Choose a song by any artist that you’d like to write about in its cultural context. The song can come from any culture or country.

Assignment Question

For this essay, you will look at ways in which music can embody, recalibrate, and articulate aspects of our culture.

Choose a song by any artist that you’d like to write about in its cultural context. The song can come from any culture or country.

You should choose a song that is rich enough to sustain the writing of a number of good pages and its significance beyond the immediate musical context though the song itself need not be directly political or offer a self-conscious statement of cultural importance. In fact, writing about music that doesn’t have any particular ambition beyond being a good song often works best.

The essay you write will be an exploration of the cultural context for the song you choose.

-Choose one song to write about -Include specific examples from your song (translate if needed) -Include specific examples from The World in Six Songs (two quotes minimum) -Include specific examples from at least two reputable outside sources (sources other than The World in Six Songs) -Sources related to the artist and/or songwriter would be good as well as sources related to the context or time period that the song was written in. For example, if you were writing about Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way,” you might consider what major decisions were ruled upon by the Supreme Court. -Format in MLA and with Times New Roman 12pt font (minimum 5 pages).

These are a couple quotes you can incorporate into the essay: “Songs also have a rhythm, of course, and this constrains the syllables that can be comfortably squeezed into a given amount of time and thus again limits the possible words when we don’t recall each and every one of them,” (Levitin, 160). “Perhaps this is simple because music and brains co-evolved precisely to preserve this property, perhaps because music by its nature is less concerned with facts and more concerned with feelings (and perhaps feelings are harder to fake than supposed facts are),” (Levitin, 141).