Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Soundtrack of my life

Before getting my list out, I just wanted to inform that, being a person who has lived in Korea for the first 14 years of my life, not surprisingly, a soundtrack of my life will contain some Korean and Japanese music. So don't be startled if the song is singing in a language that you do not know. The order is: title of the song - artist.

1. Oasis - Do As Infinity
(http://youtu.be/KgdlbhxCEEM - embedding the video is disabled)
This song, I would say, kept me under control during the age range that most people would call as a "phase." I'm usually into alternative/punk rock that are usually very pumpy and somewhat loud, but for some reason I really liked to listen to this song during my middle school. Still, I never really got to see the music video of the song, which I am kind of glad that I didn't, because I feel like I would've gone into the "phase" if I got to see the music video of this. It's just weirdly creepy and I feel like I would've become very emotional if I got to see this when I was a middle school kid. I still like the song though.


2. Link - L'arc~en~ciel

This song pretty much represents my high school life because I was really into Japanese animation during this time and I was especially crazy about the animation called Fullmetal Alchemist. I dare to say that I have dedicated 2+ years of my life during high school, watching and doing some other fan-related activities such as writing fan-fictions or drawing fan-arts. You can go ahead and judge me on that and I won't care because I am so not ashamed of myself during that time, and I actually quite treasure that time.


3. Romantic Cat (낭만고양이) - Cherry Filter

This is probably the only kind of Korean music that I listened to and actually liked during middle school, while 95% of my friends were going crazy on some idols and their "a cappella" or dance music that always sang about a girl that they love, would die for, or got heartbroken. This song does not sing a single thing about love but it literally sings about a cat that dreams about going to an ocean and basically living a heavenly life for a cat, never having to go through garbage cans and just having endless fish for oneself. I really liked its up-beat rhythm and light lyrics, along with a very talented voice of the vocal. I actually got to like the main vocal a lot more by hearing a story about how she became a singer, which I got to know long after becoming the band's fan. Long story short, she was a young middle school teacher but she quit her job and became a singer, because that was what she truly loved to do, and I'm glad that she became a singer.


4. Poprocks & Coke - Green Day

I cannot not include a song by Green Day. Green Day is my favorite band and I had a real hard time picking just one song by them, because I really like many of their songs and I simply couldn't pick just one song. But I picked this song because I think it somewhat represents my life because I'm quite of a creeper (as in creeping other people out in a random way) and someone referred to this song as the "cutest stalker song" so I thought it worked out well in that context.


5. Happily Ever After - Shoko Nakagawa (中川翔子)

Probably the song that I listened to the most, and loved the most. I still do. I highly doubt that I'll ever listen to a song more than I did for this song. It also relates to my high school life and an animation that has greatly influenced my life. I think the reason that I like this song so much is because this song was used as the background music for all the epic scenes in the animation and it just recaps all the energy and many other strong, even motivational feelings that I felt when I was watching the scene.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Field Trip to Library

Since my topic was based on relatively current issue, I thought that I'll have to find something that's somewhat relating to the issue that I plan to discuss about. But I still didn't know what could be a good keyword or how to vary the keywords so I could specifically find a book source. So I went to the College Library and asked for help, after breifly explaning what I needed to do. After couple of searching with keyword "music" and "critisism", we pinned on a new keyword, "bubblegum (music)" and finally found a book. Unfortunately the book wasn't for the criticism of bubblegum music but more of a praise to the bubblegum music. Still, the librarian suggested to me that there could be a section talking about criticism and that I could look at the references made in that section. I also thought that this could be a good counterargument source, or just another point of view that portrays pop music as something that's not too devastating to the music industry.

The book was right at the College Library and the floor that I was at, so having the call number, it wasn't that hard to find the book. When I found the book I pulled the book out and briefly looked at the contents. It appeared that it wasn't a book by an author but an edited book with the collection of multiple writings. There was a title saying "informal" history of bubblegum music in the introduction, and one of the titles in the section "Up Close and Personal" was "I Hate Bubblegum!", which I assumed to be a criticizing piece. The books around were also talking about rather "new" music, or the music that started to get popular around slightly before my generation. The titles actually sounded very interesting that I kind of wanted to read personally, just for fun. Few of the titles were: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno, and All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America.

The book that I found and checked out was:
Cooper, Kim, and David Smay, ed. Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001. Print.

Its call number is: ML 3534 B795 2001

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Fowels and Advertisement

Zoosk is one of the online-date searching website, such as Match.com and eHarmony. The advertisement is popularly referred as "Man versus dart," or as a banned commercial, which was actually banned in Europe only and was broadcasted in the US. And I know it is broadcasted in the US because I saw this commercial during winter break when I was staying at my friend's house. The advertisement starts with two women, who seem like to be at a workplace and looking at Zoosk, just running into a "cute" guy. The woman who was looking over the shoulder says that she is more into the atheletic type, and the other woman who was actually searching for a date asks, "Didn't your friend set you up with an 'athelete'?" Then there's a quick flashback of the woman's date with the "athelete," which is quite a terrible date. The guy is not an athelete, nor atheletic because apparently he thinks that dart is a "real sport," performing his darting skill with a very odd shout and a stretch, shooting a random guy's chest with his dart who was standing somewhat close to the actual dartboard. This dart-hitting-a-person part was the reason for banning in Europe. After that short flashback, the woman tells her friend that she would just stick to Zoosk's ratings, with her iffy voice that strongly suggesting that it's better to look at the information in Zoosk than to hope that the set-up date would turn out to meet all the standards that the person is looking for.

What makes this advertisement unique is that, unlike the two example websites' adertisements, which mainly shoots for the need for affiliation and forms a lot of aesthetic comfortness, Zoosk's advertisement shoots for something different. It contains much more touch of humor, and evokes the "negative" emotion by showing the viewer the possible disasters that can occur by using other sites or sources for a date than Zoosk. But I think the humor kind of backfired in this advertisement because when I was trying to remember this ad, I only remembered the flashback part, which was hilarious, and not actually the name of the website, Zoosk. But for a short-term, I would say that this strategy is very effective since it indeed leaves a very strong impression and if I were a person who was trying to find a date on website, I would've definitely tried Zoosk just for the huge laugh that it gave me. Also, I've ran into several ads made by eHarmony and Match.com, and because their ad strategies are so similar and are not changing their style much, I find it rather boring and unoriginal. Therefore in that way, I think Zoosk did a really good job for being different, and in a good way too.




This is the example commercial that I could find for eHarmony. I hope this could explain what I meant by boring or unoriginal: