New Methodology

For my investigation I have chosen to take two views on lyrics and combine them to see whether this would still be true. I have researched the topic of lyrics and have found the following quote. ‘I wanted to write lyrics that had meaning to them, lyrics that were meaningful and hopefully people can take something from that’. Adam Rich, who was a musician and record producer in America, had quoted this. This quote mentions how artists try to be influential and inspiring and change the audience’s feelings and actions, which therefore is having influential power over the audience. This places the writing in asymmetrical power relationship with the audience. Another quote that is based on music in general which was said by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was a poet and professor, ‘Music is a universal language’. This has caused me to wonder if lyrics written in other countries, such as South Korea, would the lyrics as a way of influence and how they would try to portray this.

            In my investigation I will use four currently active bands in South Korea and use all of the odd numbered songs on an album from each band, and use this data to analyse and see how and if the power relationship is present in the lyrics. To help make this project more comparable I will use an album from each band that has been released in the same year or as close as possible, so all of the lyrics would have been in the same time span. Similarly to get a wider spread of data I will use two boy bands and two girl bands to see if the power relationship is still present. I have chosen to do this as I want to see generally if music in South Korea has this relationship as my quotes doesn’t mention gender I think to help the reliability I should have both genders’ lyrics in the data. If I had just one sex I would only be testing half of the music produced.

            Therefore my hypothesis is that there will be an asymmetrical influential power relationship in data I will analyse but the amount of techniques found in the song will differ depending on the gender. I will the female lyrics will use less obvious techniques where as the power techniques in the male lyrics will be more assertive with the power. But overall I feel that the lyrics will still have the influential power despite being written in a different country.

            The only problem with this project is that the lyrics that would have to be gathered would have to be translated into English. However this is the way in which non Korean speaking listeners and readers would connect and see the lyrics in a way in which they understand. If I gather the translations from the same site then they will be translated in the same way and keeps the variation at a minimum.