Introduction
"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams." — Willie Wonka
In 2011, Katy Perry was honored by American Music Awards with a Special Achievement Award for Having Five Singles at Number 1. This award was a special achievement because she had been the first female artist to tie this record with the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. These five singles were released from the commercially successful album Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection. 1 Building on the popularity of her album, she followed up with the 2011-12 California Dreams tour, which eventually was captured in the Katy Perry: Part of Me, The Movie.
As I sat and watched this movie I couldn't help asking myself as an educated consumer and educator: what are the messages this film presents? On a surface level Part of Me is a combination of performance-based music video, interviews, and archival footage that follows the dream, career path of gospel singer Katy Hudson. Raised by evangelists, Hudson moves to Los Angeles to pursue stardom in the eyes of the global music industry and of young-adults around the world.
Throughout the film Perry is repeatedly captured telling the audience to follow their dreams and, most importantly, to be themselves. I wholeheartedly think this is a great lesson for young adults, but Perry is anything that resembles reality. Fantastically enough, her concert is a mash-up of Alice in Wonderland trapped in the world only Willie Wonka could confection. Full of vibrant color and themed with candy, Perry's film nonetheless left me wondering about its subtext. Beneath the spectacle, what was this text reinforcing about stardom? About the role of gender? About the representation of love and respect? About the nature of religion in America?
These questions, in turn, raised some broader issues in my mind about how my students read visual texts in consumer culture. More specifically, I want them to take the skills they have acquired throughout the year to examine texts that are closer to home: music videos. Teenage Dreams and aspirations constantly compete with nightmarish fears and anxieties. Media, more specifically popular culture, often reflect and amplify
that ambivalence. A media subtext often promotes an emotional war between the negative and positive aspects of consumer culture and our interaction with it. As a culminating project students will produce an argument that applies their growing knowledge of rhetorical appeals, rhetorical situations, narrative structures, visual frameworks, by answering a retired Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition question. Instead of writing about literature from the canon, students will take the tools they have acquired and apply the question to a different kind of text, music video.
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