Listening to music in class

So far, the music we've been listening to has been awesome, I even downloaded some of them. However, I find it interesting that with some of the songs we study, we watch the youtube clip that goes along with it. I'm kind of confused why we do this. Anyone can post anything on youtube and the images we saw could have been put together in 5 minutes. I'm not saying there isnt retorical meaning behind them, but we do not know who made them. The meaning and structures of the songs are not connected with the images - Marvin Gaye did not put together the video we watched in class. This isn't true with some of the other people watched like Bob Dylan or Neil Young. With Dylan, we saw him playing on a stage that he was on. All the visuals went with the song. With one of the listenings of Neil Young, we didnt use any visuals and based are opinions purely on sounds. In both these cases, we were able to discuss the rhetoric of the artist's choices and not something a random person made.

Movies we've watched so far

After our current class discussions and going over the scenes from the movies, it has become easier to analyze them. Before this class, I would have called all these films similar to each other based on the fact that they are all about Vietnam. Watching Apocalypse Now by myself, I realized from the first scene that I was able to pick out different things that the director put in there to get an idea across. Because of this, I can say that these three movies are totally different in what they are trying to say and how they are trying to say it. After watching Coppola's surreal style, it occured to me that not only are these films different, they're extremely different. Im curious to find out if any of them affected or inspired one another. I know that Apocalypse Now was done first in 1979 but the other two were done a year apart from each other in '85 and '86. Perhaps Kubrick was inspired by Platoon to go in a totally different direction from it.

Teddy,

The personal blog should be different from the community blog; you don't need to be so academic in your writing; you can make observations about the class, your own learning, what's interesting to you and what's not, what questions you might have, what connections you're making with the real world outside the academy walls, and so forth.