(Piece: http://dma.sjsu.edu/art103/t_stebbins/FinalFlash/SongSpeaksToMe.html )
(Original Proposal: https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AUCeAfy0HJq7ZGN6c3Q3ZGJfODJ0emJzYjdmaA )
THIS SONG SPEAKS TO ME
By Travis Stebbins
This Song Speaks To Me is an artistic exploration of the meaning and context of modern popular music through the means of an existing popularity system and the use of several processes of analysis. Specifically, it is an art piece that attempts to explore the meanings (or lack thereof) of the most frequently used words in pop music at any given time— in this case, November 18, 2011.
Those songs are:
We Found Love (feat. Calvin Harris) by Rihanna
Rumor Has It/Someone Like You by the Cast of Glee ("Someone Like You" only counted once since the original by Adele is also on this list)
Take Care ft. Rihanna by Drake
It Will Rain by Bruno Mars
Sexy and I know it by LMFAO
Good Feeling by Flo Rida
The Motto (ft. Lil Wayne) by Drake
You Da One by Rihanna
Someone Like You by Adele
Ideally, the songs that are the most popular would influence the behavior of those it reaches in a positive way (e.g, contributing to society, treating their fellow man with care and love, treating others equally, etc) or at least explore a subject in depth. To test this, I used a word-counting site (with slightly modified words/letters to include each word regardless of its capitalization or punctuation and accounted for the top 23 relevant words (excluding such repetitive words as "a" or "and"), including "I" and "you" due to their immense prevalence.
Initially the piece did not have a specific 'physical' or aesthetic 'shape'; at the time I had hoped that the results of the word count would show the kind of direction the piece could go. Would the top words be about love? The club? Sex? Breakups? Sadness? Joy? If they took to a specific direction, they would provide an illuminating view on the general context of popular music's general message(s).
...it turns out that even with some of the more redundant/less necessary words out of the picture, next to nothing could be discerned from the most frequently used words in popular music on November 18, 2011. A vague sense of selfish desires and/or sexuality may have peeked through, but in general the 23 most frequently used words said next to nothing about the human condition, love, lust, or just about anything of particular use.
Of course, this does not mean that nothing of value was gained! This piece took on a sarcastic direction of its own with the discovery that pop music doesn't mean anything; I decided to take the piece and turn it into a "Pop Music Generator" with a generic Roland TR-808 drum beat and use samples of the most frequently used lyrics from my data set so that any participant may make progress in becoming the next Pop producer by producing large amounts of absolute drivel and musical/lyrical garbage.
(UPDATE: As of December 19th 2011... several of those tracks are STILL on top of the Singles Charts for iTunes. Perhaps there is commentary to be found in that?)
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