Hi guys i would be really thankful if you could let me know what you think of this two question. i need for my Media exam.
[size=150]The influences of rock music and the contemporary rock
artist Marilyn Manson upon the youth of Today[/size]
Do you think the video could promote violence? What kind of person or things is influential these days? Why do you think they are influential?
thank you
no one has listened to Marilyn Manson in 3 years so this question is disingenious
The influence - M.M is a channel for so much teen angst, depression, nihilism, stupidity. The culture of victimhood and cool-morbidity! Not too different from Alice Cooper - the rebel, the anti-anti-anti-man, the shock-rock-cock-in-the-face-walk!
A clown, a charlatan, about as demonic as a pink poddle! A rich bastard! Not exactly a more sore - so many hysterical american suburbanites must hold Mr M.M. responsible for all the soical ills of today…but we all know why that is! The French Revolution!
Who has infleunce these days - Celebrities! It sounds so unimaginative and indeed it is…but Popular music icons, movie heros, televison characters - in short - The Unreal-real population of the Media: are the predominant influence, wearing with honour the badge of present fashion!
But is this a bad or good thing? Is their influence morally corrupting! (I hope so) There is so much depression about these days…i think your average kid isn’t even aware of how little these CELEBRITIES INFULENCE HIM…they can’t even be bothered to notice they don’t care.
“You need people like me so you can point your fucking finger!”
(forgive me for such a superficial reply - my faculties have regressed, i used to philosopise)
Lost soul,
I would draw your attention to the forum guidelines
iii) We are not here to do your homework
If you haven’t done your essay due in tomorrow, you’ve come to the wrong place. Organise your time better, read some books, copy someone elses essay. Whatever you do, just don’t come here.
A
ILP Staff
Oops…thankfully, my reply as ever, was totally useless anyway…
I think the music industry is one facet of a many faceted pyramid of tripartite ecological conditions so precise that they are borderline suspicious of conspiracy.
Work, sex, and family figure, are the rough three base motives for all particular ethical and moral agendas and behavior. Everything is oriented around them.
To express these there must be a medium. These mediums are such things as music, drama, athletics, sexual prowess, masculinity/feminism, and career.
For the adolescents, the major expression is sexual and gender related, achieving masculinity/femininity, is the occupying motive in the first eighteen or so years.
Most if not all of the sexual identity, as well as the amplitude of individuality and independence- the rebellious and declarative spirit of a teenager who dares to break rules and cross limits- is passed through the art industries and clothing industries.
A kid, nowadays, does not beg Repunzal to let down her hair, or beckon to Juliet. He just buys some clothes and listens to some music…to sign-on to an indenity described in the lyrics of the songs, themes of the sit-coms, styles of the clothing, shape of the body, hair, etc. Listening to certain kind of music says alot about one sexually as well.
Marlyn Manson is a lucky prostitute who gets paid well to prepare, for greedy corporate vocation, the way for commercialism to boom through product sales in the fabrication of identites. Manson is your basic:
“middle-class white kid being scrutinized by other races, his parents, authority figures in general, an indifferent God, his unfaithful trailer-park girlfriend named “Rhonda,” a low wage job washing dishes, pressure to decide about college, and otherwise hostile and discomforting events that, coupled with the end of puberty and a few scars from radical skate-boarding, make one a restless person who wants to wear black clothing and go to Star-Trek conventions after hanging out at the comic book store Friday’s with gothic friends, and that girl from school who wears the ice-blue contacts and spiked dog-collar”
…type of persona generated from that specific angle of music and theme. The identity is created and behavior norms are established in conduct…kids act like their favorite rock-stars or rap-stars or movie-stars, etc.
The teen age years are the most malleable and music style is one of the strongest influences on personality when constructing an identity of beliefs and behaviors.
Great analysis detrop…
I listen to just about every form of music under the glorious Sun!! I am no long adolescent (at least not physically, 
) Jazz, classical, electronica, world music, anything obscure…
detrop: Work, sex, and family figure, are the rough three base motives for all particular ethical and moral agendas and behavior. Everything is oriented around them.
What a limited moral horizon so much of the world has…
detrop’s basically done your work for you (and how) but I’ll add a couple of contextualising comments. Manson came to fame with a name that combined two epic symbols of US culture, Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson. It’s a reworking of the old romanticist notion of nature - the scarily beautiful - that in their early days also provided the rest of the band with stage names. For the whole ‘sanitised rebellion’ schtick that the band (and their promoters) adopted this was ideal - the threat of something dark but the reassurance of something safe combined into one.
The band came to the fore in the mid 1990s as I remember and as such could be seen as part of the whole pre-millenial doommongering (real word?) that comes with any moment of significant change. The question ‘what is a human?’ became ‘what does it mean to be a human in the 21st century?’ and Manson’s answer is ‘a scarily beautiful thing’.
Basically the band, their image, their PR, their ostensible ‘philosophy on life’ was sufficiently ambiguous and contradictory not exclude sections of the market but sufficiently ‘of a type’ to betray the context which led to them becoming popular.
Selling middle class (and upper working class kids) safe forms of rebellion has probably been a more profitable endeavour than selling them the mainstream for the best part of 3 decades. Punk music was, ironically, a manufactured pop movement. As was Heavy Metal then Grunge then post-rock and the whole Mosher thing of the mid-late 90s.
Even the Rolling Stones bore the hallmark of safe rebellion for people who want to feel, en masse, like individuals. The Doors on the other hand were just drug addled and pretentious, though I do really like their music.
Of course all the bands existed before be signed to labels - and their music was perhaps more authentically “rebelling”- i.e. it was less aware of what it was doing - it was only, after the event, that this rebelling becomes systematic, marketed, controlled…tamed…
But it was born out of genuine affliction…im sure…genuine - middle-class angst! I think a lot of the Manson thing was a reaction to the stuffy conservatism that permeates American society, with its chornic Evangelism, and alos, the “plain old soft suburban christians”…It was a wee musical and asetheic attack on “safe moral cushions” that all of American middle class was sitting on…
Drug abuse, self-harm, uber-cynicism - are not necessarily “safe forms of rebellion” - perhaps the safe form of rebellion would be “to become a Christian” - that does spin rebellion on its head.
I’ve no idea. Perhaps the band originally (consciously or otherwise) adopted these safe modes of rebellion because it
a) got them popularity locally
b) gave them a better chance of being picked up by a label
An attack that had been made a dozen times before and as such was an established route of rebellion. Were Marilyn Manson doing anything that Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne hadn’t done before?
Also it’s all too easy to rebel against a set of images (those of suburban evangelism) by simply opposing one element (evangelism, to make it into suburban satanism) and creating another set of images. It’s like the red and the blue of Merseyside football.
Well, if your parents are liberal agnostics or atheists then becoming a Christian is rebellion. Speaking as a person whose parents are liberal agnostics…
Drug abuse isn’t safe, self-harm is safe because either you cut enough to bleed (on a fatty part of a limb, usually) or you really do damage to yourself in which case you are beyond self-harm and into suicide attempts. I’ve met so many people who’ve done self-harm and freely admit it that I’m convinced that for the most part it’s completely safe.
Uber-cynicism - feeling neither highs nor lows. Very safe, very conservative. The ‘last man’ indeed…
Lost Soul,
The rule about homework is fucking stupid cause anyone can disguise a post, what’s important here is what you write. I don’t mind discussing this with you… as homework or not we’d be doing it anyways, but to do that you need to bring something to the table as well. Tell us what you think about the topic… and we’ll let you know what we think .
Btw… Manson’s guitarist is really fucking good.