Who Doesn't Enjoy Music?
According to Sontag, images should only be viewed when it “leads
to action or knowledge.” In the world however, there’s more than just images
that shouldn’t be viewed just out of curiosity or enjoyment. A big part of
everyone’s life nowadays is music, and you can’t tell me you’ve never listened
to a song with an inappropriate word in it. Children exposed to this type of
music will learn from it and apply it in their own lives. Is the potential risk
of clouding a child’s mind worth the enjoyment of others?
I think songs with inappropriate meanings and words in them
are not necessarily harmful for adults, but it is the immature children that
don’t even know what the meanings are yet that scares me. A main source of this
type of music comes from radios. Most people don’t drive around dead silent in
their car, and most people resort to the radio. It is true that some radio
stations bleep out inappropriate words, however, the inappropriate meanings are
still there. Also, music apps like Spotify have the word “explicit” beside the
inappropriate songs to warn people about it, but that doesn’t stop curious
children from exploring the songs. Why give the opportunity to children when we
can just stop these kind of songs?
Many may argue that they enjoy listening to these songs, and
I can’t completely disagree. It really is hard to limit what children can
access these days and in order to stop that, we need to stop it for adults too.
Despite the actions of bleeping out words and warning children, there hasn’t
been much more done to this topic.
I like how you compared images to music and I agree children could be easily influenced by music. I also think that as the children apply and use swear words in real life, swearing would blend in their culture in future generation. I mean you don't want your kids going everywhere and swearing right? Slowly, the places with much formality can even be engulfed with swear words.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! I never thought about how explicit words in music could affect children or even have the same impacts as violent images. The existence of such widespread profanity in so much of the music we listen to today is definitely an issue in that it can influence children negatively, but can it be stopped? In addition, you talk about how profanity in music should be removed for everyone- adults as well. Would that be fair to those who are mature enough to handle such music? The issue that you bring up in your blog, while fair, definitely requires more discussion before a solid verdict can be given. Great blog this week!
ReplyDeleteBright! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this blog post. I love how you connected images with music. Nowadays, it seems as if inappropriate words and/or references are just thrown into pop culture without a second thought. Even if we tried to shield young children from being exposed to these things too early, it would be near impossible. As swear words become more and more common, they seem to have lost their original meaning and just act as meaningless words.
ReplyDelete