Madonna’s Like a Prayer
The only rules that an artist goes by are the ones they set upon themselves. Artist’s criticize current hot topics and sometimes explore their context threw the use of their imaginations. One very fine example of this is Madonna’s Like a Prayer music video at the time that it was released it was a huge hit on the music charts. Still today “ Like a Prayer” is a very well known song. At the time of its release it was at the center of controversy with parent groups, church groups, mainstream media, and the government. Throughout the history of art this has been a reoccurring phenomenon that art can be offensive. My position within my group is I am a member of the media but I am neutral and am just interpreting the content and the implied context of the video.
Pepsi and Sears both wanted to pull advertisement support from MTV if they continued to show the video. One of the reasons for this was the controversial religious content and both companies are family oriented which they thought may have blemished their image. In the opening scenes of the video you see Madonna witness a crime and a black man coming to help the woman just in time when the cops get there. This man is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is totally innocent and in fact was trying to help the woman. So Madonna goes to the church where she prays to the black Jesus, which also looks like the hero from earlier. Jesus was an innocent and sin free person wrongly accused of crimes he did not commit. This is the connection that Madonna was trying to establish with the black Jesus.
When Madonna dozes off on the church pew she has a dream of being in Heaven and then she is in front of burning crosses. Burning crosses are usually synonymous with the KKK. Here again I believe Madonna was not promoting the KKK obviously but she was again trying to establish the assault on innocence and the context of the burning crosses and the black Jesus fits in perfectly. The cross burnings symbolize the backdrop of hate and what prejudice can create. In this case it was white men attacking a white woman and black man coming to save her. Then the white cops automatically assume since he is black that he did it.
In the excerpt from the novel Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Viramontes, the story of a girl named Estrella is described. Throughout the story, Estrella learns a valuable lesson from a box of tools. Viramontes’s use of the literary elements such as selection of detail, figurative language, and tone are implicated to display the development of Estrella’s character. Estrella, a very timid girl at first, eventually becomes confident and capable of succeeding in school after she learns a lesson from a box of tools.
... song entitled “Formation”. The filming took place in Los Angeles, but features references to Hurricane Katrina, with Beyoncé on top of a police car in a flooded street and later cuts to a man holding a newspaper with Martin Luther King Jr.’s face on it with the title “The Truth”. Later a young hooded boy dances in front of a line of police officers with their hands up before the video cuts to a graffitied wall with the words “stop shooting us “ tagged on it, at the end of the video the police car sunk with her on top. Not only did this song, bring awareness to the 10th anniversary of hurricane Katrina it also brought awareness to police brutality, racism, and the “black lives matter movement”. I stand with Lil Wayne, Beyoncé, the people of New Orleans and the countless others who are pushing for a change in the way minorities and the lower class citizen are treated.
Blacks have become the most often targeted in hate crime. The slightly covered moon might be an indirect indication that there will be some kind of transformation going on at night. For example, the little African boy grew horns at night which makes him look like a devil after catching a duck by the river or lake. There is a white man lifting a black woman on the end of this artwork. It looks like he is about to throw her off to ground. The broom she is carrying in her hand may be a signal that she is a witch for the reason that she is high up above the ground. To whites, these slaves from Africa are portrayed as devils in disguise and witches who practice witchcraft. In the 21st century, our society still has stereotypes remain rooted for African Americans. Those stereotypes are often created during our first impression. However, most of our negative stereotypes are created by advertising, media, and our society. The problem is we are developing an image of African Americans based on generalizations and not our encounter or first impression of them.
The depiction of Madonna and Christ is among the most ancient and common in Christian iconography and has an extensive number of variations because apart from its symbolic religious functions, it allows one to interpret the link between mother and child in many aspects. (8)
This song “Respect” by Aretha Franklin sheds light upon the topic of Women having equal rights as men.
Korsgaard defines practical identity as “a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions worth
Few authors can convey the raw emotion of world changing events in such a moving and simplistic fashion. Anna Ahkmatova is able to capture this through her almost tangible use of imagery. Her words can transport the reader through time, allowing them to feel the same pain and fear she survived in Russia during Stalin’s reign of terror. Ahkmatova’s writing is known for its abrupt changes in point of view, and quickly shifting stanzas. Her unique style and poetic form can be attributed to the emotional turmoil of the world changing events she and her nation suffered through; and her innate love for music, as found in Mussorgsky’s Russian Opera, Boris Godunov.
The Collapse: Richard Van Camp’s “On the Wings of this Prayer” and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag”
Music censorship has been a major problem plaguing America for over fifty years. In 1957, Elvis Pressley was only allowed to be filmed from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan show (Nuzum 1). Plenty of controversy has taken places between then and now, but more recently it has become much more prominent in the media, and people and organizations are beginning to actually take a stand. For example, Island Records (owned by Disney) dropped the Insane Clown Posse just after their release of The Great Milenko and MTV actually refused to play Madonna's video for Justify My Love because it was considered too sexually explicit (Nuzum 1).
In today's society, all types of music artists are expressing their views, opinions and feelings in their songs about what they see and what they know. This is on of the great things about this country, the freedom to express yourself. It is not fair, nor is it constitutional that music should be censored in anyway. It is not only rap music trying to be censored it is in all types of music. They are taking away their rights and it isn't fair. As reported in the New York Times. "Wall-Mart CD standards are Changing Pop Music", Wal-Mart and other large department stores sell CD's by your favorite artists which are not what your favorite artists originally created. Some retailers refuse to carry CDs with "Parental Advisory Stickers", a few also go as far as to make it known to labels and artists that if the CD comes to their shelves with a "dirty" word, a "controversial" cover, or an "explicit" lyric it will not be allowed on the shelves.
Throughout Jane Austen’s lifetime her most treasured relationship was with her older sister, Cassandra. Neither sister was married, though both were engaged, and their correspondences provide Austenian scholars with many insights. Austen began working on her manuscript for Sense and Sensibility the same year that Cassandra’s fiancé, Tom Fowle, passed away. Although there is no evidence to prove that Jane wrote Sense and Sensibility with her sister in mind, it is evident that she writes of a familial bond that she certainly felt with Cassandra. Many readers think of Jane Austen as a writer with a penchant for constructing sparkling, but Sense and Sensibility goes against that framework, providing us with underwhelming romances, overshadowed by the sisters’ relationship. Claudia Johnson argues that the reason Sense and Sensibility was not a huge critical success was because, “Pride and Prejudice was the model for what a novel by Jane Austen ought to be, and, set against that model, Sense and Sensibility came short,’ (Johnson, Sense and Sensibility, ix). As its title suggests, Sense and Sensibility is a novel about the intertwining of sense and sensibility in life, love and family. According to Cassandra, the roots of Sense and Sensibility can be found in an epistolary novel called Elinor and Marianne, which, most likely written in 1795, documented the correspondences between two sisters separated by marriage (Pride and Prejudice 407). In the late 1790s Austen rewrote this novel into the third person. Sense and Sensibility was met with positive criticism, specifically in the “British Critic” and the “Critical Review,” and was praised primarily for the characters and the morality which governed the story. Widely regarded as the most d...
Low self-esteem affects individual’s success. If the person is pessimistic and believe in external locus of control, then they think their life is totally controlled by other people. They totally depend on others because they believe that they themselves cannot change their life. They believe in luck rather than their hard work. So, people who have low self-esteem, who rely too heavily on validation from external sources can easily lose control over their lives and never get success in their life.
In psychology, the term self-esteem is used to describe a person's overall sense of self-worth or personal value. Self-esteem is often seen as a personality trait, which means that it has the need to be stable and enduring. Self-esteem can involve a variety of idea about the self, such as the appraisal of one's own appearance, beliefs, emotions and behaviors.
An individual can be motivated in so many ways, at times it can help the person in a positive way and sometimes it can be negative. One of the most important topics of motivations comes within us and involves our self-esteem. It reflects emotions and the way people seem themselves. Self-esteem is the mirror of one’s soul, what moves people as individuals and might allow them to proceed and better themselves. Another way to help with motivation is to seek professional help, talk to others and make the necessary changes to feel accepted.
A person’s self-esteem affects whom he or she chooses to associate with, and how they look at different social groups. This is important because then depending on our level of self-esteem, it essentially tells us how we choose to associate with certain groups and not others, or that we choose to not choose at all. This affects how the population develops relationships with one another. Those who think more highly of themselves (in terms of aspects such as race, socioeconomic status, intelligence, etc.) tend to be very protective of those within their social group, and discriminatory against those who are not, so it is harder as a society to develop relationships unless someone meets certain qualities. This could lead to conflict amongst social groups.