Account of the past week

A very delayed hello from me...

After attending the meeting last Thursday, we discussed the need for effective research skills being pivotal. How to approach a project is shaped around the ability to communicate with people both on an intellectual (for the information) and on a personal level (a rapport can help people to elucidate their truer self greater).

My contributions to the music quiz that our group devised, and Jyoti pieced together, were the songs from the grime (Dizzee Rascal's Stop Dat) and classical (Wagner's Tannhauser) categories. I chose these specifically, with Dizzee Rascal's song being a track many of the university audience would have grown up with. Using a more niche grime track or alternatively a newer mainstream grime track I believed would have swayed people in other directions (an interesting follow up experiment could occur from this). Stop Dat was at the very start of mainstream grime and will evoke memories from people (I hope...) of the music they heard whilst growing up. Having a reflective element to the experiment will hopefully bring varied and interesting results.

Wagner's Tannhauser I also chose specifically, in direct contrast with Dizzee Rascal. Wagner was a notable anti-Semite and posthumous mascot of the Nazi party. Yet his music is not so readily associated with violence as grime is. Despite the fact that Wagner's used music as a form of propaganda. I wanted to see whether grime (which is associated with the working-class and those who are discriminated in society) and classical music (associated with the middle to upper class, in the UK anyway) have significant difference in the emotional reaction.

I will be doing the experiment on Monday during the day- I apologise for my lateness, I was exploring (with Josh, who has not yet accepted his invitation to the blog...) Stokes Croft in Bristol. In terms of studying sub-cultures this worked fantastically as Stokes Croft and St Pauls were the areas in which former slaves (after the Transatlantic Slave Trade) were housed (Bristol being the first place in the UK to abolish slavery). The area has a cult status due to its influence of Caribbean, African alongside British and European culture. Sound systems are used frequently outside, and the area is famous due to the 2011 protests against the Tesco. It is a community based area with clear influences of black culture which attracts all sorts of subcultures to the same area. Whether that be for grime, drum and bass, reggae or blues. I think throughout this experiment we must always look for the crossovers in sub-cultures and how all combine to create human culture. Culture is a Venn diagram, not a tickbox list.

ÉGA 29/01/17