Choosing a Theme

This week in American Studies we started working on a little project known as Junior Theme. This paper will take up much of fourth quarter and is a major part of our grade, thus it's probably a good idea that we choose a topic that we're really interested in. Personally, I knew that the general topic wouldn't be very hard to choose. Two things that I am really interested in are music and technology, thus I quickly narrowed my search for a question down to these two topics.

From there it got difficult. I had no idea what my "why" question should be. I thought that I could do something about music technology, electronic music, rock music, Apple computers and how they're taking over the world, but I just couldn't think of a question that would not only be interesting to me but also had a history in America. After thinking some more, I finally came up with one topic that is truly one of the most controversial topics in pop culture right now: hip-hop music.

Portraying themes of violence, sex and excess, hip-hop was the perfect topic. It had its roots in race music, such as jazz, blues and R&B, yet was a modern topic that has two very distinct sides to the argument of whether it is healthy for our community or not. Because of this argument, it led me to the perfect why question: Why does hip-hop influence people's perceptions about African-American culture?

While it was a difficult process, I found a topic that I am really interested in and I cannot wait to research it further.

UPDATE: Turns out my teachers didn't like that question, they wanted something more honed in and focused, which makes sense. I have now changed my question to "why did hip-hop become part of mainstream music?" This will be very interesting to research and I am very excited to write this paper.

Why is it Only the Drama?

This week in American Studies, we have been talking about racial tokenism,  and specifically how it applied to major network dramas. Our teachers have even said that tokenism is only present in network dramas, because other types of shows (sitcoms, reality shows), follow different rules. 

I began to think of what those different rules were. I mean, all types of shows are for the purpose of entertainment, not just network dramas, so shouldn't they all follow basically the same rules? Well, in the same way that we looked at cast pictures of network dramas, I looked at a cast picture of the ABC sitcom "Modern Family". 

This clearly would never be the cast picture for a network drama. In the photo there is a gay couple, a family where the husband is twice the age of the wife (and the wife is hispanic), and what we would call a "traditional" family. However, when one watches the show, it really pokes fun at all of these topics. It pokes fun at the fact that the families are different or dysfunctional, and that one of the women is latino. 

We also looked at the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, which does the exact same thing. They make fun of tokenism and all of the elements that you cannot just make a joke at in a network drama. 

So is that the answer? The difference between the two and tokenism is that one can make fun of it and the other one can't? I am not sure but it is a very interesting subject.