Thoughts on Mercy with Music

Taylor Tschida

Lora Strey

Composition 101-12

9 October 2014

Some Thoughts on Mercy with Music

        "Some Thoughts on Mercy" is an article or a memoir if you will about some stories of  this black man's life and how he still has to deal with racism in present day. There was one story that I always wondered if it really happened in the real world, it was a story where Ross Gay got pulled over for a reason he did not know. But anyway Ross told himself that he wouldn't be scared when the police officer came up to his window unlike normal because it's always a tense moment when a black man has confrontation with a police officer (Gay). Ross goes in depth about the routine stop but then the cop continues to ask if he any drugs or guns in the car with no real reason at all, except that he a black male. What Ross is saying is that he a respected associate professor at Indiana University and why must he be subject to general racism for a random stop. Also why are not only cops but other people still holding black people to a lower standard in this day and age.

       Reading about Ross has brought up a few questions of how this same standard could be the same in the music business. They're a lot of black people in the music business like producers, artists, and musicians. So the questions I asked were: Do black rappers think they get treated unfairly with the law? How are black musicians treated differently than white musicians? and Does being black or white have an effect on sales?

          There was an article I found about what rappers think of the criminal justice system. It says that although rappers use lyrics that portray cops as the enemy and how they exercise their power, that those communities are subject to more profiling and unfair treatment from the justice system (Wade). But blacks are more likely to be arrested and sentenced rather than whites, regardless of crime rate.

       Another article that a group member found was from the L.A. Times about how The NAACP's best estimate is that black recording artists are responsible for generating 25%- 30% of the total revenues earned by the recording industry. It also goes on to talk about how the blacks buy 11.4% of the records, tapes and music videos sold annually, according to the report (McDougal).
      
       So clearly the racism is still a very big part of the music industry and I don't think it is changing anytime soon. I always hear about stories of how police officers try and aggravate black people when it is simply unnecessary and unneeded. It's not right how black people in music and just black people in general are treated unfairly in their life when people know it's wrong but do nothing about it.


Gay, Ross. "Some Thoughts on Mercy." N.p., n.d. Web.

McDougal, Dennis. "Racism In Music Industry Alleged." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 24 Mar. 1987. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.

Wade, Lisa. "What Rappers Are Actually Saying About the Police." Mic. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.




 



               

Next Time Someone Says Women Aren't Victims Of Sexual Harassment, Show Them This/Music -Priscilla Yang

The post we looked at this week was a comic strip geared towards women being victims of sexual harassment. The comic strip focuses on how women are victims daily but people just don’t seem to notice it because it has become a social norm. The author of the strip talks about how sexual harassment towards women are both done physically and verbally and how most power in society is claimed by men. The comic strip gives many examples of it in the work force, relationships, public property ownership and even in common jokes made popular today. It also focuses on the power inequality between men and women today. The comic strip says an issue with mens’ attitude towards women is that men “choose to insult challenging or uncooperative women by dismissing their attractiveness” (Tickld). The real problem that the author was trying to get at in this comic strip was that the real problem is not only the men who treat women like this, but also women who allow this to happen to them or other women. The author’s main purpose was not to accuse anyone of sexual harassment towards women but to simply give notice about the growing problem.

My group and I said that we see this epidemic problem growing in the music industry. We questioned how many female singers do become successful without the use of sexual or physical appearance and whether or not songs that objectify or portray women as lesser become more popular than songs that don’t. Without doing any research, my group and I believe that there is a correlation between women being victims of sexual harassment and music itself today.

How many people honestly see ugly female singers today in the music industry? The biggest and most renown female vocalist are beautiful and sexy women. Let me give you a few examples of females who come to mind when I talk about beautiful, sexy, successful women: Beyonce, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, Madonna.. Should I keep going? When you think of a female artist you think of an individual who is strong and beautiful but what if I talked about Susan Boyle? She’s not the most attractive looking and successful artist but she is most definitely known or used as a comedy joke because of her looks. Sadly, some people only know of her because of her looks. But on the other hand, how many female singers use their looks to have become successful? An online blog post said that “if a female singer isn’t completely ugly, then labels and media take that and run with it” (Carroll). Lana Del Rey was shown in a magazine cover fully nude only covering up with her own body parts while four other male artist were fully clothed.

Popular songs have an impact on what our culture defines as beautiful/ugly or in this case, right/wrong. The message that the popular song portrays is usually seen as cool because it’s popular due to a lot of people enjoying listening to it. An article written in Brown University Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter states that, “It forms the background of car rides and social gatherings, and it also informs the adolescent about the adult world through the lens of the artists’ lives, language and role modeling” (Brown). Teens at a young age learn that harassing a girl about her looks becomes normal because it was in a popular song. In Chris Brown’s song Loyal, the hoes (females) weren’t loyal so they gain the title of a hoe. Which for many girls in any context is not a pleasant name or term of endearment. Young girls learn that it seems ‘cool’ to dress like women in music videos because that video or song was popular. Thus the vicious cycle of sexual harassment continues, especially in the music industry.

Works Cited

Brown. "New research explores effects of rap music on adolescents." Brown University Child &

Adolescent Behavior Letter 19.6 (2003): 1. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 16 March 2010.

Carroll, Grace. "Women in the Music Industry: Chewed up and Spat Out?"GIGWISE.com.

Gigiwise.com, 14 Nov. 2014. Web. 02 Oct. 2014.

Tickld.com. “Next Time Someone Says Women Aren’t Victims Of Harassment, Show Them

This.” Tickld.com. Tickld, 09 Aug. 2014. Web. 02 Oct. 2014.