Hip Hop

The video we watched in class was eye opening. Music is a fascinating topic. Most everyone has some type of music preference. It is interesting to watch opinions change over ones lifetime. For example many children start listening to kid and Disney songs. Then they grow out of that faze and typically are heavily influenced by family and friends. They will listen to what every the parents, brothers, or sisters are listening to. After that faze most people start to find opinions in music. Most people will discover who their favorite band, music, genre etc. After that a person typically matures and changes their music preference once again. Watching the hip-hop video I was thinking about the age group of people that listen to that type of music. I am not sure but I would guess it ranges somewhere around 17-35? I have found not a lot of young people like that style nor do older adults. I personally do like hip-hop but I find the background and the typical artist fascinating. The need to fit in as a tough black male artist is overwhelming. It would be nice to see more diversity especially in the music genres. We need to get over the cute blonde for pop stars, the cowboys in wranglers for our country stars, and the black male with tattoos for our rap and hip-hop. Music can make people feel and act certain ways. I think if we had more diversity in the music industry there would be more listeners to different types of music.

Valentines Day

Don’t get me wrong I had a wonderful Valentine’s Day. It was full of fun activities, good food, along with good company. Every Valentine’s Day my husband and I have a little tradition of doing some of the same things. It is a fun relaxing day of all of our favorite things. What is not so fun is what it does to the bank account. I cannot believe how much we fork out on these made up holidays. I heard in my marketing class that more couples break up the month of February than any other month. This got me thinking of the expectations that people have. My teacher previously worked in the candy/chocolate business and what better time to buy chocolates than for your special someone. And if you don’t have a special someone it is a good time to spend money on yourself. This holiday has people buying gifts, doing activities, and going out for a fancy dinner. What a great hallmark idea. Spending hundreds because it is a day we are supposed to express our love for the people that matter most in our lives. Advertising and society play such a large role. The United States has another holiday to celebrate and of course to spend. I find it so fascinating how much we drop to make these special days worthwhile by spending. If you are not spending then you have to deal with the potential break up. Breaking up over not saying I love you with gifts and goodies on one day is crazy. People should look at their relationship on all the other days to see how much someone cares about or loves you.

You choose.

When I was searching in the gender ads I came upon some pretty rediculas ads. I was shocked just seeing the categories genderads has. It sad that we can classify so many bad things in our advertising world. My first example was this Bed Head product called dumb blonde. I find it sad that companies can label their products these negative conotations and figure out that it sells. They have a product and then a picture to accuratly represent the product. What is this really saying for females?

I am asuming that this is a very old advertisment. And that ketsup would not think about putting an advertisment on like this in this day and age. It so degrading to think that they are advertising that women are so helpless that they once upon a time could not even open katsup. Really? I understand that some of the jars, platic, and wrap are not always the easiest to open. But seriously it is not the impossible.

I went to another section on the genderads and found this under the noramlized woman. It was sad for me to find that this close up ad of this face needs to be displayed as needing all of these different things to be pretty or even normal. She has a stunned or even a dumb face on which does not help the cause for women. Making women and men think tha women to be normal should own all these products and change their appearance to a superficial look. How do we always end up falling for this stuff?

Defining Ourselves

All this talk about what people do to define ourselves has got me thinking. I am going to disagree with some of the comments that people have made in class on how it is not important. Defining ourselves is important I have lived 21 years and have continuously been attempting to develop me. It is a lot of work to create a good identity that everyone can recognize you with. I have found very few people that are similar. We are all so unique and I find it important to know who I am. This is different than judging someone on what they do or believe. I may not agree with everything someone does but in the end it doesn’t matter. When I have a baby girl chances are there will be overwhelming amounts of soft pink. I am okay with that. It does not mean that she won’t have cute yellow, green, even blue outfits but what she wears should clearly define that she is a girl. Frankly I don’t want their identity mistaken. Identifying yourself as female or male should be encouraged. Men and Women are not the same. We use different products go to different bathrooms there are differences. Not understanding where you lay in society can create large amounts of confusion. I do not see anything wrong with creating a “girl” identity for a baby girl. To me it makes sense.