Friday on Monday

We are doing this... Matt Rayos was all over this meme early last week. Poor guy


Let's let the voice out of the studio...


 But what of this music studio that finds such talent...
and of course here come the tributes

Kill Your Idols- Drafting

Here is where you be for today:

Part A- Description of your disillusion of this album
Part B- Your counter-argument with critics who herald this album
Part C- Your three song reviews from the album
Part D- Your discussion about what the stain of this album on popular music
Part E- Saved to your Google Docs
Part F- Share with me and your partner

Stage 2- Co-Editing
Now you are an editor.  It is your task to offer constructive feedback to your writing partners.  Just as you push a team mate to dig deeper during a race, ask of similar creativity of your partners.  If you find a particular strength, ask more of it.  Where they are weak, offer a more creative angle.  If you need to, argue with them in a hypothetical way to draw out more.  Don't be reluctant to ask , "SO WHAT?"
Insert no less than five comments into their draft this time.



Style/ Voice
Allusion
Sarcasm
Dead pan formula/ code break
Participle + noun adjectives
extended metaphor
rhetorical question
personification
antithesis

Kill Your Idols- What's the effect?

So far you have drafted the following components for your Kill Your Idols expanded critique:

1. Your description how you came to see this "classic" differently from the rest of the music establishment.
2. Your two responses to music critics using "moves" from the Index of Templates handout.
3. Three song reviews from the album.
4. Writing moved into Google docs for future editing with partners.

Here is the next part that will serve as your headiest discussion of this album.  What are the deeper problems of this album in terms of what it reflects about society and culture?
Consider the following questions to guide your critique:

• Why is it such a problem that we have built this album up so much?
• What weaknesses does this reveal about our culture's taste in music (lack of sophistication, political ignorance, unworthy praise of "individuality", etc)?
• Has this album opened up more problems through copy cat artists or a downward spiral of widespread musical talent?

Here is some clever writing by Jace Lacob from the Daily Beast about Glee: (Annotation my emphasis of technique)

What is Glee doing when other shows would be moving forward, or showing their characters in challenging, or funny, situations? (1) Well, Glee has become a music single-delivery mechanism. (2) Scenes involving dialogue or plot development are shoehorned between massive musical set pieces, which draw from the vast and varied world of popular music. (3) Instead of illustrating the unspoken and inner desires or fears of the characters, the songs here seem like coldly calculated viral videos, designed to rapidly spread across the Internet.(4)
The more it focuses on the music and less on the characters, the higher the ratings climb. (5)
Why, I ask as I tear my hair out, is the show so beloved? (6)
Perhaps the answer is as simple as why people loved American Idol so much for so many years. The songs on Glee are not original; they’re culled from a huge catalogue of singer-songwriters, rock bands, and alternative types, but what they have in common is that they’re all part of the pop-culture lexicon already. These are songs that people know the lyrics to, after all. By redoing them within the context of Glee, Fox and its sister studio, 20th Century Fox Television, have created a cottage industry of mass-produced knockoffs, easy to consume and cheap to buy. (It might also be why Idol is so successful, but the original songs for the finalists fall flat every time.)

1. Rhetorical question which bluntly exposes the show's lack of creativity.
2.  Shoehorn connotes a forced attempt to avoid character development to adhere to the show's "winning" formula.
3. Cold metaphor meant to strip the show of any artistic merit and reveal its equate it to boiler plate replication of industrial production.
4. Simile meant to continue the slight by raising the content to creativity of LOL cats.
5. Clever use of an antithesis.
6. Hyperbole to capture intellectual exasperation.