1. Taylor Swift: Crazier, country, 2009
2. Keith Urban: I Wanna Be Your Everything, country, 1999
3. Tim Mcgraw: Felt Good on my Lips, country, 2010
4. Jason Aldean: Cowboy Lady, country, year unknown
5. Tim Mcgraw: My Best Friend, country, 2000
Community Service!
4. Michael Jackson: We are the World, oldies, 1985
5. Leeland: Follow You, Christian, 2009
The pleasure aim is more prevalent in today’s society. I think this is true because I could easily think of five songs off the top of my head, and people like feeling good. There are tons of songs today that are about love, sex or drugs. It surprised me how difficult it was to find community service songs. When I searched on google to find community service songs, nothing really came up. I also noticed that there were a few songs that claimed to be community service songs that were not. One example of this was a song about hurricane Katrina. It was aimed to be a song to let the world know what was going on, when really it was a video to make George W. Bush look bad. The pleasure aim of Hinduism is about love, alcohol, intoxicants, or anything that pleases you. The difference between this aim and the pop culture of today’s music is that we do not follow basic laws of morality. In the Hinduism tradition they give you pointers on how to have pleasure. In our society they just do whatever they feel like doing. In the community service aim people are committed to helping others, but this is limited because they will eventually run out of work to do. In today’s pop culture people will only write and compose songs when there is a disaster. This is not doing community service in my opinion because we have so many people that are homeless or that are in need of help today, but you don’t hear many songs about that. The only song I could find that was not about a huge disaster was a Disney channel song about recycling. Although today’s pop music is very similar to these Hindu aims there are some significant difference such as the pleasure aim where you have to be intelligent about it. Also with the community service aim you are committed to helping others, and today we only help others when there is a big problem, even though there are millions of small problems that are going on all around us.
Kelsie-
ReplyDeleteI think you made a really good point that although Hinduism does include pleasure in the Four Aims it does not mean that one should do whatever one desires to do in order to receive that fufillment of pleasure. To me this proves that people crave pleasure and will do whatever they have to do to get it. Unfortunately, for many people this means doing bad things like stealing, taking drugs, and drinking alcohol. The Four Aims set a standard to receive pleasure properly.
I completely agree with your response to the 2 aims. You made a great point in reference to community service in American Pop culture. I had a hard time at first coming up with Community Service songs and when I searched for those songs on YouTube, each song was a result of a disaster that had happened.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely to your point on community service songs. I think that only when a big tragedy happens songs come up and it is recognized by the community. I also agree that pleasure is not limited in todays pop music based on the explicit lyrics in some songs. People say and do what they want because that is what pleases them
ReplyDeleteI too had an easy time with the pleasure aim. Infact, while sitting in class the first 5 songs that came to my head I put down as my pleasure songs because to me pleasure is anything that makes one happy. ANd as I'm reading these post I think we all have the general consensus that community service songs are created after a tragedy whether national or world.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about community service songs only being made after a tragedy. Exceptions I can think of to that are things by The Beatles and other older things like that, but one might argue that they were in the midst of a tragedy as well, with the Vietnam War and all that other jazz. You also made a good point in that the Western idea of pleasure really does encourage you to do whatever in fulfillment of pleasure, not just whatever within the realms of morality.
ReplyDeleteKelsie,
ReplyDeleteOne thing I found really interesting about your paragraph is that you mentioned that some songs claim to be about community service, when in fact they have deeper ulterior motives. I think that’s a really great observation. I also really liked how you wrote about the difference in morality when comparing pop culture to Hinduism. That thought didn’t even cross my mind while doing this assignment, but I’m glad it came to yours. It’s really true though, while in Hinduism they do speak about pleasure and satisfaction, they still have a moral code that they live by, whereas in pop culture, we let our morals slide a bit when singing about our latest hook ups. I also really liked how you wrote about the fact that we as a whole preach about helping out natural disaster victims and keeping the planet green, which are great, but that we don’t seem to want to look closer to home and make a dent in helping out those who are in need of help as well.