Rosa's Music Portfolio

Content: 4/4   Individual Rationale: 1/1 Presentation: 2/2 Use of Time/Effort: 4/4 Growth: 1/1 I have always been bad at technology but I feel as if I put in the extra effort and even looked at youtube tutorials to get a portfolio that was somewhat aesthetically pleasing and functioning, I think I improved my blogging skills tremendously seeing as a started at 0. I tried to stick to a theme - relating what we learned in class to my own personal struggles, almost as a motif for how I use music as self-expression, growing and learning from my own reflections as well each lesson. Final Reflection      Going into this project I had my initial doubts about how well our project would turn out. After our first zoom meeting, I knew our team was gonna do well. We immediately started throwing out ideas about what we wanted to do and we all communicated really well. We had a group chat that we talked in regularly and a shared google drive folder where we collaborated tog...

            Just like in last week's reflection when I discussed Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston is one of my top comfort artists, and my mother and I both idolize. I can remember back when she died my mother crying in her room and every year when the day came around my mother became a little sadder each time. I was too young to understand at the time how the music industry her, a black woman in the white pop world which eventually led to her sad untimely death. She was another artist who helped me stay true to my own identity as a black woman.       Even in Marla Shelton's article,  Whitney is Every Women?: Cultural Politics and the Pop Star, she describes Houston as a "symbolic mulatto icon" and a representation of the integration of white and black America. She had so much pressure placed upon her shoulders during a sensitive time after the Civil Rights movement. She was both rejected and accepted from the black and white...

      In Anthony Helibut's Aretha: How She Got Over, Seventy Years of Soul, he mentions Aretha having stage fright and starting off awkward and aloof in her performances. She was such a powerhouse, to imagine someone as insanely talented as her with stage fright is unfathomable. She has always been a comfort artist of mine and this tidbit made me like her even more because I've always had anxiety especially when it comes to public speaking. In Helibut's article was interesting to see the progression of Franklin from a young girl afraid to speak her mind and stand up to a woman who was confident in her own skin and not afraid to speak or sing her opinions.      I always admired Aretha Franklin when I was growing up, she was one of the artists I would turn to when I felt like I was losing myself. I vividly remember my mother blasting her music through the house when she would clean on the weekends singing along to "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Wom...

       A common theme of black popular music in America can be defined as "black roots, white fruits", in which black musicians are left out of mainstream music but the fruits of their labor and artistry are reaped by their white counterparts. This can be seen in multiple instances in which black innovation was taken by and popularized by white artists, a famous current example since the Elvis movie came out is the multiple songs that were popularized as covers by Elvis Presley such as "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thorton, "Money Honey" by The Drifters, and "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by Lloyd Prince. In Reebee Garafalo's Crossing Over from Black Rythym & Blues to White Rock & Roll,  the music industry limits the recognition of black artists.  Black music is the backbone of all genres of music from country to rock and roll and has even been placed into smaller categories recently like rap and hip-hop when it's always been so much more than t...

     Double consciousness is a theoretical term categorized by internal conflicts spurred by an oppressive society and was initially mentioned in W.E.B Dubois's autobiographical work, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois discussed the African American experience of looking at the self through a racist white lens, therefore, developing double consciousness. I always found that music is what helped keep that part of me alive when my environment was trying to snuff it out. As seen in my previous reflection, I was in a constant identity crisis due to my upbringing in a primarily white neighborhood and there was nothing that tied me to my "blackness".      While reading chapter 4 of Olly Wilson's Issues in African American Music, Negotiating Blackness in Western Art Music , it was interesting to see that a duality that existed within African American music was similar to one that existed within me, having a multitude of musical influences on my upbringing. It...

A podcast on behalf of the woman's rights group snddxsign · MUSC 2101 Womanists United Podcast ** image by Shania Rimpel

I focused on the argument analysis of our songs and the message all the artists were trying to convey, here are some of my notes!