Media blog 2 - Mr Bush

Music Video: Common - Letter to the Free Our first Music Video CSP is Common - Letter to the Free. This is a stunning music video and protest song that documents black American culture and the legacy of slavery. Notes from the lesson Common: a pioneering artist Common is a Black American cultural icon who has maintained a political and social concern in his music. At one of the most charged periods in American history, the video  Letter to the Free  is presented as his contribution to the divisive political and social issues of contemporary America, a sense that he is attempting to draw attention to initiating a new wave of ‘protest music’. Michael Eric Dyson on Common Dyson on black stereotypes and Common: “Many critics don’t account for the complex ways that some artists in hip hop play with stereotypes to either subvert or reverse them. Amid the pimp mythologies and metaphors that gut contemporary hip hop, rappers like Common… seize on pimpology’s prominence to poke fun at it

Film & TV assessment: Learner response The Film & TV assessment was your first test on an in-depth area of study - with a tough postmodernism question thrown in for good measure. This is an excellent example of the type of question AQA can hit us with and developing our skills in responding to such questions will help us massively in the actual two-hour exams. The first part of your learner response is to look carefully at your mark, grade and comments from your teacher. If anything doesn't make sense, ask your teacher - it's crucial we're learning from the process of assessments and feedback.  Your learner response is as follows: Create a new blog post called 'Film & TV assessment learner response' and complete the following tasks: 1) Type up your feedback in  full  (you don't need to write the mark and grade if you want to keep this confidential). WWW: some media knowledge/theory/analysis in Q3 EBI: very little gasp of postmodern

Music video: theory There are a range of important theories we need to learn as part of our Music Video unit. Both our Music Video Close-Study Products contain representations of black Americans. We therefore need to study a range of theories that address the representation of black or minority ethnic people in the media. Notes from the lesson Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy is a key theorist in A Level Media and has written about race in both the UK and USA. In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy explores influences on black culture. One review states: “Gilroy’s ‘black Atlantic’ delineates a distinctively modern, cultural-political space that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but is, rather, a hybrid mix of all of these at once.” Gilroy is particularly interested in the idea of black diasporic identity – the feeling of never quite belonging or being accepted in western societies even to this day. For example, Gilroy points to th