Discussion Questions:
How does this album make you feel?
Does it inspire you to live differently in the
empire?19 January 2013
Imagine What?
The artifact I chose for my second
post is the album Night Visions by the
band Imagine Dragons. This album came out in September of 2012 and is mostly alternative
and indie based music with slight influences of dubstep and hip hop. Their most
famous singles are Radioactive, It’s Time and Hear Me. Imagine Dragons is made up of four members, Dan Reynolds,
the lead vocalist being the most well-known but also includes Wayne Sermon, Ben
McKee, and Daniel Platzman. The band became increasingly famous when they
started touring alongside AWOLNATION, which resulted in the selling of over 83,000
copies in the album’s first week alone. The story I think they are trying to
tell is about the struggles we face every day of our lives. In every song there
is always some sort of pain or heartbreak, but at the end it is transformed to
be inspirational, and liberating. They use the hurt they have experienced to try
and teach us something, that even though things get hard we can always change
the way things will be by how we feel and what we do about it. I feel that
their “goal” is to inspire us to get up, to get up even when we don’t think we
can because we’ve been knocked down too many times. They instill in us the
notion that we can do anything, if only we just try. I think this definitely
says something about the empire we live in. Our society tells us that sometimes
things get too hard and we should give up because there is nothing we can do. Imagine
Dragons wants us to forget about this because they know getting up is what makes
us stronger, and in the end is what will help us break the chains that this
empire has enslaved us with. They use their imagination, and creativity to tell
us that standing out and risking it all is the only way to make a difference in
our world. We have to be different or no one will notice. Our lives aren’t supposed
to make sense to un-believers, and if they do then something is wrong.
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This is one of my favorite albums. I agree with the opinion that is album is an album that defies the Empire's notion that we need to give up when things get tough. This is manifested in a line from their song, "It's Time," where the lyrics go, "So this is what you meant when you said that you were spent, but now it's time to build from the bottom of the pit, right to the top. Don't hold back." The pit is as far down as we can go but it is not where things end. When we enter the pit we need to realize that things may seem hopeless now but there is a world out there that we need to build toward.
ReplyDeleteWith a name like Imagine Dragons, you'd certainly hope the band would be encouraging imagination and creativity! :)
ReplyDeleteI think focusing on specific songs or lyrics may have been helpful in examining this piece. Often it's helpful to point to specific lyrics or the arc of the musical landscape when reviewing an entire album; otherwise, observations become too general and disconnected from the thing itself.