Now that you’re three weeks (halfway) into your senior project experience, are you answering your essential question?
- How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected?
Exploring the essential question is going a little differently than what I had expected. While it’s undeniably more productive, I didn’t expect to go so in-depth into the history of music to see how trap music and jazz could possibly be connected. I do feel like I’m answering my question because in all aspects of music I’m noticing common themes among the songs, and when overlapped with other genres there are some constants.
- Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?
I would definitely say I’m surprised by how long it took me to analyze the lyrics to trap songs. Because their style is heavily influenced by jazz, they don’t often pronounce words fully or they freestyle, meaning I didn’t understand it during the song. But when I looked at the lyrics through the light of the trapped life, they were a lot deeper than surface level, and there is a lot of focus on mental health and coping mechanisms, and spirituality in it.
- Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how? What do you want to know more about?
Rap music seems to center itself around a trapped lifestyle and the black experience, be that a come-up story or a song about the hold drugs still have on someone. They all seemed to have a deeper message than the surface level. It now makes me question how much thought a lyrical rapper actually puts into their song in comparison to a trap artist? What is different about the methods that somehow ends in them both telling a story of their struggle.