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Midnight Thoughts on Midnights

Midnights tells the story of “13 sleepless nights,” according to the queen herself, Taylor Swift. While on the surface this collection is a set of poppy-techno songs, the lyrics carry a much deeper philosophical significance with many of Swift’s songs detailing internal conflicts at midnight. Swift’s song Anti-Hero expresses some of her deepest self loathing and fears of consequences that may come from being such a prominent figure in the public sphere. With the chorus “It’s me, Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me,” Swift is taking ownership of her intrusive thoughts. Instead of letting others (the public) put that on her and shame her for her insecurities, she’s coming out first and saying it as a means of empowering herself.  

Fans, “Swifties” as they self proclaim, have gotten a taste of Taylor Swift’s tendency to reclaim her own identity many times in albums like 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore/Evermore, and most recently, Midnights. What these albums all have in common is that each time Swift reinvented herself and her public image – because as she tells fans, she writes what she wants to when she wants to. Swift writes, “‘She’s laughing up at us from hell!’” With lyrics like this Swift uses irony and sarcasm to show the world she hears its criticism, and her lyrics reflect how little she cares about others’ opinions. How does this connect to philosophy? Swift is exhibiting what is termed egoism, a theory that claims “each person has but one ultimate aim: her own welfare” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Every time Swift releases a new album, it is on her own terms.  She defies stereotypes by producing music of new genres each time; she doesn’t let her previous image constrain her creative horizons. Her motivation with each new album is to stay true to herself, and as her identity changes, her music changes with her. Swift’s constant changing between genres and identities takes her and her audience to new levels of emotional and philosophical introspection as with each song and era, her listeners can feel inspired to stay true to themselves and feel empowered as they deal with uncertainty and change in their lives.

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How much is fifteen seconds of fame worth?

Growing up, my role models included my mother, Michelle Obama, and Aly Raisman, women I look up to because of their work ethic and amazing achievements. Today, many kids look up to Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, two of the app Tik Tok’s most famous stars, young women who in this case are role models simply because of their fame. Whereas I was taught that achieving my goals required hard work, generally academic, and overcoming challenges, today “influencers” on social media preach to young kids that if they make enough “good content,” they will become famous and be successful financially, very successful. I have spent my years in high school participating in sports, volunteering in my community, and conquering a full advanced placement course load so that I can get into my dream college. Today, kids spend their free time repeatedly making Tik Toks in the hope of going viral and getting signed to a talent agency, yet another example of America’s worship of celebrity culture. This phenomenon is not new; America has been dealing with a warped celebrity culture for years. The Kardashians are famous based off a reality show where they exploit and put each other down. Paris Hilton is an international celebrity solely based on her wealth. Donald Trump gained his fame and notoriety through a reality television show,“The Apprentice,” and now as president he has the platform to spew incorrect “facts” that continue to rivet the media. Being young, beautiful, able to push out your image, and on your way to or already rich, are suddenly criteria for social importance.  These social media stars  are famous for being famous, a phenomenon social media apps, such as Instagram and Tik Tok, have amplified. 

Around the world, 800 million people have downloaded the Tik Tok app. Instagram has one billion active users. According to Statista, the average American spends 2 hours and 3 minutes on social media per day. As a Tik Tok and Instagram user myself, I am not saying social media is the root of all evils. Many medical professionals are using social media apps like Tik Tok to put out credible information about the coronavirus during this pandemic. Social media has also provided a great outlet for people to stay in touch during quarantine and to develop their creative talents. However, as I have grown up during the age of technology, I have noticed a significant difference between what made someone impressive when I was in elementary school versus what makes someone noteworthy today. As an elementary schooler, the people on the news were doctors, politicians, and famous athletes. You were considered impressive by the kind of degree you had, or the tier of college you attended. Today, your value is measured based on how many followers and views you have. It is based on how many likes you have accumulated on your platform, or how many viral videos you have produced. 

Tik Tok has created a culture where it is cool to drop out of college to become an influencer. Ten years ago, being an influencer wasn’t a job that existed. Now, kids are putting out content on their social media accounts, begging for followers, so they can prove to their families they can be influencers and circumvent college altogether on a fast track to success. On Tik Tok, I see multiple viral videos of kids asking for viewers to help them hit a certain number of views so they will hit that new benchmark of fame and success. Addison Rae, one of the most successful individuals on the platform with 36.3 million followers, stated in a James Charles video that she “resigned” from LSU to pursue her Tik Tok career. Tik Tok Star Charli D’Amelio has 51.3 million followers, more than the entire population of California. Based off of her popularity, D’Amelio has hinted on her accounts and the Ellen Show that deals for a reality television show and going on tour may be in the works. Going on tour for what exactly? During quarantine due to coronavirus, our social media use has only increased, and each day the message is pushed out to more impressionable kids that they should trade their as yet hazy career goals for instafame, living with a collective of influencers like Tik Toks “Hype House” or “Sway House.” Honestly, I love making Tik Toks because I enjoy dancing and it is fun – I consider it my fifteen seconds of fame, but the idea that our culture is undergoing a shift exacerbated by this quarantine, where we now value influencing over education, is an idea we should reject. Tik Toks and their creators should stay as they started out as fun ways to pass the time with friends and not a replacement for hard work, academic rigor, and a college education.

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Listening Beyond Stereotypes

On Tuesday January 28, 2020 Black Violin played in Santa Barbara, California at the Granada Theater, usually the epitome of established upper class white culture. But today this performance by Black Violin drew a multicultural audience, young and old. The music, the visuals, and the performance they brought was an extreme juxtaposition: the cross pollination of classical and hip hop music. 

Black Violin’s first album was called Stereotypes, and the title was a theme to which they returned often to describe their experience:  two black violinists who have been physically stopped on the street, confused with thugs when they hold violins, two black men who were told in high school they should play basketball or football because of their appearance. These biases, conscious or not, are within all of us. Everyday we place ourselves and those around us into these boxes, as if you can only be one person or another, rather than the eclectic mix we all are.  

Black Violin breaks those stereotypes by mixing two genres that couldn’t be more different, by showcasing their passion for not only hip hop but also classical music, and by bringing elderly white women to a concert with urban black teenagers. Black Violin in their first two minutes on stage leaves behind the idea that just because you look a certain way or are part of a certain group that you can’t fulfill this dream. Wil and Kev, the duo who make up Black Violin, play with true virtuosity and passion. They repeatedly got everyone up on their feet, clapping and moving with the music, and demonstrating how music unites people from different backgrounds. And they teach that lesson in many venues; they played for 1200 school children in Santa Barbara earlier in the afternoon, showing by example what kids can achieve through music and also by following a vision that is just a little bit different. Not nearly as well funded as sports, music offers another community to an entirely different set of kids. Making it a goal to enhance urban communities, Black Violin works with around 100,000 young students during the school year, mostly from Title 1 schools, not only to mentor them in music, but also to spread their message of being unique and standing out from the crowd.

To break a stereotype is to put yourself out there, to risk rejection. Black Violin has taken this risk with clear success.  Having received music scholarships for college, Kev and Wil could have become classical musicians for an orchestra like the LA Philharmonic and used their classical training. They could have chosen the hip hop route and completely disregarded their classical training. Instead, they combined their two seemingly different worlds into a movement even more powerful, a lesson for all of us.

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Inside the Fortune Teller’s Tent

I love stories. I love movies. I love magic. For my entire life, I’ve believed in the magical stories I’ve read in books or seen in movies. Even though I know and believe in scientific facts, magic is fun! Believing in magic is part of childhood, and there’s nothing wrong with keeping that mindset throughout life. But, is there a difference between magic in stories and magic in real life?

This weekend I met with a fortune teller for the first time at a friend’s birthday party. I went in thinking, “well this is going to be a bunch of baloney, but it should be fun.” My friends told me to ask her about what is to come in my love life, and we all regarded my visit as a joke. I entered her little cloth tent after about an hour of waiting my turn, and a middle aged woman wearing a multicolored caftan – I’ll call her Zara – asked my name. Zara asked for something of mine to hold onto, so I gave her my watch. I told her immediately as I entered that I was excited and had been waiting for this moment, so I was not all that impressed when the first thing she said to me was that she believed I had a lot of energy. But as our session progressed, her comments got more and more specific and made me question my strict adherence to scientific facts.

My social life has been a rollercoaster lately, and she told me she could tell I’ve been stressed. That comment just reinforced what I already knew about myself;  I have been told I give off a stressful vibe. As we continued talking and Zara continued fingering my watch, she spewed out some additional wisdom about my life, and I felt like I couldn’t look away. She suggested that music calms me, told me I would find a boyfriend who has brown hair like me, and that when I get my braces off I’m going to be a “knockout.” Whether she told me what would actually happen in my future or just what I wanted to hear, I’m not entirely sure. But I left her humble booth feeling happy, justified, and hopeful for my future.

Predicting the future has been around for centuries and is done under the belief that the universe has a set pattern for each individual in which clues can be found to determine fortunes and upcoming events about a person’s life. As a student in AP European History, I loved the idea that fortune telling is found in many cultures and may have some roots in Renaissance magic. Subjects like alchemy and astrology speak to me like the pages of Harry Potter and the idea of having the stars align for me seemed equally riveting.  

Whether my experience with Zara was actually scientific or just a bunch of well- executed educated guesses by an excellent reader of people I will never know. But what I do know is that seeing a fortune teller is an interesting experience that allows you to take some time for self reflection. Maybe it was all ambiance – like being in the salon or having a sleepover with good friends, but I felt like I could really tell her anything, and she would magically shape that new bit of information into some prediction about what would come next. So the next time you’re feeling curious or a bit confused, don’t spend a ton of money on a therapist, just head down to a fortune teller and have a real, personal, and downright magical experience.

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What you get with The Hate U Give

Society uses movie theaters and other forms of entertainment to get away from life’s problems for an hour or two. We watch movies about superheroes and princesses in far off realities, different from our own.

As an avid theater goer, I am constantly waiting for the next Marvel movie to come out, or for some new Disney picture to be in theaters. When I saw the trailer for The Hate U Give, I saw a young black girl, struggling with the death of her friend. It looked interesting, just like any other movie.

I decided to take my family to see the movie, and I was just expecting to see yet another far off reality different from my own. I could not have been more wrong.

The Hate U Give is about a black teenage girl, Starr Carter, who lives in an African American neighborhood ridden with crime, called Garden Heights. But her parents want something better for her, so they send her to an all white private school in a nearby suburb.

In the course of living her two realities, her childhood friend from her neighborhood, also black, is shot by a white police officer after being pulled over for a routine traffic stop. Starr finds it increasingly difficult to keep up the act of juggling two lives as the investigation of the shooting progresses.

This film provides tremendous insight for me, a white teenage girl, into the extreme differences between the lives of black Americans versus white Americans. In mainstream America, the media minimizes how black people really are treated by authorities, especially law enforcement. But The Hate U Give highlights reality, which is that blacks are treated differently than whites.

The Hate U Give is classified as a drama, crime, and thriller film. However, more appropriately it is a serious, suspenseful drama characterized by many agonizing moments, which are often hard to watch because the truth hurts. This movie is not some far off reality. It is the world right outside of our movie theaters, right outside of our schools.

The story that this movie tells is replayed over and over again across our country. April Ofrah, an attorney in The Hate U Give, powerfully stated, “It’s the same story just a different name.” For example, in 2014 this same story played out in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American man, also by a white police officer.

This tragedy led to extreme anger across the Ferguson community and the community protested, both peacefully and violently, for over a week. The protesters in Missouri used the slogan “Hands up, don’t shoot,”the same slogan that is featured in a protest in The Hate U Give. One person died in the Ferguson unrest.

Despite similar roots as civil rights protests, black protests are often immediately labeled as “aggressive” and “dangerous,” when protests like March For our Lives, made up mostly of white people, are considered “empowering” and “good for society.”  

This issue of discrimination is not something new that we are just seeing in the 21st century. Black Americans have been fighting discrimination for decades, long before the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, often due to whites’ perceptions of blacks. As April Ofrah, attorney in The Hate U Give, said “…when our blackness is the weapon that they fear.”

I chose to see this movie twice because I was so moved by the real story that it reflects. As a white teenage girl, I see this story from a different perspective, because I can’t even pretend to understand what the character of Starr, and everyone that she is representing, is going through.

The Hate U Give shows the real story of how law enforcement treats different people, solely based off of their skin tone. While we enjoy black culture, like hip hop music and dancing and march in protest for the rights of black Americans, we have yet to understand the experience of being a black American in 21st century America. As Starr Carter put it, “You act black but you keep your white privilege.” We can do better. We can start by seeing The Hate U Give.