I chose to do a rhetorical analysis on the music video “You Belong With Me” By Taylor Swift. This song is about Taylor Swift have a crush on this boy who is her best friend when she’s in high school. The boy she likes has this girlfriend who is nasty to him and doesn’t understand him like she does. Given away from the song title, Swift believe that her friend belongs with her. This music video uses both kairos and pathos throughout the music video to convey the song’s message. Pathos can be found when looking at the generalized meaning of the song. When Swift is trying to say, is that her friend deserves better than what he has. Several people can relate to watching a friend date someone who doesn’t treat them properly. It’s annoying to watch …show more content…
The one that is most apparent (and adorable) starts around 2:30 when Swift is at her high school football game in the marching band. It shows the ending of the game where the football team just won the game (her crush is on the football team). Swift’s neighbor, the one she’s crushing on, runs over to his girlfriend and they get into what seems like a pretty big argument. He turns and walks away from her, completely disregarding what she said to him. It then cuts to the boy getting ready to go to the Homecoming dance when Swift stays home. He asks if she plans to go, but she said she needs to study. To which he replied “Wish you were.” After this is being shown, the lyrics are “I think I know where you belong, I think I know it’s with me”. It then shows Swift looking at the paper she wrote “I love you” on, which she wrote at the beginning of the video. I find this moment to be kariotic because the views get caught up in seeing Swift crush on this boy for the entire song, then he finally shows interest in her. Along with the lyrics, it shows that she might finally get her moment to show him that they belong together. Then Swift finds him at the dance and she shows him her paper that says “I love you” and he shows you his paper that says it too. The entire music video leads up to that point. This is one example of a rhetorical analysis on a music video, but every music video could be analyzed this way. Just like an essay,
Pathos is used as an appeal to emotion, often to gain an audience’s investment for a specific purpose. Animal shelter advertisements, car commercials, and even magazines use this method to attract an audience and pull them in by their heartstrings. Rebecca Skloot’s contemporary biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is no different, utilizing this method to maintain the audience’s attention and emotional investment in the story.
Pathos goes beyond that and rouses the audience’s emotions and persuades their heart directly. With her iron-willed personality, Kelley uses emotional appeal again and again to tell the attendees at the National American Woman Suffrage Association about the hardships child laborers have to go through, including the sheer work many children had to do such as, “working eleven hours by day or by night”. Saying this lets the audience sympathize with the
In this essay I will be touching on the rhetorical devices, Ethos and Pathos. The rhetor
Pathos is a rhetorical device used for providing emotion to the reader. He wants the reader to feel sympathetic towards the mistreatment of African-Americans. In the introduction, the first rhetorical device he introduced is pathos. Coates present pathos when he introduced Clyde Ross. He titles the first chapter as, “So that’s just one of my losses”.
The definition of pathos is the quality or power in an actual life experience or in literature, music, speech, or other forms of expression, of evoking a feeling of pity, or of sympathetic and kindly sorrow or compassion. In other words, it is a way that authors and/or writers get to the audience’s emotions. Spurlock uses pathos by affecting the emotions of his audience with children. The beginning of the documentary shows kids singing and dancing. That automatically affects people’s emotions.
Chris uses pathos by providing examples of Chris’ troubled family life. For example, after finding out about his father’s affair, Chris felt as if he could only trust Carine. This is evident as Chris sent her a letter saying, “Anyway, I like to talk to you about this because you are the only person in the world who could possibly understand what I am saying” (Krakauer 129). This appeals to our emotions as Krakauer makes us empathize with Chris: he feels as if no one understands him, so he thus ignores his family. Chris was not only socially isolated, but he was also physically isolated from everyone he loved.
This song shows a young girl who is portrayed as having a dorky nerdy look. Also, it shows a girl that is opposite of her, who is a pretty brunette known by the highschool kids. The “nerdy” girl is in love with a football player, who she believes will never have a chance with, because he is with another girl. “Taylor swift” has a crush on a boy who is blind to see that she really loved her and not the girl he is with who is portrayed as a “popular” Brunette. This is an important aspect to Taylor Swift because she is known to sing love stories that she hears about or experience herself.
The new persona Swift puts on is a cold-hearted person who gives mixed messages. The personas Swift puts on make his modest proposal seem more
Meanwhile, this phrase is displayed at the same time, when Swift is at its most fortunate moment in her life, which is performing at the concert. Finally, pathos can be defined as the red dress that Swift wears to appeal to our emotions. The color is a red symbolic color, because it is found on every diet coke label. These methods were created to persuade the audience that diet coke will make you feel young and
Swift includes examples of parallelism such as, “I could show you incredible things/ Magic, madness, heaven, sin” in order to make her lover aware that she can be all of those things for him, all she has to do is “find out what [he] [wants],[and] be that girl for a month.” Another thing “Magic, madness, heaven, sin” does is emphasize the unpredictable personality of Taylor Swift, and also serves as a fair warning that they are going to have a difficult relationship.
The music video conveys a very deep meaning that is culturally relevant and is something many people struggle with everyday. Hozier utilizes imagery, symbolism and rhetorical strategies as an attempt to expose the
Are you happy with yourself?” By repeating this question, the speaker is asking her audience to seriously question their own happiness and if it was falsely cultivated through society’s measures. At that moment of the music video, Beyonce is shown with no makeup, accenting her innate beauty, and she smiles at her reflection. In the last moments of the song, softly sings “Yes”, confirming that she has learned to love herself, the way she naturally is. This sums up and executes the speaker’s main message- that young, impressionable girls should appreciate the beauty they were born with.
Abstract Taylor Swift has been marked by her many fans as an icon of feminism and empowerment. Inspiring girls on how their own experiences and personal truths are something worth singing about. Illustrating what she claims to be female empowerment through ‘squads’ and award speeches. With the rapidly increasing influence of mainstream media, it is imperative to highlight how big icons such as Taylor Swift are manipulating and being manipulated by the masses, society and the market itself for profit and personal gains.
She, in fact, refers to her lover as the prince, and as for herself, she is the princess. To add, Swift comforts her lover through song as she sings, “... we’ll make it out of this mess.” In this metaphor, it is eminent that Swift is declaring the
Although she does not want to, their is a part of her that wants to be with him and is jealous that he has found another woman to love. This song is giving the audience a lesson that we are all strong and that it is always possible to be happy even when it does not seem like it. Despite how strong she is, she still hurts and speaks to her ex who left her broken hearted. “I heard that you 're settled down, that you found a girl and you’re married now,” they broke up and Adele is having an onerous time getting over him. While he is married and now moved on to new things in his life, “I heard that your dreams came true.”