Okay. I just have to refudiate refute some things I’ve seen on Facebook that prove that nobody, like, does, any like, f***ing research(1) regarding the Chick-Fil-A controversy.

First, let’s explain what’s going on. Chick-Fil-A founder and president S. Truett Cathy has come under fire for donating over five million dollars over the past decade to Anti-LGBT organizations (2). Answering as “guilty as charged” to operating under “the Biblical definition of the family unit” (3)

So, let’s clear a few things up here just from those two sentences alone.

• This is more than just “Some conservative making anti-gay statements”
• He has confirmed his discriminatory practices
• There is money involved.

I cannot stress that last point. Money from Cathy’s non for profit organization, WinShape, was donating money to these organizations (4). This money had to come from somewhere, which is why there is a boycott going on.

Some people who still support Chick-Fil-A claim that they support the organization on the grounds of “supporting free speech” and waive of protesters with “the first amendment”. I’ve seen it all over Facebook. Let’s first start with the incorrect use of the first amendment. The purpose behind it was to prevent government censorship of citizens, allowing them to criticize the government. I’m not going to cite this because this is basic American civics. So, let’s look at what’s going on here.

Things that are involved in the first amendment

• Government
• Censorship
• The rights of citizens in relation to the government

Things that are not in the first amendment

• Fast food restaurants
• Boycotts
• The response of citizens in relation to discriminatory actions.

Are we clear on that? If not, let’s put it another way. The first amendment gives you the right to say what you want and defends you from government censorship. It does not defend you from someone else using their first amendment right to criticize how you’re using your first amendment right and criticize your actions (5). It also says nothing about where people should and shouldn’t spend their money.

Nobody involved in the boycott is trying to censor Cathy. He can say what he wants and most of the people involved in the movement won’t try to stop him. They’re obviously not forcing people to avoid chick-fil-a, as they still have supporters. They’re just not going to his restaurant, which they are well within their right to do.

Because believe it or not, the LGBT+ community and its allies have the first amendment right, too.

1. For those of you non-StarKid followers, that’s a reference to a Darren Criss quote.
2. (Source)
3. If you don’t know what that phrase means get out from under your rock and go see the world. Also thank you for making my blog the main website for your rock. also (Statement source)
4. This was mentioned in previous sources. I’m too lazy to find a new one.
5. Unless they’re lying. However, since all of the information against Chick-Fil-A is verifiable, I’m not going to go into that.

When I was in middle school, I figured out that in between the time when the bus dropped me off in the morning and the time school actually began, I could go to the school library and check out a book. This daily ritual is how I discovered my love of Cliched YA novels. I’d read until the already barely distinguishable plots blended togehter into a sludgy mix of irredeemable mean girls, teen starlets, and bad best friends. I wasn’t looking to be amazed, if I was, wouldn’t be looking toward the wish fulfillment of middle aged women who seemed to hate both high school and their adult lives. It was just fun. As I made abundantly clear by reading in class, I enjoyed these innaccurate portrayals of high school far more than my real middle school classes. A world where an honest to God hopeless high school girl comes into her own and gets a boyfriend as a result* was better than my still-awkward middle school existence where I thought the boy who mocked me had a crush on me.

In a way, though, those novels were right. It’s bizzare. Once I left middle school, that library never really left, although in order to make it to the high school library, I had to go to the second floor, which I had no time for. I did end up growing as a person during high school. I became aware that the snide remarks I thought were funny in middle school were actually unbelievably rude, and while I never did ditch the narcissistic, overcompetitive, condescending group of GT kids I was forced by my schedule to spend time with, I did find friends who were actually loyal and respectful. None of this, however, came with someone to run off into the sunset with, but I realized that most of my crushes were on the idea of having a crush, anyway. There weren’t teen celebrities or trips to India or whatever MacGuffin you could think of involved in this realization. Just time. Maturity doesn’t happen in an instant, but it still happens.

PS if you want to pay for me to go to India or you can arrange for me to meet the celebrity of my choice, I’ll gladly accept.

*Why there always had to be a romantic interest, I’ll never know. Seriously, boyfriends don’t improve storytelling

Read more …

This is from my new pop culture/media blog.

mediateen:

So, I was looking through Netflix looking for something to watch and review for everyone, and I naturally went to the “musical” section. It’s kind of a good starting point for me because

1. I know more than the average person about musicals
2. It is a storytelling medium I love
3. I have a general idea of how the Broadway community works overall and how any given musical would tie into Broadway history

Five seconds in I realized that over half of the titles were in black and white, as if to shamelessly say that they were made before technicolor became a thing. I found it so bizarre that this medium that had once dominated the screen was something almost rarely seen anymore on our cinema screens.

I have a few theories as to why this is a trend in recent media. First, we have to eliminate the assumption that people assume that musicals are for kids. While most musicals are directed towards kids, there are others that are very clearly geared towards adults, like The Book of Mormon. People mostly have accepted that musicals can be just as much for adults as kids, so why still the box office hesitancy?

I think it has to do with audience. The stereotypical demographics of a broadway musical are rich white people, and that’s not too far from the truth. While I was too lazy to get my readers around the paywall at Time.com, an excerpt from an article they did that fascinated me when they printed it shows that a night at the theatre can add up. That’s not to say that you have to have seen a musical to know about it, because I have fallen in love with musicals I’ve never seen, but it makes people hesitant to see a show less inclined to do so. Then it raises the point that it doesn’t need to have mass appeal to make millions a week, just have a really devoted fanbase.

As for the racism stuff? Totally valid. Look at all of the musicals that have been popular throughout the past few years, the best musical winners, starting from 2001, their protagonists are

• White
• White
• White*
• Puppet (usually played by a white guy)
• White
• White
• White
• Latino
• White
• An interracial couple
• White

I’m not saying that these musicals don’t have POCs as characters, I’m just saying that most broadway musicals tell stories about white people, and while it’s a problem in all media, it’s especially strong in broadway musicals. Again, remember the whole point about how because of ticket prices, broadway only has to appeal to a wealthy minority of people? Well, most wealthy people are disproportionately white. In order for something to cinematically translate, it has to at least pretend to communicate to audiences that aren’t white. Non-latino white people make up 63% of the US population. The other 37 percent have money, too. 

Side note: stop saying that glee is a musical. It is a TV show. It has musical tendencies, a cast that has been involved in musicals, but it is not a musical. And stop saying it’s diverse. The screetime will show you it is not.

Also I will not be taking comments on this side note because my love/hate relationship with Glee is something for another day.

*Hairspray does get a lot of credit for some things for which very few things get credit: for example, the acceptance of Tracy’s weight or the fact that it passes the Bedchel test, it loses major points for fitting the plot of “white person helps black person with [insert problem here]”.

Dear Team StarKid,

You need to plan your events better, because they always seem to fall really close to when I have my history AP tests. Granted, I got a 4 on US History last year even though Starship premiered on YouTube that weekend, but still, not cool. It’s almost sounding like a “the dog ate my homework” thing. “Oh I didn’t do as well as I would have on my AP European History exam because I was too excited about Apocalyptour.” I mean, I’m good when it comes to AP Tests. You’re my kryptonite, my one weakness I can’t avoid. I know I’m not the only one. It’s no secret that most of your fans are nerdy (read: they may be frumpy but they’re super smart) high schoolers. They have finals, AP tests, and IB exams too. So maybe you could possibly take that into account the next time you plan on traipising around the country?

If you don’t I’ll still love you anyway.

Yrs,

Aria.

Once I found out that the dystopian young adult novel series The Hunger Games was being compared to Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga, I was beyond offended. How could they compare such a great work of genius to a piece of garbage that does not deserve to be called literature? So, on April 1st, I am going to sit down and explain to you why exactly Meyer’s novels are superior to the toilet paper that is The Hunger Games.

Katniss is not a well written protagonist. She’s stubborn, impulsive, and violent. Everyone knows that the only acceptable flaws for a female protagonist to have is clumsiness, and even then, it must be treated as if it’s cute. They must also be feminine and well read. Katniss hunts in the woods illegally and is never seen reading classic literature. How are we supposed to know that she knows how to use her brains to get men? We don’t, because Katniss is an idiot with no actual skills.

Also, the movie made Katniss even worse. Jennifer Lawrence is a horrible actress, and her skill does not come close to matching that of Kristen Stewart. Stewart’s bland facial expressions required the script to tell me what was going on. Lawrence’s portrayal of every emotion of Katniss’ left me super confused. Since when are protagonists supposed to have thoughts?

The love triangle in The Hunger Games also leaves much to be desired. Neither Gale nor Peeta is a good match for Katniss. Gale tells Katniss too many things. She spent the entirety ofMockingjay knowing what District 13 wanted her to do. Gale didn’t do nearly as good of a job as he should have of hiding information from her. Peeta, meanwhile, has his own flaws. He spends most of his life watching Katniss from a distance. How are we supposed to believe his crush when he doesn’t even watch her sleep?  I mean, we’re supposed to interpret a loaf of burnt bread as “romantic” and “generous”? MAYBE if it was a cake that was in decent shape, but burnt bread is not a decent gift.  Edward is a better boyfriend than both of them because not only does he not respect Bella’s wishes. He also hovers over her for her own safety. Collins does not acknowledge that women are simply incapable of making their own decisions. This is why we have so many problems in society. Not only are there now more female protagonists in the media, but they also perpetuate the stereotype that women don’t need a man to protect them. How untrue!

The love triangle isn’t even the focus of the series. It’s behind some political bullcrap about government. Does it look like I care? I don’t care what my government does or how it treats me. I just want to watch the drama unfold. And isn’t that what The Hunger Games is really about? How awesome it is to watch conflict between people and not do anything else?

littlemissmars:

Songwriting is easy—just write what you feel and let it come to you.

Anyone who says that songwriting is writing your emotions is either a liar or Taylor Swift. I like to think that there are two components in writing music: the music itself and the emotion that it conveys. I don’t like to think of lyrics as a writing component but rather a subject that falls under emotion, since not all music has lyrics but all music has sounds and can convey the almost same things lyrics do.

What a lot of people fail to realize regarding the musical component, is that music is a science. While for some people it’s easy to catch on to without much study, you need a lot of developed, innate senses and instincts to understand how to organize sound. Songwriting is not just a right-brained creative task, but a left-brained puzzle. Not everything works in music, and if it does work, that does not necessarily mean that it’s good. It probably means your idea is a basic pattern or mediocre chord progression that came to you because you figured out the simple rules of the foundation of music. 

But from that springs creativity. It’s understanding what’s common and what’s basic that gets you to create something new and exciting. That’s why people like music with 7 chords and accidentals: they aren’t supposed to be chords. They are mistakes that ended up sounding beautiful somehow. 

However, this comes from discovery. Not necessarily “playing what you feel.” While creating music through your emotional episodes may produce a great piece of music eventually, you have to discover through a slightly painful, tedious experience with a lot patience what that sounds like. 

Besides the musical component, there is the lyrical one. This is mostly where people think this misconception will carry them to success.

Writing lyrics is not about people hearing your lyrics and understanding you. 

It’s about you understanding people, hearing their words, and turning them into lyrics.

Music is useless without relatability. It’s the power that takes you from just appreciating a piece of music to falling in love with it. It has to have something that strikes a chord in people and makes them think. And since human beings are innately selfish, one of the sure fire ways to get people to think are to get them thinking about themselves.

The infamous Taylor Swift is a great example for how relatability successes and fails. For groups of people like me, who don’t admire her as a musician, it has a lot to do with her biggest flaw but in a way, her greatest attribute: how personal she makes her music. I have never been a girl crying whilst playing my guitar on a Tuesday night in the rain because my boyfriend left me for a cheerleader and called  my best redheaded friend Abigail who lost her virginity freshman year to comfort me. The amount of specificity Taylor Swift writes her songs turns some people off because she pointedly describes how terribly mediocre her teenage experience was. Because I don’t care for her experience her music doesn’t speak to me. It doesn’t make me care for her and it doesn’t make me feel anything. (Also musically, she’s just a mess, but we’re talking solely about the lyrical component and so that’s not a really big deal at the moment.)

I don’t want to relate to her music. But her target audience does and that’s why she’s become so popular. Millions of teenage girls across the globe listen to her for the same reason I listen to Mumford and Sons to convince myself that I’m a deep, introspective, philosophical blue-grass British hipster. Swift convinces them that their typical experiences were heartbreaking and important to their growth and will make them independent, empowered young women (although, let’s face it, life isn’t that hard when you’re a blonde, skinny, pretty teenage girl with enough boyfriends to write albums about until you’re 22.) They like the fact that they can hear the names “Drew” and “Abigail” or say “she” and “he” and try to replace them with people in their personal lives. In “Fifteen”, she writes the entire song in second person to throw that personal feeling onto the listener: this is happening to you, I know what it feels like. It also helps that she’s not the most sophisticated writer either. The lack of complexity and the same phrases she uses repeatedly are what a 14 to 17 year old girl would write. 

But another key in writing good music, that Taylor lacks at times, is universality. Her popularity and recognition and reputation is what earns her awards, not necessarily her talent or writing ability. While you certainly cannot satisfy everyone, you can attempt to be appealing to more than a restricted age and gender demographic. 

All in all, writing what you feel is a bad idea. Well, it’s not as much of a bad idea as it is one, minuscule step. Try writing what you feel and then see what comes. It’s going to be a jumbled mix of sounds and words and just…noises that you are going to love but no one else cares for. It’s taking that and finding a way to tweak it and really make it want you want to portray, what other people are going to like hearing, and something unique. 

Emotions are messy and broken and indescribable and difficult and it’s not a musician’s task to copy them exactly as they are. It’s a musician’s task to find what messy and broken and indescribable and difficult sounds like. And then make it just a little more beautiful.

Again, not mine (obviously), but enjoy!

(Source: mythoughts--arestars)