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Malvina Reynolds Song Analysis

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Little Songs, Big Meanings Music is a critical form of expression, especially in times of political and social unrest; it has been an ever-present component in protest movements throughout history. Songs have the power to not only unite a group of people, but also motivate them. Music is an important historical text that provides us understanding into the circumstances that led up to protest movements and the reasons that motivate its activists. They are far more complex than just types of entertainment. Protest songs have no specific genre and can often be applied in many social movements. The 1950’s and 60’s were the beginning of the civil rights movement. Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes” is a critique of the culture of conformity during …show more content…

In Suburbia, housing covenants were put in place and mortgages were denied in predominately black communities. The ‘Invisible Poor’, consisting of urban, rural, and elderly poverty, began to grow. Although the government shed light on the high level of poverty, they put no help or money into solving it. A new generation of student activists, that were fed up with the slow pace and half successes of leftists at this time, began to take direct action. They no longer wanted to be a generation that conformed and sat back, instead seeking to “share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life and that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” They believed in a participatory democracy. In the Port Huron Statement, students stated that there is “no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others”. Society was encouraging everybody to be like each other, quieting any voice that attempted to speak out. These students began protesting and fighting until those around them had no choice but to listen. The song “Little Boxes” represents the generation of people these students didn’t want to be, refusing to conform to the demands of society and coming together to fight for basic civil rights for

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One of the themes presented by Sue Monk Kidd in, “The Secret Life of Bees” is pushing boundaries. In the book, Lily runs away from her abusive father and stays at a beekeepers house where she would be safe. This beekeepers house is a black family and while she stayed there and everyone was constantly pushing boundaries. The story relates to the article written by Nadra Kareem Nittle which was called, “How the Freedom Riders Movement Began”. This article was about a group of people called freedom riders traveling together to end the Jim Crow laws or other known as, racist laws.

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Matthew Desmond’s Evicted takes a sociological approach to understanding the low-income housing system by following eight families as they struggle for residential stability. The novel also features two landlords of the families, giving the audience both sides and allowing them to make their own conclusions. Desmond goes to great lengths to make the story accessible to all classes and races, but it seems to especially resonate with people who can relate to the book’s subjects or who are liberals in sound socioeconomic standing. With this novel, Desmond hopes to highlight the fundamental structural and cultural problems in the evictions of poor families, while putting faces to the housing crisis. Through the lens of the social reproduction theory, Desmond argues in Evicted that evictions are not an effect of poverty, but rather, a cause of it.

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The civil rights movement was a way for black people to combat that attitude. John included it in his story to support his newfound respect and empathy for the black race, as the newly demanded respect for them was

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Music is not only used to capture peoples hearing but it is used to power peoples minds through the power of an individuals voice. Music served a critical role in the African American’s lives, as it was used to uplift their spirits as well as providing them with hope and strength to fight for civil rights and overcome segregation between white superiority and the unfair treatment of the inferior black. Music was defined as the voice of the people that lived through the oppression of the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, there were many different types of music genres sung, dependent on the culture, this included spiritual music; gospel and even folk music, which was performed by musicians, singers and even people of any musical talents. Through this, it brought about the uniting of people to join together and sing songs that helped them go through the oppression of the civil rights movement.

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In this paper I will be discussing “American Idiot” by Green Day as a protest song. A protest song, “is a song that is associated with a movement for social change and hence part of the broader category of topical songs or songs connected to current events” (Google, 2015). People who feel strongly towards a certain political view within society create protest songs, and this is the only way they know how to express their opinions. Protest songs can come in many different musical genres such as folk and rock music.

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