Joint Effort (Post #6)

Due to technical difficulties, this post is being posted by me, Jackie, but the authors of the questions are Geoffrey and Meg. Cheers!

Geoffrey:

I’m left thinking about Obama. And Glen Beck. And Reagan. And Clinton. And Hitler. Would you prefer Jefferson? I’m thinking of him too… Walker (paraphrasing Hesiod) suggests the world of “rhetoric” breaks into two clear worlds: in short, the rhetoric of art and the rhetoric of business/politics. That rhetoric (or whatever word will eventually become “rhetoric”) is a “pyschagoogic art” of enthralling the given audience and turning aside listeners’ minds. Literally, taking control of their thoughts and bending them to the task at hand, be it poetry or policy. That the Arts would originally be considered the “secondary” half of the two is not surprising. However, the deduction that the most-successful rhetoric of politics and business actually springs from this “secondary art” is quite interesting to me as a writer and as a teacher and as a citizen, and I think Walker and company are on to something quite empowering here.

Back to Obama. He is our President because he’s a good speaker. Period. That’s it. Politics aside, what separated him from that pack and captured the imagination and support of so many a year ago was his ability to speak well. To share his vision in a way that was comprehensible to the “lore and language” (epos) of his mass audiences and supported by the “rhythmic formulae” (epea) of a sweeter discourse clearly found within our churches, streets and cultures. Our ears, suggests Walker, are trained to appreciate these “rhythms” and devices through church, ceremony, art. An epideictic code of an almost Jungian nature that the audience (must never forget the audience) shares collectively. To this, does the master speaker address.

I should just get onto my question: What rhetorical practices that we’ve encountered so far this year in song appear in your favorite “practitioner of pragmatika?” I’ve had a ball the last few days watching Obama speak (on Iran) and Beck rant on Fox. I’ve thought about the best salespersons I’ve ever worked with in the business world. I’ve thought about the “best” teacher I ever had and why... How did he speak? Question #1: What in the language of these practical speakers is similar to the rhetorical devices found in song? From repetition and cadence to expletives and hyperbaton, and everything in between. These devices are learned by the audience from ART, from the poetry of five thousand years of song and story. If Wallace speaks true, we’ll find these same devices in the next speech by your favorite (and least favorite) politician. And if, indeed, the Muses have blessed us with the gift of rhetoric to foster peace and justice on Earth, our very best leaders will those who have assimilated the very best practices of art (rather than the detached “rhetoric”propsed by Aristotle and Socrates). Question #2: As writers and educators and citizens, what rhetorical devices might we learn for ourselves and pass on to the next generation that are lifted from directly from the “bards” of so long ago and today?




Meg/Woog

As I read through Walker's essay I couldn't help but focus in on the sophist as he defines (if they can at all be defined fully) one. A "...professional intellectual, a 'wiseman,' 'sage,' or the possesor , performer, and a professor of some special skill...The sophist might, perhaps, even be a 'wizard'..." (37). This is because they seemed to translate as poets, in that a poet must be some type of wizard to pull the audience into the text/performance with grace. I use the word pull because I am imagining now a ribbon in the wind that a speaker must extend to the audience in order to reach them. The audience might not always be able to catch the ribbon (meaning the imagery or every word spoken) but that the image/text/performance is ever present, dancing before them. The subject matter in poetry can be stronger or more engaging when it dangles in from an audience, leads them to or through a story.
This is most clear in poems such as Edmund Spenser's "Aegloga Quarta" and Shakespeare's "It Was a Lover and His Lass" where the story seems whimsical, fluid, song-like. And, of course these are song-like, as Spenser has a, sort-of duet with these two voices talking back and forth to one another. And as Shakespeare writes with refrain using "with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" Sophists are poets in the sense that they bridge the gap, or more importantly, overlap the epideictic and pragmatic speech.
So, to the question. If poets like Blake, Spenser, and Donne are capable of creating poems that are "timeless," in the sense in that they "embody an ancient, ancestral wisdom," (23) speaking as "sages," how then, can modern poets such as Langston Hughes or Geoffrey Hill immortalize their poems? Are they steeped in the language of the present and is that language song-like enough to keep us from forgetting it or its importance/success as a "timeless" art?

P.S. Does anyone still have the Lip Gloss song in their head? Man, I can't stop singing/humming it.

Questions for Week 4-ella-ella

I think that we picked a great set of songs. They have everything we’re looking for in a standard pop song, but are different enough from each other that we can separate them.

To me, it seemed the biggest way to categorize the songs is by song structure: How did the use of instrumentation and emphasis on the refrain affect the bridge? Generally, the two seemed to go together, and I came up with two different poles and then most of other songs.

On one end was Lil’ Mama’s “Lip Gloss”, with virtually no instrumentation and a heavy emphasis on the refrain. Rihanna and Beyonce are very close on the spectrum. The bridges on these songs all seem tacked on and almost like an intrusion to the song. Especially with “Lip Gloss”

On the other end is F.K.O., with more instrumentation, but no real refrain. Wu Tang is similar. They go verse after verse with only once or twice interrupting for a very brief “Protect ya neck”.

My question is how do these song structures affect the inherent purpose and reception of the songs? Can the structures work rhetorically independently of the lyrics?

Also, if we want to talk about the lyrics, here’s something interesting I noticed. In each of the songs, especially the hip hop, the performer carried their own ethos. Lauren Hill told us the importance of real hip hop, Beyonce gave an F-you to committal-phobic men, Snoop Dogg smokes weed etc. To me it seemed that the only performer that didn’t carry their own ethos was Rihanna. Jay-Z shows up at the beginning of the song to basically tell us that she’s with him and we should listen to her, then he disappears. Did that seem strange to anyone else or am I just thinking to much?

Question of the Leadbelly Week (#4)

I've got a few ideas rolling around in my head about this week's readings/recordings. I've had the rhetorical triangle on my mind (not only because Evelyn drew it on the board, but because I will draw it for my 111 students next week). I’m interested in where we apply the ethos angle of the triangle to the recordings.

We've talked a bit in class about how performance changes our reception of a song and how the singer's interpretation enhances (or maybe interferes with) its rhetorical value. For me, at least, I tend to put the performer in the rhetor position, rather than the songwriter (whose name, if known, is tucked somewhere among the liner notes).*

After reading about Leadbelly's life, from several different (conflicting) perspectives, I'm curious about how our knowledge of a singer's life interferes with how we interpret a song? Do we assume (like so many readers assume short stories consist of thinly disguised memoir) that we’re learning about the singer’s life when we hear them perform? How can we apply this to our ability to view these songs as rhetoric?

(This is similar to the “separating the artist from the art” question.)

Also, how is this complicated by our “romanticism” of the artist? (I’m thinking about Mullen’s article now.) Is it possible to listen to these songs without a dose of romanticism that might hinder our ability to look at them objectively? Is it even possible to look at them objectively?

*Except for those rare cases, when considering popular music, or "mainstream" (as opposed to indie?), that we have a song delivered to us by its lyricist/composer. Stevie Wonder pulls this off for us, but there aren't too many like him in that regard.

Question of the Week #3

So, let’s talk about Freud. His is hardly the first literature I’d normally turn to in a critical discussion of song, but I find that the anecdote in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle offers an interesting perspective. It tells of a child who plays a game, sort of a one-party fetch, where he hurls toys into the corner, waits, then retrieves them with visible satisfaction. Freud interprets this as a mechanism for coping with the frequent absence of the boy’s mother, that the child mollifies himself “by dramatising the same disappearance and return with objects he had at hand” (13).

This conclusion seems contestable to me (and Freud, to be fair, offers an alternate interpretation), but, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume there’s some validity to it. My question, then, is how and to what degree might the performance of music, especially the selections from Goodbye Babylon, be analogous? How, if at all, do we sing religious songs to as a means of alleviation through “dramatizing” our own experiences? What experiences among those who sing might be the stand-in for the missing mother in the scenario Freud describes? It might be interesting, too, to drag Marx into the discussion: is there an “opiate” effect of dramatizing experiences through song?

I don’t have much of a congealed answer to these questions—not yet, at least. I’m looking forward to reading what everyone comes up with.

Question of the Week #2

As I read this week's assignments I was struck by the use of the word lyric. The the focal concept of lyric has, I believe, changed contextually for us. When we think of "the old days," we think of lyric as poetic verse(s) that has a song-like quality, that is, perhaps, meant to be sung. Currently, the word lyric is most often used to described those words that accompany the (instrumental) music in songs. Thus, to my thinking, lyrics have receded from the forefront of what we consider music to be. Lyrics have, in a sense, been somewhat removed from music and have been reduced (if we can say reduced) to just words.

We may say that this is the case, as Frith suggests and Citron exemplifies (for the most part), because lyrics as artful words, or "literature" (Burke) can be deconstructed in a familiar, formulaic method. Nonetheless, when deconstructing the efficacy of form (primarily lyric, but some instrumental), we may mistake certain procedures (such as repetition) as simple--the result of "unschooled common folk rather than sofisticated lyricists" (Citron 22). Still, these operations are effective in their ability to be remembered. We remember choruses and old folk songs based in repetition, while verses, despite their rhyme scheme, often escape us. The form of repetition may be simpler, but not lacking in sophistication, as more complex emotions (for which more contemporary writers may rely on lyrics) may be conveyed by the music (i.e. tone through melody, etc).

Bearing in mind our temporal removal from the origin of these songs (esp. those we listened to), what particular progression is prevalent in the fulfillment of form and how and to what extent are our desires fulfilled or confounded (through conflicting forms) in these songs?

Question of the week #1 (If you want to sing out, sing out...)

Question of the week:

As I tackled this week's assignments, I found myself at a loss to determine where I should begin. After all, because this is a rhetoric of song class, it made sense to listen to the song selections before delving into the readings. On the other hand, as a student of rhetoric, I've been conditioned to privilege the persuasive power of the written word—so much so that I found myself wanting to read the texts first so that they would provide some indication of how I should "read" sound and song.

To prove how tied to the text I am, I started by reading Burke, and I feel that much of the reading and listening I've done this week for class has been shaped by his theories. On a positive note, Burke's definition of rhetoric as "language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols," I feel, opens a space to talk about songs, such as ballads, as rhetorical. I have to confess, though, that I also empathize with Alan and John Lomax's fear that by theorizing about songs, "capturing and imprisoning them in cold type," we may somehow kill them as we try (because we try?) to understand them. Just like them, I'll charge on anyway and try not to worry about the damage . . .

My question is this:

Let's take as a given Burke's idea that rhetoric unites people who identify with each other based on their shared "substance" (shared motives, values, beliefs, ideas, emotions, reasoning, language). Using our readings and listening assignments for this week as examples, what could this shared substance be exactly, and why does it lend itself to taking shape as a ballad?

What do you all—heck, let's be folksy—what do ya'll think?

-Mandy

Hi 740

This is where opening questions will be posted most Thursdays. See syllabus for more info on creating and answering opening questions. Respond to opening questions by commenting on the opening question post. Post your comment by midnight of the day before class. Sing sing a song sing out loud sing out strong make it simple to last your whole life long, don't worry if it's not good enough for anyone else to hear, just sink, sink a sonk. La la la la la...