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Honestly, society did create the mindset for things dominated by men that we should categorize women when they become apart of it which is wrong. The term "female rapper" is very demoralizing. Because in reality we do not say she is a very good female basketball player but we do when we say she's a great female rapper like society made that the norm and we need to break the barrier. Like being a girl does not mean they cannot excel in something male dominated and being male dominated should not discourage women to trying in rapping. They should be praised equally not because of their gender.
We do not see Eve Jeffers and Lauryn Hill as just rappers who are good for a "girl" but we understand their greatness and influence for what they did for other artists around the world. Lauryn Hill is known as one of the greatest artist and she paved the way for other female artists and break the barrier. In her famous song "Mystery of Iniquity" we see the theme of unseen disadvantages of courts and labels of stripping her from her earnings within her music and label. Which is unfair and would never happen to a male figure in the industry. But she put it on notice and things changed. Women voices should be heard and should not be categorized by society especially in a music form because that is art, it is their art and categorizing them is knocking their art and hardwork.

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This week we learn about short stories and how they all have theme and conflicts within them. We are given two albums one from Kendrick Lamar, "good kid maad city", and one from Tyler the Creator 'The Flower Boy.' Kendrick we learn that he is expressing how he grew up in poverty and gang affiliations as a adolescent. We learn that no matter what he does but the reality of drugs and gangs is inescapable to him, from his lens we see how Kendrick grew up and paints a picture to us from his struggles he went through. His friends were never a good crowd to him and he let peer pressure get to his character, his friends would rob places and he would be in the middle of it. With themes of religion vs violence and monogamy vs lust through his songs, we learn that is the picture the album is trying to portray to the audience. My favorite song from the album is 'Sing about me, I'm dying of thirst' and it is 12 minutes of story tellings in a melodic setting showing two different perspectives of a person in the streets then being another person who became woke and got pulled away from gang culture and finding spiritual rebirth. He is grown now and shows his growth through his personal experience through his poetic songs he writes.

The Flower Boy by Tyler Creator has an occurring theme that seeking approval will lead to an unhappy life and you will never find peace and satisfaction in life. Approval is finding it within yourself and not seeking validation, the famous term of relating to this is "Loving yours." In the song 'See you Again" we see that Tyler is talking about his dream lover in a fantasy state of mind but when he wakes up that dream fades away, so the theme is that he hates having to constantly wait and chase what he wants in the moment. My favorite song off the album is "Pothole" because he is using real world references to describe his life to the audience, it talks about how driving in life is moving forward but in life we get stuck and have bumps known as potholes which are obstacles and struggles that we deal with on the path of growth. As the album goes on there is the theme of being comfortable in your own skin and loving yourself. He uses flowers and cars as representation to find self-expression and find his identity throughout the album. Overall, the concept of being free from yourself and your mind and finding that approval within yourself will make life more peaceful and the more you drive away from your problems the more it stuns your growth.

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This week we are learning how Christine Otten uses different types of theme throughout the novel that resemble a character in a novel. The theme of a story is important because a story's theme is part of the reason why the author wrote the story. The author has a message he wants to share with readers, and he uses his story as a way to get that message across. With that I am using Felipe and his background and how Otten uses Felipe for readers to understand her theme. We learn that through hardships there is a success in the end, there is always beauty within the struggle of a person and that is what makes a person. That is the team Christine is trying to paint to us, that hardships growing up will lead a person to prosper and make them who they are if they embrace it instead of running away. Felipe was born in a broken home with a single mother creates a struggle early on for Felipe. With no role models or any supervison to watch what he does, he got into trouble and did not know what is from right and wrong. So this allowed him to get into gangs, not caring for school, and get into fights and killings. Felipe at 16 stabbed someone that sent him to jail later on in the novel, if he did not come where he came from with his circumstances he would have never been in that situation, and that is what Otten is trying to show us. His own mind is what he struggles with, his inner problems is what he battles everyday and gets him in the places he is everyday. He had good schools to choose from but instead left that life behind and when he got older, he was a leader of a activist group called that Young Lords which to me is pretty successful coming where he came from. He later lost his position because of his careless actions which has always been the cause of him losing something important. But later on he becomes very successful as a Last Poet and as Felipe, but without him having to go through everything he did, he would not be the person he was today in the novel and successful.

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In the poems about women's voice that struck my eye was Kendrick Lamar's 'Keisha's Song.' The "her pain" part is describing the things women go through that resorted in prostitution. The real pain of having to survive by doing something that is ungodly or not right to societies eyes. But she endures the pain just to eat and survive in her life. He is not shaming prostitiution but more educating from his lyrics on the idea of pain that women go through and how it can damage a persons soul and mind.

Also Tupac's song 'Brenda's Got a Baby' is also similar to Kendrick song and theme, it is about the life of preteen pregnancy and weak family structure and weak welfare that come from the ghetto. Brenda is relying on family but the family just do not want her around anymore and do not want to take on the responsiblity of her "mistake." So she ends up doing prostitituion where that leads her to being raped and molested then causing her death. But the lyrics are residing how she needed help and a hand to guide her but was shunned and looked down upon which ultimately lead her to her downfall. But she should have been heard and there should have been a care to get her what she needed to feel secure.

Repetition and Rhyme are the occurring similarities between both passages. Also the themes of prostitution which is the thing they fell back on when they were neglected and looked down upon is also the message trying to be told. Also the fact of no support system, weak family, poor family and ghetto settings are also reoccurring themes in these writings/songs.

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This week as a class we learned about setting and conflict, today I am going to use Felipe from the novel to help demonstrate how setting and conflict plays a role in his life throughout the story. Felipe is the main character in the story and we learn that him and his mother keep moving back and forth from New York and California then back to New York and there is where Felipe describes his house as a "broken home." We can learn from him saying that, that he is not doing too well financially and it is not the prettiest area to be in. With conflict being around we then learn that since he has so many problems at home life that he goes outside looking for even more trouble to getaway from his own troubles. He joined a gang with his cousins where there he realized he didn't belong like when he first thought he did when joining. But he is very aggressing and still getting in trouble where that leads to going to jail multiple times. His mother thought that taking him to California would stop and become less of a disappointment but Felipe did not like California and then moved back to New York where he still got in more trouble such as hiding/help covering a murder his friend did. He comes out of jail with a new direction by joining city council for an activist group. But he gets kicked out the group because they found out Felipe cheated on his wife. You can tell how conflicts seem to beat Felipe in the story instead of him overcoming them. He has always had mentality issues and where he came from did not help either, the lack of a support system and role models for the blueprint in the right direction was missing and this is what caused Felipe to go down the path that he went through in the novel.

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The character that I chose for my character analysis was Omar Sharif. He caught my attention more than everyone because of how detail orientated he is which reminded me of myself. When reading from Omar’s perspective he is going very into detail into things whether it is a conversation with another person or describing someone’s looks that he is attracted to. In the novel Omar is describing how someone's voice is when they are talking to him and even about their skin at the very moment which I think he is being alert to who he is talking to even though it could be a normal conversation. I relate to Omar because when I meet someone or talk to someone, I like to see what they do at first, whether it is tone, hand gestures, and topics so I get a feel for the person at first and read the room and I think Omar is good at reading the room, so he does not end up hurt in the end. Society likes to call this overthinking which is what ill agree upon that term as well, because Omar goes into detail about things that honestly a normal person would not think about, so relate because I go back and ask why a certain person is the way that they are and what caused someone to be like that since we all are humans with different backgrounds, so it makes life more interesting. But this goes back to Omar being a person who dwells on his memories and actions, and that made me question why people always dwell on the past instead of the present. But then you realize that society never soaks in the present or future because the past is the building blocks for our foundation, when we do something that affected us in a negative way, we learn to find an alternative so it does not happen again so we can move forward and progress. Also, when something is working out for us, we continue to do so because we don’t want to fix what is not broken. I learn through my mistakes and make sure it does not happen again because the past memory triggers me from letting that same result happen again, which is why I relate to Omar because he uses his memories to express what he has gone through. One event I want to talk about in the novel that pertained to Omar was about his grandmother, his relationship with his grandmother was never the best as she always pushed Omar down. Omar is the type of person who does not care about what people think of him and will do him anyways, but he has a soft spot for certain things that trigger his emotions and cares. But he will never show it, instead it is a battle between him and his own emotions in his head, which I relate to because my pride gets in the way and I choose not to show that I care about things, so I brush it off plus also society thinks when men show feelings, they are soft so that programmed me to be so. But Omar’s grandma would always say Omar would not amount to anything and that he is nothing. So, when Omar finally decided, he was known to become a poet after his performance he was excited and inspired to be. But he would run into a grandma, and she would not say anything to him but instead stand in silence and turn around, and this would always haunt Omar because her words would just haunt and replay in his head every time he thought of her. I understand him because he wants good judgement and moral support from family so it hits home for him, but why would his own blood want to push him down instead of uplifting him?

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Hello everyone my name is Baljot Sahi and I am looking forward to this class year with you all and meeting new people. I am a sophomore as Stan St. and my major is finance which I am trying to become lawyer. I was born in Ceres so the valley is nothing new to me.
In my spare time I like to either listen to music, play video games, or play basketball that's kinda like my trinity of keeping me occupied from boredom. I am on the Stan St. basketball program and hoping to bring a banner or championship to the program. I am introvert when you first meet me and then when I am comfortable I start to show you how I really am. I am really into hip hop music & R&B music so that makes me even more excited about this class. I have two older brothers who are music heads as well and we all have been deep into music from production to lyrics and meanings, we just always appreciated music than what the norms usually do. So that is why this class was what I wanted to be in. I understand that rap is more than the negative that is portrayed from the world because of sex, drugs, and violence but in reality it is more than that. It allows a person to be an artist and instead of having an instrument or a paintbrush like art and music artists rappers have a mic and lyrics that are their canvas in which they can share to us. Lyrics have so much deep meanings and are more than mumbles and melodies. Relating to lyrics is what allows us to feel and have more emotion. Music is always a escape from reality and in this course I know that we will dig deep into lyrics and meanings of songs and production so it will make me more appreciated towards artist and songs. It will also up the perception that rap is more than mumble and negative thoughts but instead another art we should appreciate. I am looking forward to the discussions in this class and can't wait to bounce ideas off rap topics.