Cultural Prescription!

So let's see...

Cultural Prescription...

I believe I will go with the "Special Knowledge" category.

So, I believe I have at least SOME special knowledge when it comes to music. I was in band for multiple years, from 7th grade in middle school, all the way to senior year in high school. I don't want to sound arrogant, but I enjoy knowing or at least having known the technicalities of music. Now when I say technicalities, I just mean the basics. From something as simple as common or 4/4 time to having to memorize all 12 major scales and dealing with such time signatures as 7/4 and 5/8.

            I believe having known the basics of music, or knowing the basics of music will change your life at least one way. Once you realize that you are learning music, it doesn't pertain strictly to the music in band, but you can go throughout the rest of your life taking apart each song you hear. It may seem difficult for some songs, and easier for others, but that's life. Once you begin "gutting" each song you listen to, you realize that some songs are way too similar. One instance is "Soul Sister" by Train compared with " I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz. I'm not 100% sure, but they share about three fourths of the same exact chords given one song might have one or two more than the other. This can be culturally viable due to noticing trends within each culture's music. On a side note, music is more of a language than anything else, in fact I believe when going for a doctorate you can study musical composition for your foreign language, but once again, I'm not 100% sure. Basically, I think that when you learn music and what makes it up, understanding people of other cultures or ethnicities will be easier.

             Notice I said nothing about having to like the other culture's music, it's not a bad thing to like it, but it's not necessary to have to like something in order to understand it. Take American pop music and compare it to J-Pop(Japanese Pop), you will notice some similarities and will most likely notice the differences. In my experience, I've realized that rhyming isn't as important in J-pop as it is in American Pop. You can obviously tell when a rhyme is about to come up in american pop music, but in j-pop, I believe they really look for meanings more than words, hence a lack of rhyming. If you do listen to j-pop just to see if you can hear any differences, you will most likely get lost in confusion at how fast they can annunciate a number of syllables, but in continuously listening, you will also notice the flow it has. It obviously has a flow that is different from american pop, but you can comprehend the flow. Since you can comprehend the flow, you can connect to a different culture through means of likewise understanding.

I feel like this is not going to be the best blog out there, but that doesn't mean I won't try. I hope that this will interest you in reading my other blog posts in the future and maybe the new ones will make sense. If it didn't interest you, sorry for wasting your time.

I can't think of a witty closer, so yeah.