Jazz Music: A Driving Force for the Civil Rights Movement?
For this paper, choose a relatively “unsophisticated” form of popular art for analysis. When you choose a type, or genre, be sure that it is a coherent genre; not “popular music” but, say, “sentimental love songs of the 1950s” or “goth rock of early 1980s”; not “comic books” but “Disney comics” or “monster comics” or “superhero-type comics.” Popular art exists in almost all areas, for all kinds of specialized interests. Be sure to select a form of popular art in a field of specialized interests. Be sure to also select a form of popular art in a field you find interesting to begin with. You can choose a topic from a wide variety of material—from comic books and horror movies to TV shows and bumper stickers and magazines, from Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys to 50 Shades of Grey, from plays by Neil Simon and Sam Shepard, to Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films and Haruki Murakami’s novels.
Explore the relationship between your chosen piece of popular culture and some social issue such as age, race, gender, class, religion and immigration.