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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11776,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":807,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}