“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 ???
