The Music Man “You Got Trouble”

“You Got Trouble”

While a quiet subtle town goes about it’s rather normal evening the center is suddenly disrupted by what appears to be a sales man… and what is he selling? He is selling fear and soon enough the town turns into a musical number. In this musical, the man expresses how the new billiards will turn this town upside down; their young boys will turn immoral towards corruption. The chorus goes like this, you’ve got trouble… Right Here in River City… Yes trouble… with a capital T. The man is inventing fear in this small town to create a need for his band.

The ideology of this clip may represent how media affects society. This musical clip gives us an idea of how well media affects everyday society, but in a small scale in a small town. Now lets imagine if this fear was created in a national scale to develop or police a way of life, culture and media. In our class reading Literacy Theory: An Anthology, chapter 1 describes the various culture theory’s of society. The most relevant theory to The Music Man “You Got Trouble”, may be the Marxist and structuralist semiotics theory. It describes how the media “Policed” economic crises by portraying the world in a way favorable to those in power or how working class youth resisted their assigned social roles through rituals of dress, dance and music that offered a counterpoint to the work routines of modern economic life.

The Clip of the music man can be analyzed extensively in its meaning. However, he does create a fear of a possible change in the towns economic life, a possible change of their culture. He then says the billiards in hand will turn their sons into immoral cigarette smoking gamblers; the town indulges in his fabricated freight. By successfully creating a favorable system for him-self he is in control of power, the next step is to simply introduce his product music. --The Music Man himself is our everyday MEDIA.

The 1920’s

This movie was created in the 1960’s; The Sixties conveyed a beginning of complex cultural and political trend’s that where seen across the globe.  The Music Man by Meredith Willson may have been seen as a comedy against/towards the 1920’s.  I believe that Willson mocks the 20’s for its delicate nature of being so reserved and subtle where in the 60’s things were fiery and the media was out there with music, news, love, war, drugs and the Beatles. Her message may be to show a comical and liberal sense of the medias control over society of how it all began or of how it is now.

Would the Beatles made it Across the Universe J if corporate media wasn’t involved ???