ENG 2150 Gimme Shelter: the spaces we live in

Kanye West – The One ft. Big Sean, 2 Chainz, Marsha Ambrosius (Cruel Summer)

This has to be my favorite song off the album Cruel Summer by Kanye West. The piano in the instrumental along with the hook by Marsha Ambrosius really brings the song together in my opinion. I’ll only discuss some of the hook and the first verse by Kanye. The song starts out with some piano and goes directly into the hook with Ambrosius singing “The storm is on the horizon, I’m standing here alone.” This immediately refers to Kanye’s views on his position in the game of rap music. He feels as if he is alone at the top. Who is there to challenge him and his label G.O.O.D Music? As the hook continues,  it conveys messages of self-importance and being willing to rise to any challenge or challenger. Kanye’s verse in particular helps illustrate the stream of consciousness that I find in rap music. His verse contains allusions to the Bible, pop-culture, celebrities, the enslavement of debt. All of this is done through some slick wordplay and the wordplay shows how rap music is associative. To cite a few examples: Kanye says: “Yeah, I’m the one, baby since God gave his only begotten son, baby” this is a Biblical allusion as here Kanye seems to be referring to himself as the new or the next Jesus Christ. As he continues he says “You on a run, baby.” I think that this refers to the race of life that we all must run in. The rat race if you will. Many people are always chasing after their false idols or unreal goals. He goes on to say “You think you free but you a slave to the funds, baby.” This can easily refers to the trap and enslavement of debt. Kids take out 100,000 dollar loans to go to prestigious universities to be “free” as in, not under the rules and regulations of their parents but only to be enslaved to the debt that they incurred over the course of four years. It can also refer to credit card debt and people love the freedom to buy whatever they’d like, whenever they’d like but they they begin to drown in debt. His verse continues: “We on a galaxy that haters cannot visit, That’s my reality so get off my Scott Disick, If you ever held a title belt you would know how Michael felt, Tyson, Jackson, Jordan – Michael Phelps.” Here Kanye puts himself on a completely different level. He says that he is unreachable as he is on another galaxy. Perhaps this refers to the hook of the song? And in the rest of the quote the slick wordplay comes in once again. That’s my reality seems to refer to the reality show Keeping up with the Kardashians and since Kanye and Kim are dating, Kanye has been on the show multiple times with none other than Scott Disick. There’s also the saying “Get off my dick” which is commonly used in rap music and the play on the name Scott Disick helps keep common rap phraseology and introduce a new twist. Then he lists the Michaels or champions of the world.

The Stream of Consciousness refers to our conscious and how it is not static. Rather, our consciousness is dynamic and always moving and flowing like a stream, hence the name “Stream of Consciousness.” I believe this song is able to bring out how rap music represents the stream of consciousness. With all the wordplay and the associative nature of the song, it shows why our consciousness is in fact like that stream. Because we are able to understand all these allusions as they are presented to us, there are a ton of word associations we make in a matter of seconds. This illustrates how our conscious is dynamic. How could we understand  this song or songs like these if we could only be focused on one thing at any given time? It is the Stream of Consciousness and our collective memories and experiences that allow us to put all the pieces of the lyrical puzzle together and enjoy the music and all the wordplay that comes along with it.

Emotional, Soft, Memories
Turning it down low
Bobbling your head very slow
Feeling the beat
It’s getting hard to see
Closing my eyes
Thinking, “Was he putting on a disguise”
This song got me thinking
Should I still see him
It’s just so Emotional, Soft, Memories

The song’s almost over
The music is going lower
Still thinking hard
This song is killing me
I don’t love him
Just have strong feelings for him
Just got a phone call, “He is back with her”
The song is over

EMOTIONAL, SOFT, MEMORIES

Shanae’ Moore

When I first heard about this assignment I was not really sure what I wanted to compare to “The Stream of Consciousness” by William James.  At first I thought about finding a picture or a piece of artwork that represented “The Stream of Consciousness.”  I realized that what I really wanted to use was a short story or a poem.  As I was surfing the internet I stumbled on this poem by Shanae’ Moore that really caught my attention.  The poem titled “Emotional, Soft, Memories” captures what William James describes as “The Stream of Consciousness.”  The state of consciousness is like a stream.  We have infinite thoughts that are always in a constant state of change.  We also have different feelings and emotions attatched to these thoughts.

The poem opens by talking about how this girl is constantly thinking about this guy.  She cannot get the thought of this guy out of her head.  Not only does she sense her surroundings, but she feels them as well.  The song that is played reminds her of him to the point that the song is unbearable to listen to.  She is wrapped up in a myriad of emotions and is in perpetual thought.  This brings up the concetps of the subjective and the objective.  The noise and the music that she is listening to is objective because it can be proven by fact.  The feelings that she is having when she is listening to the song is subjective because that is her own feelings toward the song that no one else can feel.  Someone else might listen to the same song and have a completely different feeling towards it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4WJlLNIsyY&noredirect=1

I love the opening to this movie, which is overall an incredible film you should all take the time to watch at some point.  One of the things that makes this movie so remarkable is the way it uses film, a medium generally confined to representing objective, surface reality, to represent the inner-life of its protagonist.  We get a sense of how the director, Francis Ford Coppola, manages this feat in the opening here.  The film opens on a long shot of a jungle, which gets obscured by an orange mist and the rudders of a helicopter.  The viewer might think this is an establishing shot, and that the action of this first scene will take place in the jungle before us.  However, as the song “The End” by The Doors begins playing, and we see the jungle explode, something seems dream-like about the scene, since we cannot hear the explosions. In the next moment, we see the protagonist’s inverted face with the ceiling fan he is looking at superimposed over it, and we realize the first shot of the jungle represents the character’s imagination and that the ceiling fan reminded him of the helicopter blades we heard in the first moments of the film.  The exploding jungle is the image he associates with helicopters and the song represents the feelings these memories evoke.  The sense that the jungle images are the protagonist’s inner-thoughts is reinforced as the scene proceeds and we see his face superimposed over the jungle he is imagining.

Coppola’s representation of his character’s consciousness accords with several aspects of William James’ description in “The Stream of Consciousness.”  Consciousness is personal, since the memories evoked by the ceiling fan are the product of the character’s particular history.  It is also continuous, indicated by the superimposition of images–we don’t have a shot of the character thinking, followed by a break and then the images he is imagining, but rather we see the object that sparked his memory–the fan–simultaneously with the memories it evoked–the exploding jungle.  And the strong emotional content of the scene–represented through the music, the slow-panning of the camera and the actor’s unmoving face–invokes James’ contention that consciousness is always imbued with the emotions.  Finally, Coppola does a good job of representing the way we are conscious of several things on different levels at once–so here it is the ceiling fan, the character’s memories, and the mess in the hotel room around him.

This scene was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of a representation of consciousness.  What did you come up with?