who listen to sermons grow in life.

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