Blog Post 10

The song I wrote and arranged is first and foremost an example of storytelling within a social movement. It discusses, in brutal detail, an exigence of the Neurodiversity movement within a first-person narrative. The exigence that is addressed is society’s current frame of people with variations in the human genome i.e. Autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, Down Syndrome, etc. The current frame is viewing these people as being diseased and needing to find a cure for them. The speaker regales the story of their life as a person with autism, feeling broken and deranged and explaining that society told them their whole lives that they needed to be cured. The speaker also emphasizes this unhealthy view of oneself, to go through life thinking that one is diseased and they have been doomed to a life of struggle due to an altered chromosome or a variation in the human genome. I wanted to do a first-person narrative in storytelling because it shows how deep the exigence runs in the lives of neurologically diverse people, and it is a personal account that will emotionally impact the listeners within and outside of the social movement. For those within, the goal is to help spread a sense of empowerment in them as the speaker is also a neurologically diverse person, which is an example of identification. The empowerment comes from the speaker fighting what their mother, doctors and society in general told them about their autism and that if the speaker of the song can do it, others can too. For those outside the social movement, the rhetorical goal is to give a peek at the exigence that those with the neurodiversity movement face, and to help show why it is so important to have this exigence changed.

I chose to do a song because it plays to my strengths as a musician, and also for the chance to incorporate symbolism with the chosen melody and the chance to tell a short story in a poetic setting. I also wanted to do a song because, while doing research about this social movement, most of the artifacts were articles, interviews, books, etc. that made logical arguments for the cause of neurodiversity, and I wanted to do something more creative to contrast the majority of the artifacts within the social movement that played to a more emotional appeal. The melody of the song is Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and I chose a nursery rhyme for the simple reason that, it’s simple.  I wanted a melody that everyone can identify with and hum to themselves long after they’ve heard it, and the simplicity of a nursery rhyme emphasizes the exigence: neurologically diverse people usually grow up being treated like a child well into adulthood, having others make decisions for them well into their adult life. At first, it might seem like mockery considering these facts about the song and neurologically diverse people. However, toward the end of the song the speaker gains boldness and self-worth and the use of the nursery rhyme becomes ironic, because the speaker is empowering themselves, by not letting others tell them what to do about their autism and how to feel about their autism, but taking their autism as a part of their identity and allowing it to be a factor that makes them unique, instead of a disease that hinders them.