Recording technology has much such crazy improvement in the last 50 years. The weirdest part for me was thinking about how artists voices will always live on even after they are long gone. the idea of listening to a dead man’s voice is weird and slightly unnerving. At the same time its nice for love ones to always be able to hear their voices of the ones that passed away. After a while you almost forget what they sounded like, so sometimes its good to remind yourself. With recording you will never forget their laugh or voice and its a really nice feeling. Helps with the grieving process a lot. All of this is from personal experience but it could be different for everyone.

I think streaming music is the greatest invention ever. I listen to music constantly, every day. It is much more cheaper to pay to stream music instead of paying for each individual song i want to listen to. I want to support the artists but i also want to support my wallet. Artists get less money but i feel like streaming sites are more readily accessible to most people. which in return cuts down on the amount of pirated music, which really hurts artists. I think its the better and safer idea in the long run for all participates involved.  1.99 a song is just ridiculous when i can pay 9.99 for every song i could possibly want to listen to for the rest of time.

Copyright is the most difficult matter to deal with because it limits so much creativity. I understand that artist should get credit for their work but i don’t feel like the laws should be so strict. Copyright law protects the expression of facts and ideas, not the ideas and facts themselves. I agree with that but i just can’t help but feel like something needs to be changed. The wrong people are getting punished for copyright. It’s a difficult problem but ideas are just as important and the public space and creativity.

I looked up the origins of the “Emo” genre of music. Emo or Emotional is is a rock music genre characterized by an emphasis on emotional expression, sometimes through confessional lyrics. It emerged during the late 1980’s and became mainstream popular in  about 1995. Since then its declined a bit since other genres like pop and hip hop are mush more popular. The term Emo wasn’t really used to describe music before 1980. Emo gets a bad reputation because of its depressing subject matter but i feel its important to embrace emotion because that’s the only way we can conquer it.

I’m a horrible dancer but listening to swing music makes me want to try and dance. The melody is so infectious and catchy that you just cant help but move your body. I don’t listen to it on my own but if I hear it being played I don’t mind it. which doesn’t really matter because its not like people are blasting swing music in their cars while driving. I did enjoy learning the history and origins of swing music. I also never noticed the quite differences in the swing beat and the whole clapping on 1 and 3 or 2 and 4. I did enjoy hear sweet child of mine as a swing song it was pretty cool.

One of my favorite things that we talked about in class was the idea of whiteness, that sounds bad I know. My dad’s side of my family is from Morocco in North Africa, while my mom’s family is from Mexico and Spain but yet I look white. I don’t want to identify as a white male because my linage does not support that, but to most people my race is simply about the color of my skin not my history. This sounds really ungrateful for me to complain about when racism is still an issue for many people today. My friends always tell me that I’m the only person who has white privilege but doesn’t want it and would rather be seen as a minority or a foreigner. Even then its difficult because I don’t know what Morocco is seen as, because in reality I could said that I am African-American because my linage comes from Africa and they migrate here to America but if I identity as such people would be very angry and disagree with me. The whole idea of race being only black and white is incredibility infuriating to me but I enjoyed talking about it in class.

I never knew or learned about minstrel shows and after learning about I almost wished that I never did. Minstrel shows are so strange and gross. It is so incredibly racist and disgusting but at the same time it all most seems as if they are envying African American culture. I just don’t understand why they were so popular. I was so uncomfortable watching them in class because I can’t believe that it was widely accepted and popular but then again I’m not racist so I cant relate to racism. I was also surprised that cartoon shared similarities with minstrel shows with there white gloves and overly foolish facial features. America is really strange with its past and where influences come from, and this makes me want to look into the history of other American traditions.

It’s so hard for me to enjoy music old popular American music. Its’ not entirely bad but I just cant get behind it and enjoy it. Like I said before lyrical quality means a lot to me and if I cant relate to a song then it’s hard for me to enjoy it. so with American popular music I cant relate to the lyrics because I don’t understand the context of the time period and I wasn’t around to experience it the music has no impact on me. My music time era cut off is really anything before the 80’s thanks to my mom of course.

While I thought this was cool to learn, I didn’t really want to learn it. I’d rather just believe that its just magic. while I am fascinated by the internet and how it came to be, I just glad that its around and that it does work. I have never really been a tech person, I know how to fix and work technology on a base level but I have never been interested on going to a deeper level. I’m much more fascinated by humans and how we work and why we do the things we do. That’s why I’m a Criminology major because criminals are extremely interesting and finding why they do things is more important that learning how the internet works at least to me.

I’m always on my computer either playing games or watching Netflix but I knew very little about the history of the computer past like Aol dial up and messenger. This was really interesting to learn about especially when I watched the videos how they used them for the war. Computers have come really far from huge bulky computers to small computers that we can literally fit in the palm of our hands. Which on a side note scares me because if the public has access to such powerful computers then the government or military must have double what we have and that could lead to many issues but I guess we’ll see fingers crossed.