On the night of Friday, the 13th a confusing battle ensued at Skooter’s Roadhouse located in Shorewood, Illinois. The venue, hosting an “annual Halloween themed party,” lacked audience's attention even with an incentive of no-cover-charge. In attendance for the event was D.J Bernie Mac, a ghost in the search box, and FOOL HOUSE, a 5-piece cover band playing strictly ‘90s music. To add to the ambivalence of the night, the venue split into two sections with the D.J performing on one side and the band on the other. It made the 50+ in attendance waver in and out of each other’s set. Unable to fully capture the room, which was made up of mostly 30-something-year-olds, FOOL HOUSE retained the majority of the audience for the night.
Wearing wigged
As the night passed on the music was turned up a couple notches. All of the groups were sounding good until it got to Eve. This young lady singer is nice to here on the radio with her vocals tuned to perfection, but in concert it was horrible and the crowd was going from crazy to just about silent. Juvenile was the last rapper to finish the (what felt like short) concert. By the time he came up there the music was so loud you couldn’t here the guy sing.
So we figured everything out and and figured that Alex Kramper, Tori Main, Trevor Waller, Kristen Kesler, and me were going to the concert, the next day we met at Alex’s house to all ride in the concert together in Trevor’s truck, it was a planned booze cruise through St.Louis. So I woke up early in the morning for the Saturday concert and did my chores early in the morning so I wouldn’t have to do them the next day all hungover. I finally finish all my chores and then take a shower and head out to Alex’s house dressed in rock concert material, with a Captain Morgan handle and a case of Stag.
On Thursday night, the stage at Birdys was adorned with oriental rugs, candles, and vases of flowers to create ambiance. It was nice, but they wouldn’t have needed it, the music spoke for itself. They played songs from two of their albums, Good Dog Bad Dog, but mostly their latest, Ohio. This album is the one that drew the crowd ...
The musical Urinetown started off quite differently than the other plays and dances that I have attended this semester. As the lights began to fade, the audience slowly got quiet and the sound of an orchestra amplified the room. When the narrator, known as the “Cop” began telling the story, I was instantly engaged and excited for the musical to start. The main purpose of this musical was to grab the audience’s attention through stepping outside of the fictional reality of the show. Urinetown is based upon your own personal experience of humor, satire, and simply making fun of this specific genre of music. The social fantasy of selfishness, exploitation, environmentalism, and various political topics in our society allows us to laugh at the “headache” of Urinetown.
To some, December 6, 1969 may not hold any particular significance. To Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger, however, it’s remembered as the day the sixties suffered a tragic death. Irrational bikers and terrified fans were not a part of Jagger’s vision when him and his bandmates organized a free concert at California’s Altamont Speedway. Despite incessant warnings that a concert of such a large magnitude was not the best idea, the Stones went ahead with it in light of criticism they’d received regarding their ticket prices being too high. They’d performed for overflow audiences without incident in major cities before, but this crowd of 300,000 was different. A total of four births and four deaths were the result of that evening, one of which was a homicide. The stabbing of Meredith Hunter by Hell’s Angel Alan Passaro happened to be captured on film, and is now the climax of the legendary rock n’ roll documentary Gimme Shelter. Larger cultural discourses shape the way non-fiction narratives are told, and the only entity larger than the notion of disaster within the film is the notion of Jagger as a celebrity. In the words of Amanda Howell, “Jagger's ‘double self’ literally takes center stage in Gimme Shelter. On the one hand, Jagger embodies the freedom, expressivity and hedonism of the countercultural movement, while on the other he appears adept in his relation to "straight" society.” In addition to this “double self,” Jagger can also be described as a commodity in the eyes of his adoring fans. What happened at Altamont was, in a sense, an explosion of tensions that had built up over the sixties; an explosion which Gimme Shelter depicts Mick Jagger to have been shielded from as a result of his three façades.
James McDowell, vice president of marketing at BMW North America, Inc. must design Phase II communication strategies for the launch of the new BMW Z3 roadster. The program follows an “out-of-the-box’ pre-launch campaign centered on the placement of the product in the November 1996 James Bond movie, Golden Eye, and including other “non-traditional” elements such as a product appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, an offering of a James Bond Edition Roadster in the Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalog, and large scale public relations activities. McDowell must assess the effectiveness of the pre-launch activities and design marketing tactics that can sustain product excitement until product availability in March.
"Harley-Davidson: At Last" as presented in Hartley's Marketing Mistakes and Successes presents the circumstances around HD's near collapse and since rinse to near mythic success. This case is a great example of marketing myopia; HD saw them-selves as full-size motorcycles' manufactures, not in the transportation, or even the entertainment industry. They believed no one bought motorcycles for transportation, but rather for leisure time use.
So began my two-year ethnography on the American rave subculture. The scene described above was my initiation into the underground subculture where rave kids, typically under twenty-one years old, are given secret invitations to attend private warehouse parties with dancing, drugs, and thousands of their closest friends. Because of my youthful and unorthodox appearance, I was invited to join the then-highly-exclusive underground scene and attended numerous raves in several major cities in North Carolina. Although my chosen subculture was not typically examined by academia, I conducted an academic ethnography of what Maton (1993) describes as a "group whose world views, values and practices diverge from mainstream North American and social science cultures" (747). As a result, I received three graduate credit hours for "supervised research in ethnography" and conducted what may be the only academic ethnography on raves.
It is impossible to fully comprehend the appeal to the Gulf Coast High School Band Room unless you are actually a member of the band. All members of the Gulf Coast High School marching band spend the majority of their time in the band room, which is like a second home for most. The room itself does not appear to be anything special. It is a large room with a high ceiling, bright fluorescent lighting, and pink and green padding on the walls. The hallway maintains a terrible odor which nobody can quite determine the source of, and the white, vinyl tile floor is covered in a layer of disgusting things one can only dream of. Still, for some reason it remains a haven to about twelve percent of the student body. At first glance, it does not look like anything special, but when you open that big, gray door and step into the “band world” it becomes clear that it really is an amazing and wonderful place. It feels like the center of the universe.
Despite their conception in 1903, Harley-Davidson and the motorcycle industry as a whole didn’t really take off until after the Second World War. Many people rode motorcycles during the war, with Harley-Davidson themselves supplying almost 90,000 motorcycles for the U.S. military during this time. Many veterans chose to purchase motorcycles upon returning home, as they enjoyed riding during the war and wanted to continue riding in their civilian life. This generation known as the "baby-boomers" quickly became the main target audience for many of Harley-Davidson’s marketing efforts. With sales increasing and the industry growing, many "motorcycle clubs" and "rallies" were introduced. Unfortunately, due to the lewd behavior displayed by most people associated with these clubs and rallies, bikers typically had an image of being disorderly and raucous. Harley-Davidson’s image itself took a big shot due to the Hells Angels. This was a motorcycle gang wishing to become notorious for "drug trafficking and other organized crime activities," who used only Harley-Davidson motorcycles. All of this combined to lead to a decline in demand and sales throughout the entire industry during the 1960’s. The industry was really helped out with the release of the Hollywood film Easy Rider in 1969. This film helped change the public’s perception of bikers and sparked an increase in motorcycle demand which has lasted to this day.
Over this semester, I attended two concerts. The first concert I went to was a performance done by the Swedish band Graveyard at the 9:30 club in DC. The second concert that I went to was at the George Mason Center for Performing Arts. This concert was a jazz competition between bands call The Battle of the Big Bands. Both concerts were performed very well and kept the audience, myself included, very entertained throughout the entire show. In this paper, I will be discussing each individual show in depth, and then continuing on to compare the two concerts.
Slowly the lights dim and the volume of the crowd rises. About 3,000 people have come to Massey Hall in Toronto on this night to witness what some consider rocks most bizarre spectacle: Marilyn Manson. They grip the back of the seat in front of them in anticipation of what is to come, some are almost to excited to stand still whilst others seem just a little bit scared. It begins with a few dull flashes from strobe lights accompanied with ear splitting guitar feedback noise. The flashes from the strobe light quicken and theatrical smoke pours in from all corners of the stage. One by one, the members of the band take their respective places on stage to the jubilation of the audience. The anticipation for the man himself builds and as it reaches a fever pitch, Marilyn Manson emerges from the darkness at the back of the stage like a lion pouncing on its prey and the band breaks into song.
As these lyrics by Subliminal Sessions, whispered in a hissing, syllabic voice, poured out of the speakers at 6:32 am, I realized this was a fitting description of clubland nightlife. The venue that night was Aria, an after-hours superclub located on St. Catherine Street in Montreal, however, the throbbing beat accompanying the words could have been found in any club from Moscow to New York City. Electronica, ambient, garage, hard-house and other forms of dance music are now mainstream. Gone are the days of disco where small groups of devot...
As the dark stadium filled with fire, with the sounds of guns and bombs exploding everywhere, the crazed fans yelled at the top of their lungs. The enormous stage was rumbling with the sound of a single guitar as the band slowly started their next encore performance. Soon after I realized that I was actually at the Sanitarium concert listening to Metallica play "One", I thought to my self, "Is this real, am I actually here right now?" I had a weird feeling the entire time because I had worked all summer to simply listen to music with a bunch of strangers.
Honda has established a program for its suppliers to strive for improvements in order to meet Honda’s requirements. The goals of the BP program are to improve the relationship between Honda and their suppliers, reduce manufacturing costs, and eliminate product defects. They accomplish these goals by focusing on 5 key areas: Best Position, Best Productivity, Best Product, Best Price, and Best Partners (Bounds and Arnold).