Auto-Tune Brain Dump

I'm using a strategy my AP History teacher taught me to do whenever I have to do an important paper; take a brain dump. This is where you just write everything off the top of your head you know about your subject, then you go back to revise and find a flow to work with. It's how I always get my best work, so I figured it'd be appropriate here.              
  
There has always been a pop music, and the scape of it is ever changing. Trends come into popularity almost out of thin air, and are as malleable and impermanent as the people who help shape them. It is through these trends that we can see what our culture finds most important over time. In more recent american history, we’ve seen drastic shifts in the musical landscape as the country has changed through the years.From the initial acoustic folk music to jazz, from the emergence of the electric guitar and the plethora of musical genres that stemmed from it’s invention. The start and fruition of the music industry as we know it today has always been influenced by the culture that surrounds it: the family friendly 50’s, the rebellious and psychedelic 60’s, but it’s also around this time we start to see a new trend in music appear. We see the surge of new music that will forever be known as pop music, starting with the birth of Disco.The mainly technological and electronic music started a trend in music that would last to this very day; that trend being the allure of using electronic sounds and editing to produce music. This had actually started to become the norm in all facets of music, but disco was a whole other beast entirely. it was mainly being produced with piano and synthesizers are over conventional instruments, and this is where style over substance really started to take full swing. You started to require a specific look that an audience was expecting; which was bell bottoms and teased hair at the time. It also left a lasting effect on the industry, because, even with the death of disco, other forms of more manufactured musicians started to emerge. The 70’s lead way to techno, electronic, and bubblegum pop. Instead of people being taken for their musical talent, they were being scouted for their marketability. Granted, there were still many other forms of music that started to gain popularity, but this techno pop still had a strong and ever growing presence. Such was the case with the 90’s and it’s overly produced teen idles. Starlets like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, who we’re the best singers on their own, were made huge starts with the advances in music technology. Music as a whole was actually being heavily edited electronically, but the pop scene of the era seemed to take it to a whole new level in the respect that it was made just for how much money they can make for music companies cheaply, and this is where we really see marketability over musicianship take root. The teen idles fizzled out of fashion, and tech still ruled the airwave, but in more rap and hip-hop scenes, and that’s where it’s stayed to date. The idea of feel good/ clubbing music still is the most top charting form of music in America today, and has jumped to a whole new level of popularity with the addition of a new invetion; and invention that would change the face of music forever. This invention was simply called Auto-Tune, and has had a drastic effect on the music industry as a whole.

Cookies Turn a Sweet Profit

For the past 21 years using cookies has been an integral part of our online experience, but in recent years the use of them has changed a bit. Instead of being used for memory of settings on sites and for shopping, cookies are now being used by adverting companies to behaviorally profile users to make selling their products more efficient. Utilizing 3^rd party tracking cookies (as explained in the Wall Street Journal video), they are able to monitor your browsing history and use the sites you visited to determine what products you are most interested in and what items you would find appealing. These actions of these advertisers are fairly unknown to most people, and have actually caused a privacy concerns for those aware of this. This modernized strategy is to sell products to individuals rather than groups, and these companies used the data collected by cookies to do so. Although there is now individualized attention, the ads seen by consumers are the same as ever.  This means that they are still filled with the formulaic social idles (as stated in Steve Craig’s article) that have been used for centuries like the man’s man, overly sensualistic attractive female, and the numerous racial and gender stereotypes we see to this day (as stated in both . Though the examples used in these ads are extremely exaggerated compared to real life, there is a grain of truth in each to keep them going and help give them power.  Though we hate to admit it, most people know or at least have seen in person someone that fit the mold of these exaggerated characters in these commercial; the college boy who can’t cook to save his life like in Hot Pocket ads, the party girl who’ll do anything after a couple drinks like in most alcohol ads, and we have all encountered one person of a particular ethnicity that unfortunately fit the negative stereotypes said about their race. Though we know , with minute exceptions, that most of these stereotypes are untrue, but why do we listen to them? Mainly because they’re shoved in our faces every day as we are bombarded with thousands of advertisements a day, and these ads farther perpetuate the stereotypes. They are deeply ingrained in our society because we are heavily influenced by our media, and advertisers, since they are able to advertise to us directly, are able to choose the right people to keep said stereotypes going, and are profiting from it. Using cookies to track history to advertise may be a debatable topic, but we can all agree that the content in them, depending on the ad, are definitely harmful to our society as a whole.

This is the advertisement that caused me to spend all that money. It is one of the many from the Darksiders 2 advertising campaign, but his one was the most effective, but to truly understand why you may need some background information. You see, I was a huge fan of the first Darksiders game. I immediately fell in love with the story, characters, set pieces, and, most importantly, the game play. So when Vigil Games, the studio that made Darksiders, announced there would be a sequel that was bigger and more exciting than the last one, I was chomping at the bit. Now I was already going to buy this game based on these facts alone, but when I saw the ad for the Collector’s Edition, I was taken away. I am normally not one for buying such packages from games because of the price, the fact I normally don’t have the funds to do so, and because I realize how gimmicky the items included are… but this was different. The thing that really grabbed my attention was the mask towards the middle of the screen; the life sized Death Mask stand. I’m into dark and gothic art due to my artistic background, and this thing just screamed dark, and generally looked cool. That alone was alluring, but the fact that the package came with extra weapons in-game, had downloadable content that extended the play time of the game, soundtrack, and hard cover copy of the concept art made me want the package even more. The advertisement wasn't just selling a game and some random items; it was selling entertainment and art (at least that’s what it felt like to me). So this advertisement not only made me buy the regular already $60 game, but it made be buy the $100 special pack with all the goodies they were trying to sell. It was quite affective because the add spoke directly to my demographic: a 17-30 year old who’s into games like God of War, prince of Persia, and role playing games who also likes horror, gore, and gothic things. It spoke to me, and, as you can tell from the picture above, worked extremely well in doing what it was supposed to do; which was making me want to buy the expensive game.

Pop Culture Perspective

Though “The Rise of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch” was insightful, it has not changed my thoughts on popular culture, but affirmed them. The notion that the media us solely shaped by corporate elites or influenced completely by the masses is only half right; it a symbiotic relationship. Popular culture is made up of the common beliefs we have, and it unites us and gives us that sense of community we crave as human being; a notion the article confirmed for me. The media feeds us information on what’s popular/ marketable, and we as consumers we buy these thing, or refuse to, and that influences the next line of popular trends after that. Within the culture there are, like all things in life, lines drawn by race, sex, and class that affect it, but it gives us enough accessibility and familiarity for it to survive, and for individuals to reside in it. I may not be the biggest fan of modern pop cultural trends, but I can recognize the importance of its study, and this article has made me more secure in that sentiment.