My new blog for 112MC

http://bashiryusuf112mc.wordpress.com/

Two and a Half Men

First time i heard about ‘ Two and a Half Men’ was sometime 2006. I was reading the TV listing for channel Five and i saw ‘ Two and a Half Men’, i thought the title was dodgy so i ignored it. Then, like a week later i saw the season finale teaser and understood that its a sitcom. i checked it out and straight away liked it and watched the previous seasons online, and i’ve been watching since!

Two and a half men, follows the lifes of Charles ‘ Charlie’ Harper, Alan Harper and Alan’s son Jake. The only thing Charlie & Alan have in common is their maturnally cold mother. In the beginnign Charlie is a rich jingle writing casanova, but later on he meets Chelsea who becomes his wife. Alan harper is a chyropractor who is trown out by his wife Judith and gets him to pay for everything she wants. then you have Jake, a Lazy fat school kid who is shuffled between his parents.

The sitcom starts with Charlie & Alan raising Jake, who then has a caring dad for all the important and boring stuff and a fun-loving sugar uncle who teaches him everything about girls and having fun.

My strange music taste

Untill this day, i havent figured out what type of genre my favourite music falls into. Looking in my iPod libary, it seems i am a big fan of Daft Punk, Tupac ‘Makaveli’ shakur, Coldplay, Eminem, La Roux, Mr hudson, The gorillaz and N.E.R.D. Which means i listen to Alt Rock, Electro and Rap.

Three genres that dont relate to eachother, im sure when you purchase a Eminem CD on iTunes they wont recommend you Daft Punk’s discovery album or Coldplay’s Viva la Vida & Death and all of his friends.

This weird taste of music makes it hard for me to explain what type of music i am interested in. When somebody asks me what type of music im into, i dont want to say ” i listen to pretty much everything”, because i dont want to sound corny. This taste of music comes from, my older brother being a hardcore rap fan, and my friends all from different backgrounds listening to different genres, and ofcourse the pop music shown on MTV.

The first time i heard my brothers rap music, i heard artist like Tupac, BIG, KRS-ONE, Nas, Xzibit, Ice Cube and Snoop dogg. I remember Snoop’s ‘Doggystyle’ album in my brothers room and Tupac’s ‘All Eyez On Me’ together with Illmatic and Ice Cubes War/Peace album. All these albums influence my taste for music and even some probaly influenced my life. I kept on listening to rap untill lets say 2001, thats the year i started to get bored. Even though Eminem bursted on to the rap scene and he quickly became one of my favourite rapper.

Somewhere in 2002 i was introduced to the gorrilaz, i started listening to their hit single ’19/2000′ and wondered if the album was as good as the single. I downloaded the album and i remember just skipping a few songs, i liked their style of music as it combined everything from hip hop to soft rock.

After the gorillaz, there was a period i was bored of music. Nothing special was being released, except a couple of eminem album and the explosion of 50Cent, so i started exoerimenting with other genres. i bought a N.E.R.D. album from the record shop and went home to listen to it, i loved the high tempo party tunes with the simple clever rhymes. Since then i keep folowing N.E.R.D and im a big fan untill this day.

When i moved to Birmingham from The Netherlands, i started listening to the music they consider as pop here. The only band that really caught my ear was Coldplay, i dont know what excatly i like about coldplay but theur tunes make you relax and are addictive. For about two years i spend listening to Coldplay, NERD and The Gorillaz and sometimes i re-visit the old Rap classics.

Then, i fell in love with electro related music, i started digging up some Daft Punk albums, and fell in love they way a Daft punk song can make ya feel good. A major example is the song ‘One more time’. With lyrics ” Celebrate and dance for free” it has to make you feel good! Then, i heard La Roux who has something special and believe me its not her strange voice, its something more than that.

Now, i listen to Mr Hudson, who’s new album just blew me away. Its probaly the album i never skipped a song. its the perfect album for me, big american 808 mixed with british vocals!

I can conclude that as i was getting older, my music taste changed with my lifestyle. for instance as a youth i just listened what the people i looked upto liked. However now, i base my playlist on my mood!

Goal.com

Goal.com is probaly the website i visit the most. I might visit it like a good 50 times a day, because it has rapid update on the latest Football news. if your a crazy football fan like me, you must visit Goal.com at least ten times a day!

From conventional football articles to realistic and unbaist player ratings, Goal.com offers plenty to keep you occupied for at least an hour everytime you visit.

The greatest thing about Goal.com is, that it isnt complicated. If you are interested just in the team you support, you go to the ‘ Teams’ and select your team and everything related to your team will be there.

My favourite feature is how it has all the latest tranfer information, and the exclusive interviews with all the big name managers and players. It also has the special feature, were it discusses football issues, player of the month, issues in football, global football, European football and etc.

Goal.com beats any other Football website hands down!

Rapbasement.com

Rapbasement.com keeps me updated with whats happening in the Hip-Hop world. Its great as its accurate and doesnt publish stories that are untrue or just made up by dodgy source. It’s has exclusive interviews (radio & Video), magzine interviews, clips of award shows that i cant view on British TV, and the latest Audio and Music Video’s.

I’ve been using rapbasement.com for about 2 years now, and i really like it. I go on it once every two days. The only bad thing about Rapbasement.com is that it sometimes takes long to update followers with news, but thats sometimes.

i would recommend it to every Hip-Hop fan!

Facebook

Facebook went from an unknown social network website to the most popular ever. I started using Facebook in 2007, when a friend kept mentioning how great it was. I checked it out and joined for the sake of it, however soon i realised how easy it is to communicate, share or even play games. In other words with Facebook you’ll never be bored, because there is always someone online.

Unlike Myspace, Hi5 and Bebo – Facebook is still number one and its only getting better. You can share everything from photo’s, Status, links, events and you can also become fan of ur favourite ‘ people/things’ and keep up to date with they are upto. What makes Facebook number one is, that it has all the featers that all the other social networking sites have, but Facebook takes those features on a whole new level!

Its hard to live these days without Facebook because, if you want to contact a person and you dont know his phone number, you just leave him a comment on his Facebook wall and they’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Another big advantage is, for example doing group work instead of heaving to meet up constantly you can create a group and have discussions.

Week 2: Group Task

Group 2C
Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf, Katherine Tysoe, Sarah Myers, Carley Bartlett and Ryan Powell.

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, began in 1964 and gained global recognition in the field of cultural studies. At the time, this was a huge development due to its difference to the thinking of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The CCCS went against the traditional understanding of mass culture expressed by Adorno who believed “art and commoditised culture had degenerated into a mere reproduction of and support for the economic base”. The main focus of the CCCS was subculture, popular culture and media studies. They were interested in how popular culture was integrated into advanced capitalism and politics.

Stuart Hall, a theorist at the CCCS, made a specific point by questioning the relationship between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ placing a certain stress on how mass produced texts are used. They prompted a cross-disciplinary investigation of different media areas such as education, genre and ‘race’. They also became re-known in their field for the combination of political critique and work on texts but also through ethnographic studies inside a generic framework.

What is very interesting in what we found was that the CCCS used various ideas, studies and theories such as Western Marxism, feminism and critical race theory to relate how the ‘masses’ interpret and consume various forms of media.

Their ideas and beliefs tie in with the masses because people relate in different ways to different forms of media. They wanted to study people’s reactions; people’s presumptions and people’s interpretations because they felt that the ‘consumer’ should have a voice on what the ‘producer’ produced. They placed the importance on the mass produced texts because they felt that there wasn’t diversity for the ‘masses’. Looking back in history, a lot of ‘mass media’ was generally looked down on e.g. poetry was favored by the high class due to its formal register and lexis. The lower class would not have been able to even read it due to the level of education. Nowadays, poetry is something that isn’t necessarily frowned upon due to its educational purposes but it is a form of media that is becoming more and more dissolved, due to the existence of mass culture, which is rather more entertaining and accessible for the masses.

Their ideas tell us that the media today is more diverse and culturally-aware than it was 30-40 years ago. It also proves that popular culture is becoming more and more evident through today’s forms of media; from newspapers to TV. It takes in a lot of different contexts such as religious and social to tackle issues that are related to modern day debates i.e. abortion. The media today proves the idea that popular culture may be a commodity that is being sold, but it is a culture that is enjoyed by the masses as well and forms a great part of today’s social environment.

SOURCES:

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631207535_chunk_g97806312075356_ss1-10

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”, Cultural Studies Now and In The Future, University of Illinois, Urbana-Campaign, April 1990.