Blog 9

 These past weeks, as we began our poetry unit we’ve also begun analyzing songs by one our favorite musicians. Like most other students, I chose an artist that I listen to often enough to already know the lyrics to most of her songs. Although I’ve been listening to these songs for months, I never noticed a lot of the meaning behind them, until now.

The most recent song I analyzed was Drew Barrymore by SZA. At first glance, this song is about a girl going through a breakup. Before I was told to actually study the lyrics, that was about all the meaning I gathered from it. However, after beginning to study the way she arranged her lyrics and the multiple shifts in tone, I realized a lot more thought went into this song than I originally gave it credit for. The beginning of the song particularly stood out to me because of how it doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the song. It begins by saying multiple random phrases someone might hear at a party, such as “oh, so glad you made it” and “somebody get the tacos”. As the song continues, her tone shifts to become much angrier and self deprecating. She states, “I’m sorry I’m not more attractive… I’m sorry you got karma coming to you”. In these lines, the singer seems angry that she’s not being appreciated for who she is, just judged for what she’s not. As I studied these shifts I couldn’t help but be reminded of the stages of grief. In the beginning, its almost as though she’s ignoring her problems, as well as the topic of the song. This is very similar to the first stage of grief, denial. The song then changes it’s entire course, the way a person might shift into anger, another stage of grief. All this time, the song I had been listening to for fun, actually had a super complex and interesting message hidden in it’s lyrics that I never would’ve discovered if I hadn’t taken the time to look for it.

With so much media and entertainment coming our way nowadays, it can be hard to fully appreciate all of it. Yet, when you actually take the time to fully understand the things that surround us, you never know what you could uncover. Lyrics and poetry are not things you can glance at to fully understand, to really see the true beauty in the words, you have to put in some effort.