Blog #1- Black and Blue

Throughout my life, music has always been there for me. Ever since I was a child, country music specifically has always been in the background wherever I went. Now, I do not find anything as comforting or inspiring as those twangy lyrics or acoustic guitar. When I am sad, I can always find a song full of lyrics that seem to reflect my mood perfectly. Listening to music allows me to express how I feel when I fail to do so with my own words. That is why, for me, lyrics and vocals are extremely important in the music I select. While some people like the instruments of a song, typically I fall for the words. The words are where all of the meaning lies and you can apply them to your life in one way or another. I also love the way music can take me back to old, forgotten places. A song I hear now that I listened to in middle school will always take me back to those days. Holiday songs especially have this effect. I can listen to "Home for the Holidays" in the middle of the summer and it will feel like the middle of winter to me. Music is a very, very special thing that many people cling to with everything they have and I am definitely one of those people.

The song "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue" by Louis Armstrong has extreme significance to the narrator of Invisible Man, and it is quite obvious why when the lyrics are read thoroughly. Throughout the novel, the narrator of this book struggles with his identity. He believes he is invisible, not in the physical sense but in the spiritual or mental sense. His invisibility occurs because he is a black man living in a racist white society. The song discusses this in a very similar fashion. The line "'Cause you're black, folks think you lack" is very important because it says right there that because a person is black, they are automatically viewed differently. The narrator's point is that the invisibility lies there. A black man is forced to be what society wants them to be, and as a result loses his identity altogether. Other lines such as "My only sin is in my skin" also reflect how the narrator of the novel must be feeling. The significance of this song to the narrator is very easy to see as the song discusses the difficulties of being a black man during that time and the narrator of Invisible Man is alive during those times and is a black man himself.