This essay investigates how male hip-hop artists assert different masculine identities in their song lyrics. The study considers songs released by American, male hip-hop artists during a 20-year time span, 1990-2010. The 20-year period has been divided into four periods spanning five years each, i.e., 1990-1995, 1995-2000, 2000-2005, and 2005-2010, and songs from best-selling artists during these periods have been chosen. A total of 8 artists are considered in this study, representing 12 songs comprising the data. By focusing on the lexicon of the song lyrics, I show how three recurring heterosexual masculine identities are discursively constructed: the male artist as a womanizer, a misogynist, or a homophobe. I furthermore show how these identities are not mutually exclusive, but can rather co-exist and in this way contribute to an unmistakable alpha-male identity. Finally, the diachronic aspect of the data collection methodology enables an additional investigation of the evolution of identity construction in hip-hop, such that prevailing trends in the early 1990s can be compared to trends evident in the current hip-hop scene.

Contemporary popular music is a ubiquitous social, cultural, and pedagogical force. Enabled by ever-evolving and -expanding technology, its songs and lyrics are transmitted into our most public and private spaces. For this study, I present the Billboard music charts as a functioning pedagogy and curriculum. Riffing on Richter’s denkbilder, Aoki’s curricular worlds of plan and lived experience, Giroux’s public pedagogy, and Giroux & Simon’s theorizing on youth culture, I sound out messages and motives embedded within the hit parade pedagogy. DJing a methodology of qualitative inquiry, autoethnography, and free association, I listen closely to chart-topping songs by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and P!nk that feature themes of marginalization, and consider the paradox presented by the juxtaposition of their popularity and subject matter. I suggest that this playlist legitimizes and perpetuates its listeners’ marginalization, running counter to its supposed intent to galvanize and inspire. Before signing off, I consider the implications for school-based educators and pedagogy in regard to engaging marginalization, particularly the notion of implementing a curriculum with which students may participate and sing along.

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Notre travail consiste à étudier les affiches publicitaires trilingues au liban et leur effet sur le public libanais qui constitue une société hétérogène regroupant des couches sociales, intellectuelles et communautaires très variées. il semble aussi intéressant d'étudier les messages très connotés des slogans crées, qui semblent ne fonctionner qu'au liban car ils reflètent la vie sociale et communautaire complexe du pays. le travail de recherche couvre une période spécifique délimitée dans le temps. on revient un an en arrière, vers l'année 2009, l'année des dernières élections législatives, dont les campagnes publicitaires sont parmi les plus mobilisées dans l'histoire du pays. cette mouvance et cette mobilisation politique et publicitaire représentées par la guerre des paroles de la publicité ont émergé durant les élections parlementaires confrontant loyalistes et opposants au régime politique.l'importance de la question se manifeste par l'influence et les effets des médias sur les individus. on va tenter de répondre aux questions suivantes. les affiches ont-elles le même effet sur les différentes tranches sociales dans le pays ? a qui s'adresse-t-on quand on décide de communiquer avec certaines langues plutôt qu'avec d'autres ? / Our thesis is based, in the first part, on the will of showing the originality behind the advertising communication and most specifically the electoral billboards by relying on a cultural analysis presented through multiculturalism and multilingualism, anchored in the Lebanese habits and know-how. This specificity has brought us to carry out a research work based on the conciliation between theory and practice in the fields of semiotics and sociolinguistics. We have based our study on the works of Charles Sanders Peirce for the analysis of the first part of the corpus taking into consideration the sign, the representamen and the interpretant in the billboards as well as the connotations and denotations that can be interpreted differently according to the visions of the world of each receptor. In the second part, we have chosen to observe and analyze the lebanese bilingualism in the world of advertising. Hence, the spot is based on the creation of a bilingual scenario accompanied with obvious and even exaggerated gestures by a Lebanese advertiser in order to show a stereotyped Lebanese across a Lebanese emigrant. The work we have undertaken is a work of language analysis beyond the only linguistic forms through a study of the speech in situation, undertaken by the gestures that accompany the speech of the comedian during all the sequences of the spot.

Driving a motor vehicle is a complex activity, and errors in performing the driving task can result in crashes which cause property damage, injuries, and sometimes death. It is important that the road environment supports drivers in safe performance of the driving task. At present, increasing amounts of visual information from sources such as roadside advertising create visual clutter in the road environment. There has been little research on the effect of this visual clutter on driving performance, particularly for vulnerable groups such as novice and older drivers. The present work aims to fill this gap. Literature from a variety of relevant disciplines was surveyed and integrated, and a model of the mechanisms by which visual clutter could affect performance of the driving task was developed. To determine potential sources of clutter, focus groups with drivers were held and two studies involving subjective ratings of visual clutter in photographs and video clips of road environments were carried out. This resulted in a taxonomy of visual clutter in the road environment: ‘situational clutter’, including vehicles and other road users with whom drivers interact; ‘designed clutter’, including road signs, signals, and markings used by traffic authorities to communicate with users; and ‘built clutter’, including roadside development and any signage not originating from a road authority. The taxonomy of visual clutter was tested using the change detection paradigm. Drivers were slower to detect changes in photographs of road scenes with high levels of visual clutter than with low levels, and slower for road scenes including advertising billboards than road scenes without billboards. Finally, the effects of billboard presence and lead vehicles on vehicle control, eye movements and responses to traffic signs and signals were tested using a driving simulator. The number of vehicles included appeared to be insufficient to create situational clutter. However billboards had significant effects on driver speed (slower), ability to follow directions on road signs (slower with more errors), and eye movements (increased amount of time fixating on roadsides at the expense of scanning the road ahead). Older drivers were particularly affected by visual clutter in both the change detection and simulated driving tasks. Results are discussed in terms of implications for future research and for road safety practitioners. Visual clutter can affect driver workload as well as purely visual aspects of the driving task (such as hazard perception and search for road signs). When driver workload is increased past a certain point other driving tasks will also be performed less well (such as speed maintenance). Advertising billboards in particular cause visual distraction, and should be considered at a similar level of potential danger as visual distraction from in-vehicle devices. The consequences of roadside visual clutter are more severe for the growing demographic of older drivers. Currently, road environments do not support drivers (particularly older drivers) as well as they could. Based on the results, guidance is given for road authorities to improve this status when designing and location road signage and approving roadside advertising.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The aim of this thesis is to contrast the verbal and non-verbal persuasive techniques used in display hoardings in the Czech Republic and Germany. The mode and frequency of the features employed to attract consumers in both countries are compared. The specific goal of the thesis is to find out whether such advertisements can possibly mirror the values and norms of the society. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first discusses the merits and demerits of the billboard as an advertising mechanism. In this section, the relevant laws of the Czech Republic and Germany are surveyed. In addition, the current situation in both countries with regard to this type of open-air promotion is examined. The second chapter summarises what is known about persuasion in general and the manipulative techniques employed to influence people. In this context, linguistic devices in Czech and German to achieve this end are evaluated. The final chapter provides an analysis of the material gathered for the thesis. The database consists of posters from 30 Czech and 30 German billboards which were photographed in the regions of South Bohemia and Lower Bavaria. The objective was to create a representative sample of contemporary outdoor advertisements in both countries. From the outset, close attention is paid to verbal features. These are divided into phonetic, word-forming, syntactic, and lexical devices. In terms of non-verbal features, typography, colour, and visual style are scrutinized. Since an advertisement is a complex means of communication, the interaction between the visual format and the text is also discussed.

This dissertation examines the activities and texts of four groups of activists who use culture jamming as a tactic to challenge dominant ideologies as they advocate for progressive social, cultural and economic change. Culture jamming, as defined here, is a practice whereby texts critical of the status quo are created through the appropriation and/or mimicry of the aesthetics and/or language that are a part of popular, or at least widely experienced, culture. Exploring the work of the Yes Men, the Adbusters Media Foundation, the Billboard Liberation Front and the Illegal Art exhibit, I argue that through their culture jamming these activists take critical theory into practice as a part of their goal is to raise the critical consciousness of the public. Confronting the issues of globalization, consumerism, and the political economy of the media in the United States, these culture jammers aim to highlight aspects of domination and oppression in their view results primarily from the corporate control of culture and politics. Using theories of ideology and hegemony developed by Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams to guide my analysis, I trace how each of these groups develop, present, and promote their critique. I steer clear of discussing the effectiveness of these culture jammers, focusing instead on the actions they take and theorizing some of the possible challenges and limitations they face in light of their own experiences. Differing requirements of cultural capital and deeper contextual information for most, if not all, of these culture jamming activities can make them especially complex forms of activism. What becomes clear is that culture jamming may be a tactic best suited to the maintenance of an activist community of people who already hold a critical position, as the jammer’s challenges to dominant culture and ideologies can be lost because of the form of the critique, or marginalized or otherwise ignored by the mainstream media. / text

The phenomenon of political marketing entered - together with democratic political competition - the Czech Republic after 1989. Together with parliamentary elections in 2006 a strong negative election campaigns appeared. The parliamentary elections in 2007 proved a stalemate and they launched a long period of political instability. An unusually sharp and mostly negative election campaign proceeded in the Czech Republic continuously during the years 2006 - 2010. For the first time foreign advisory firms prepared strategies for the biggest political parties - ČSSD and ODS. The election campaigns were characteristic not only of mass enter of negativism imported by the foreign consultants, but also of a great number of anonymous mocking and defamatory political advertisements, the customer and the payer of which was unknown and unable to find. The negative campaigns then introduced both the question of ethical limits in the election marketing and of the harmful influence of opaqueness in contracting and financing the campaigns. The thesis is dealing with regularities of political marketing which got control of Czech political scene in 2006 - 2010, and it formulates hypotheses about the possible effecs of negative, defamatory and mocking political campaigns on the environment of Czech public politics.

Through the analysis of the spectral characteristics of thousands of mastered (or remastered) commercial recordings from a variety of genres over the history of popular music, researchers have studied stylistic trends and spectral conventions. The aim of this study was to further explore, analyse and compare the spectral characteristics of two broad but distinct popular music genres: rock and vocal-based electronic music. The main reason for this choice of genres being that rock generally predominantly is based on (amplified) acoustical elements (e.g. acoustic drums and acoustic/electric bass/guitars) and that electronic music generally predominantly is based on electronic elements (e.g. beats and synthesizers). The stimuli for the study consisted of 24 top-five hit songs from the Billboard charts between 2016-2020, divided by genre. A fast fourier transform approach was used for the computation of target spectrums as well as low level descriptors for the two independent datasets of recordings. Spectral analysis followed with the goal of answering the following research questions: What do the spectral stylistic conventions appear to be in rock versus vocal-based electronic music and what spectral differences/similarities exists between these two distinct popular music genres? The results showed that there were some significant spectral differences between the two genres, especially noticeable in the low end of the frequency spectrum. Other genre-specific spectral trends and overall spectral conventions were found as well.