Critical Evaluation of Group Blog

First of all, the idea behind our blog was to see if music genre to some extent influences its target audience, and to also argue and change people’s perceptions for instance that the underground genre of Grime possesses violent lyrics which inspires its listeners to become violent.  Originally we sought to illustrate our ideas by including archive images, music and home videos from YouTube, which we did, but due to the banning of music videos on the UK YouTube site, this didn’t make it very possible for us to do.  However i think we utilised mutlimedia, i.e. being able to make our own videos, for instance, Yvette’s interview with music DJ and the interview we did with music journalist, Ben Gilbert. We were also able to add our own images like Yvette’s one on her nightclub review post and my post with the soul/indie artiste, VV Brown.

Moving on in terms of the goals we had for the blog, we wanted to get to our niche audience (14-21) about how the music they listen to may influence their action to some extent. I think we were kind of targeting teenagers, because some teens can be vulnerable and prone to accepting what they listen to lyrically. So we were sort of trying to reach this audience by sort of telling them not to be too gullible and accept what they hear regularly. Also we were aiming to contradict mainstream media’s exaggerations and perecptions of these genres. We were aiming to lay out the idea that listening to rock or emo can’t make you suicidal or want to self harm, and how rap influences someone to be interested in slitting another person’s throat.   In terms of the experience we had setting up the blog, i think it was pretty easy and difficult at the same time. It was easy because we had a daily schedule of who was to post on a certain day, and because we had the genres we had to focus on (for instance i focused on Rock, Metal and Emo, Naomi on Grime and Garage, Yvette on Dancehall, Tendai on RnB, Mary and Tamara on Hip Hop). But what was difficult was having to decide what to blog about on the scheduled days, so i had to like look around and give the subjects and artistes i want to blog about some good thinking before deciding to blog about it. In terms of the writing style, we tried so hard not to make it sound too academic . So we made it chatty and informal, which i think was one of the strengths of the editorial team.

I also feel our post was kind of responsive to the recent events, for instance the rise in AfroPunks, and how rappers are beginning to dress like followers of the Electro/Funk Music scene. We got our stories from the internet and from primary sources, like Yvette did with her interview of the music DJ. For the newsday exercise we wrote a news story and  a video intervew. It was difficult with the editing and all the workload we (Yvette and I) got, but in the end it was worth it. The blog was organised so everyone of us in the group could get a fair share in the writing for each day, and so as to give variety of music genres to blog about on the day, i.e. getting posts like Rock, Hip Hop and Garage today, then R n B, Dancehall and Grime the next day.  The role I played in the group was having to post issues and topics under the allocated genre of rock, indie and metal. I think it was successful because i was able to broadcast things that were unknown before, like Afro-Punks and the reviewing of up and coming artistes like Newton Faulkner and VV Brown. I think our group worked together but the newsday exercise tested our working relationship, in the sense that there didn’t seem to be that much co-operation and participation from some members, but all that has been put aside and everyone has been able to pull their weight in the last few days remaining for the assignment. In terms of my posts, what was good about them was being able to talk about artistes and issues like self harm and black people in the rock music subculture, something i have always been passionate about ever since  my sixth form days. What i didn’t like about it, was not being able to secure interviews with artistes  and going to review gigs like i had intended to in the beginning, but since we have decided to carry on the blog I will be able to do that. I intend to cover the Camden Crawl Music festival, which will run later next month. I also used visuals and even videos from YouTube, making sure all my entries had images to help illustrate what i was blogging about.   Only one of my posts drew a comment and that was about the band, Wicked Wisdom, someone commented to say they liked the post and will be checking out the band, but when they did they disagreed about my opinion on the band being better than this American metal band, Evanescence. I replied by saying that i thought they were better than Evanescence because they fused different genres such as Funk and Soul into their beats and lyrics. What i learnt from this was the essence and ethics of interacting with the audience. I think what we need to improve on is crediting the images, including more genres such as electro, dubstep, funky house etc, using opinion polls, drawing audiences through networking sites like Facebook. What we did well was making it as intercative and chatty as possible. Works of others in the group that i particularly liked was Yvette’s blogging about the influence of dancehall with the DJ, Callie Kenzi and Mary’s introductory posts on Hip Hop, they were really insightful on what our blog was really about, lyrical effects on the listeners of music.

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