Alexis Battle's Digital Past Blog

Just another college student trying to get by, one procrastinated assignment at a time.

Displacement

Today in class we talked about displacement in terms of, “displacement of people in space and time.” One rhetorical questions that were asked were, “Who are the people singing and drumming in GarageBand?,” in terms of space and time. This question made me really wonder who were the people that I was just dropping in my song for the final project, and do they embody in their music what I want to convey through my song. Through my song, I want to try to capture the cries and the possible feelings of Africans and African Americans during their physical displacement during slavery, to the civil war, and even today’s societies. However, I’m having a hard time doing that because it doesn’t seem that any of the people that are at my disposal in GarageBand fit into my idea. Within GarageBand themselves the blank faces give no indication of who these people are, but the names and genres assigned to them allows the user to infer the race and ethnicity of them. The only problem is that the genres that are typically enjoyed throughout the African American community are an accurate depiction. It all just sounds like a bunch of whitewashed meaningless nothingness making it difficult to convey my ideas throughout the music.

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