https://civicmediaclass.mit.edu/2015/03/17/the-sound-of-music/ Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:19:16 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.2 https://civicmediaclass.mit.edu/2015/03/17/the-sound-of-music/#comment-66 Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:19:16 +0000 http://civic-media-class.wordpress.brownbag.me/?p=452#comment-66 There are some great examples of music in civic media. The most obvious are chants in activism which come from or beget slogans we see as hashtags now: BlackLivesMatter for instance. But on the humorous side we see YouTube projects like Songify the News (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL736C3116AD309B58), which is a brand that has been adopted by the NYTimes and others as a way to sort through complex debate material and focus in on the absurdity of political rhetoric in a style similar to the Daily Show or Colbert Report. I would argue that most activist-based music is not from popular artists at all, although they have a profound impact when they decide to go political. Underground artists are often freer to be more controversial in the politics they espouse. The one unusual example is Hip Hop, which has both popular and underground political impact. You should should definitely read Tommie Shelby’s Impure Dissent essay on this, which I can share with you. I think you need to bring your topic down to a much tighter focus for it to be accomplishable. I will want you to engage with the questions of the crisis in civics and/or the crisis in journalism (a lot of people being informed on issues where music can make a real impact). I think you will struggle to find existing surveys and other studies that get at the topic from the angle you are expecting. It’s okay to reflect on the theory where there is a lack of empirical evidence to guide your case study. But where do you want to go with it? Is there a way that we can use political music to make change that leverages the networked public sphere in some way? Is there an educational invention that you can imagine that addresses the “participation gap” that Henry Jenkins talked about, such that popular media is a gateway to engagement with larger issues as long as their is some scaffolding in the skills necessary to participate in that kind of participatory media conversation online?

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