Hell Yes I Am
Being apart of the musicians
Music is a very important part of a lot of peoples lives. It doesn’t take much to be into music but sometimes music isn’t just a part of your life, it’s most to all of your life. For most musicians this was their reality. People become musicians and this is like a Discourse as mentioned by James Paul Gee in his paper Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics. Being in a discourse, according to Gee, is mastering everything within a certain field. According to Gee being in the music Discourse means mastering every aspect of this field which would entail writing, singing, playing instruments, preforming, just everything that come with the “big time” musicians you see and hear about all the time. If this were true then a lot of the “big time” artists now are not truely in the Discourse of being a musician. Some of them don’t play any instruments, most do not write their own songs, and some of them don’t even sing, it’s all auto tune, and then they lip sink on stage, but they are still musicians and artists. In this Gee is wrong, I see him as wrong in many aspects of this.
Why Gee is wrong (in my opinion)
Musicians and artists and being a part of the music world, all of that is just one big clump that makes up the music family. No matter what genres you are into you are part of the music family. Some people are deeper in it than others though, these people tend to be the ones that follow bands, and cry at meet and greets. These people are so deep into the music. I can give the most played up “fandom” of all and that is the “little teenage girl fans” of alternative bands, like All Time Low, Pierce The Veil, and Sleeping With Sirens. These bands help people with their lyrics and positive messages. Why it seems like so many teen girls are all over them is because that’s when girls go through most of the rough patches in life, hormones are changing and no one really knows whats going on. These girls and guys turn to music. They devote a lot of their time to the bands, genre, and music. They make blogs, fake twitter accounts, fan accounts, and countless other things, to support, share and get the attention of the people that helped them the most. To me and to them they are a part of the music culture and part of being an artist. They sing, they devote themselves, but the Gee they are “pretenders” and that’s where he is wrong (in my opinion) because there is no way you can tell these people that they are not apart of the musicians, just because their Discourse of being in a fandom isn’t exactly being the artist.
