Glendale Community College Analysis of Songs on Los Angeles Essay

Writing Goals

The goal of this essay is to demonstrate your understanding of how music can reflect, represent, or speak to a place. You will do this by demonstrating the following key writing skills:

Crafting an argument: Creating arguable claims (including your main claim – the thesis) and using effective logical reasoning to develop the argument

Using evidence to support claims: Demonstrating the ability to identify and incorporate relevant, interesting, effective evidence that enhances and supports the argument

Adding to a conversation: Further exploring ideas, concepts, questions, or terms raised by another writer, which calls for your own examples, claims, and analysis as you test, complicate, or add to the ideas raised by another writer

• Analysis: Opening up meaning for readers, based on evidence from your subject, beyond an opinion-only reaction by offering explanations, insights, and connections between evidence and claims.

The Assignment

• In “Los Angeles Is Singing,” Kun claims that “[s]ongs can orient us to where we are, ground us in a sense of home, but they can also help us imagine where we want to go and reimagine just what home can mean” (183). Throughout his examination of this idea, he discusses the wide variety of songs that have been written about Los Angeles.

In this essay, you will select 3-4 songs that relate to Los Angeles in some way and explain: How do these songs offer a particular experience or “phenomenological” understanding of L.A.?

• In your essay, you will analyze how particular songs reflect, influence, or speak directly to Los Angeles. The first step is to decide on a focus. Choose one of the following areas of focus:

Pick a specific neighborhood or community in L.A. and discuss how the songs represent that neighborhood; this could involve a contemporary look at the area or an examination of a historical moment (such as gangsta rap from Compton in the 1990s, the hard rock scene in the 1980s on the Sunset Strip, the West Coast jazz scene on Central Avenue from 1940s-1950s, etc.).

• Look into the ways songs represent a particular culture in L.A. Culture in this case could mean ethnicity or country of origin, but it could also mean a subculture that revolves around an activity or place (such as surfers, car culture, etc.)

For the project, you will need to include 3-4 songs (your mixtape).

Source Requirements

This project will require you to do some research to find your songs, which will be sources for the essay. The first step is to discover and listen to songs in order to narrow down the ones you want to include. YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, etc. are valuable tools for this.

Along with the songs, you may want to understand more about the music, cultures, neighborhoods, and histories you are examining. This optional research would help provide important context for your readers and help you to understand your subject better.

In terms of source requirements, you must incorporate cited evidence (e.g. paraphrase/summary, description, quotations) from the following:

Josh Kun’s essay, “Los Angeles Is Singing” (add to the conversation that he started about how music represents Los Angeles)

3-4 well-chosen songs