Today, I’ve been thinking about the feedback I received for my presentation, and I’m incorporating it into my final paper. I’m doing some research on THE articles for nostalgia and self-continuity and finding some good sources to reference! I also started organizing my figures and the structure of my paper. Other than that, I just need to continue researching and writing.
Author: Ainsley Bonang (Page 1 of 2)
I have been doing SO much research today for hours and hours because I got so into it. I’m at a point where it feels like so many ideas are floating around and themes are becoming clearer, but I don’t yet know how to articulate all of this. I spent a lot of time searching Instagram, Pinterest, and the Internet for examples of song lyric tattoos to build up my corpus, in addition to reaching out to a few of my friends who have song lyric tattoos (one got one today, which was so exciting, and her tattoo is a prime example for a lot of the things I want to talk about).
One theme I found today was a lot of people getting song lyric tattoos to connect them to another person, so one person has the first part of the lyric, and the other has the other half. I also found this adorable example of a woman who got lyrics to a song her husband wrote about her tattooed on her arm, in addition to musical notes each representing a family member. This got me thinking about the role of the visual and the text in song lyric tattoos. Some tattoos are inspired by song lyrics but don’t include the song lyrics themselves. On that note, I’ve been doing some research on how music and lyrics work together to create emotional responses and mental images (which is interesting in thinking about visualizing lyrics).
Another thing I was discovering is that people get song lyric tattoos to sort of document their life, or as Kosut describes, a biographical documentation of one’s life. One person was talking about how they just like a specific song and have memories of even just doing simple things like cooking or putting on makeup. In this way, this song has become the soundtrack to their life, which is super powerful.
I also have been contemplating this idea of fandom a lot. I was looking into how song lyric tattoos can connect people. I’ve also previously done some thinking about band t-shirts and how they serve a similar (but more temporary) purpose to song lyric tattoos. Then I started thinking about the boygenius tooth that all three members have tattooed on their wrists (to portray the lyrics from their song “Bite the Hand”) and how I remembered drawing tooth tattoos with my friends this summer because we were performing one of their songs in a talent show. I loved how that made me feel like I was part of a group of people who love the music (and whole culture around it) that has become so core to my identity. It made me feel special because it was a reference you could only truly understand if you really knew their music. I also vaguely remembered seeing that they were giving out temporary tooth tattoos in their vinyl record, which is a cool way to bond fans and include them in their shared tattoo. They also recently launched a line of tooth jewelry, serving a similar purpose. Thinking about all of this in the context of my tooth tattoos with my friends at camp, I also remembered an event we had for the campers: Taylor Swift Day. We set things up Coachella-style with a silent disco, fun food, and even a temporary tattoo and paint station. I was in charge of the paint station, and we were instructed to do hearts or the number 13 on kids’ hands. Taylor Swift used to write 13 on her hands because it’s her lucky number, and so that took off as something fans would do while attending her concerts. Wearing symbols like the tooth and the number 13 indicate to other people a certain knowledge of an artist and express a certain level of appreciation for those artists.
Anyways, these were just a bunch of my thoughts, so writing them down was really helpful. I’m going to continue exploring these interesting areas and start to organize my findings more by theme so that I can craft my presentation!
I met with Professor Plesch today to talk through my ideas, so I just wanted to keep track of that progress here. I want to work on collecting more examples for my corpus so that I can analyze them and categorize them, which will help me to structure my paper. I also need to work on narrowing down my topic to better understand the who/what/where/when/why. On the note of collecting examples, though, I was watching the first episode of a tv show called Good Girls, and an interesting case of song lyric tattoos came up. One of the main characters had a tramp stamp that said “all you need is love,” but the “love” was a heart. They robbed a grocery store that she worked at, and the manager found out it was her by seeing her tattoo. I thought it was an interesting portrayal of tattoos in media. It did get me thinking, though, about how tattoos are a part of people’s identities, and that they can be used to identify people because they are very much a part of that person. I aim to understand more about why people resonate with certain lyrics and choose to make them a part of themselves.
I had a lot of fun researching Duke Riley and got very into his style and his work. I think it’s really cool how much he focuses on nautical themes but also relating that to environmental issues, such as the trash in our oceans. His work — both visual arts and tattoos — is very influenced by scrimshaw, which you can see in the technique he uses (black outlines, a little boxy, etched). I also thought it was cool that he painted over cassette tapes and etched song lyrics and scrimshaw-like designs representing the music the cassette tape would play. I was really excited about this connection to my project!
This week was FULL of research, and I feel like I got some ideas going for my project, which was really exciting. I’m intimidated by but pumped about the fact that I have selected a gap in the research by looking into song lyric tattoos. I found sources on the connections between tattooing and trauma and also music and trauma, which is a way I’m connecting the ideas of music and tattooing. I also found some sources about affirmations and how that promotes well-being but also how music promotes well-being, so words and powerful phrases can be a tool for well-being, hence why many people choose to tattoo song lyrics on themselves. I also was thinking a lot about why people choose to get tattoos and how it can create community between people who are tattooed or connect with the tattoos one has. For example, with song lyrics, fans of that music might be more drawn to one’s tattoos and establish connections with them based on that music.
I spent some time this week trying to research my topic and realizing that it’s actually kind of difficult. I did some online research and came across some examples of song lyric tattoos with little explanations of their importance, but I’m not finding a lot of scholarly articles. I did sit down with some of the books on Reserve but wasn’t finding much. I did think it was cool, though, in the Atkinson reading on straightedge tattooing that the lyrics of a song called “Out of Step (With the World)” by Minor Threat sparked this whole culture of straightedge and certainly inspired tattoos to represent their values of “don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck. At least I can fucking think,” which were both the song lyrics and the motto of this straightedge philosophy. I’m looking forward to doing more research on this specific topic and my project in general.
I had a LOT of fun with this presentation project because I got to look into an artist very personal to me — my brother’s tattoo artist! My brother’s decision to get tattoos is a big part of why I was thinking so much about tattoos and therefore why I was intrigued by this class. His artist has such a cool Instagram page and has done so many different styles, displaying their wide skill. I was particularly drawn to their interest in using bright colors in tattooing, which was really fun. I tried to look for song lyrics in their work and found a couple of examples. One was a Mac Miller lyric and another was multiple different tattoos of “you are my sunshine” — a lyric that has become such an expression I forget it originally came from a lullaby. These examples were written with imagery or in someone’s handwriting, which I thought was beautiful and enhanced the meaning of the lyrics. I can’t wait to do more research on this, and it was really cool to look at it from one artist’s perspective.
When reading both the Sarnecki and Gentry & Alderman articles, I kept thinking about how a powerful way to tattoo trauma would be through song lyrics. I know a lot of people use song lyrics to get them through challenging times, and so I figured this would be a way people would want to express their growth in getting through those challenges. So I searched some examples of this and found multiple people who tattooed song lyrics on themselves, and they all had a moving story associated with it. I think it’s really cool how other people can see those song lyrics and connect to them because they know them and yet have a totally different experience with them. Songs hold a strong memory trace involving everything a person was feeling or going through when they listened to that song, and so song lyric tattoos are a beautiful way to tell that story and embody that resilience.
I chose to research Aboriginal Australian tattooing traditions because I’m going to be studying abroad in Sydney in the spring, and I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the culture. I found that there actually weren’t a lot of tattooing practices in Aboriginal Australia, but there were practices of scarification and ceremonial body painting. I found some information about the ceremonial practices and how women would paint their bodies and sing and dance as a means of healing the community and passing on tradition. These traditions were grounded in the Dreamtime, a time when mythical beings were created and connections between humans and nature were established. They incorporated song in this ritual, which I remember learning about in my Intro to World Music class last fall. I thought this could be a potential topic for my final project about song lyrics, as I could also look into how music is visually represented on the body. Dreamtime is also the basis for much of the natural imagery used in body painting, and now modern Aboriginal-influenced tattooing. In my research on this, I found a tattoo artist, Tatu Lu, who does these Aboriginal-influenced tattoos with the intention of helping people connect to their Aboriginal ancestry. She also tattoos non-indigenous people (such as herself) with designs of Australian botanicals and fauna, connecting people to Australia. Though this is a modern practice, it is rooted in Aboriginal traditions, connecting the past to the present and future, which is exactly the point of Dreamtime.
One of the most fascinating things to me about this class is thinking about the skin and tattooing as the act of inscribing the skin. I really liked what Schildrkout had to say about this in relation to feminist theory and the emphasis on the body and embodied experiences, a topic we have been addressing a lot in my feminist theory class. I have been drawing a lot of connections between these two classes because of the ways they each emphasize the body as a physical representation of identity. In the case of my feminist theory class, identity is present in the body through the ways it is expressed but also the ways in which the body can sense when things are wrong, which is tied to identity. For example, there’s the classic image of women tensing up when walking alone at night. They might not know in their heads that they feel unsafe, but their body does. Our bodies are a language. Our bodies communicate. In the case of tattooing, tattoos can reflect so many aspects of our identity — group membership, our values, etc. I absolutely loved the way Schildkrout summarized this concept, saying that “the body, as a canvas, is not only the site where culture is inscribed but also a place where the individual is defined and inserted into the cultural landscape. Tattoos, scars, brands, and piercings, when voluntarily assumed, are ways of writing one’s autobiography on the surface of the body” (Schildkrout 338). I think the idea of tattooing as a way of telling one’s story, as an autobiography, is really powerful because it means the person themself is the writer of their own story. They can reveal what is most important to them, document stages of their life, and reclaim their bodies. The Rubin article had so many pictures that demonstrated the art of storytelling on the body. I appreciated the emphasis on tattooing as a high art that takes significant focus and attention to do well. People’s autobiographies are a big deal, so it is the responsibility of tattoo artists to portray them well and assist people in telling their stories.