Magarian, Patrick

Text Review Assignment

On June 12^th of this year, an artist named Dominique Jones released a song titled “The Bigger Picture”. This release came less than three weeks after George Floyd’s tragic death. The artist, who goes by the stage name “Lil Baby”, had been having an extremely successful year up to this point. The song was certified Gold, debuted at #3 on the Billboard top 100 list, was nominated for two Grammy awards, and racked up 65.4 million streams in the first two weeks after it released (According to Billboard).

Jones was pictured at protests following Floyd’s death and used a photo from the protest as the cover for the song.

Some of the most striking lyrics from the song are:

“I find it crazy the police will shoot you and know that you dead, but still tell you to freeze”, “It’s too many mothers that’s grieving, they killing us for no reason, been going on for too long to get even, throw us in cages like dogs and hyenas”, and “Cause I can see in your eye that you fed up…They know that we a problem together they know that we can storm any weather. As a protest song, Jones did a great job combining a catchy beat and powerful lyrics. I remember when it first released, it really felt uniting. People from all over the world listen to Lil Baby and I remember seeing people from many different backgrounds sharing and discussing the song.

The chorus goes: “It’s bigger than black and white, it’s a problem with the whole way of life. It can’t change overnight, but we gotta start somewhere. Might as well go ahead start here, we done had a hell of a year. I’m gonna make it count while I’m here, God is the only man I fear.” This the most well-known part of the song and I think the lyrics will be remembered for a long time.

I think that the takeaway Jones was looking for when making this song was a feeling of unity and companionship. I also think that he meant for this song to help raise the standard that we hold police officers to. Everyone in a position of power is held to a higher standard.

Conversations of the problems Jones refers to were already happening before the song was released. There is so much injustice in this world. We all remember how the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd brought a lot of attention to some of the systemic issues our country has. Jones song is almost like the theme song for the movement. Lyrics were all over social media, television, and running through tens of millions of people’s minds.

Magarian, Patrick

Context Research Presentation

Topic connecting to reading: Armenia losing their region called “Artsakh” to Azerbaijan.

Word Count: 424 including In-text citations

*Disclaimer* Some of the information I know regarding this topic is from what I have directly heard from my family that lives in Armenia/Artsakh and the stories they have shared to me about their experiences being forced to fight in the past few months.

In 1915, the Ottoman Turks raped, murdered, and burned down cities in what is known as “The Armenian Genocide”. 1.5 million Armenians were killed. In 2020, as Turkey is trying to regain control of that region again, they are backing other governments, including Azerbaijan. Armenia has conflict with those countries because we are a Christian nation and the others are not. They want to take over all of Armenia and convert it to align with their regime. Turkey is backing Azerbaijan and they are doing a lot of the same things as what happened 105 years ago. However, now they are also taking over our churches and changing them to mosques. This is very clearly systematic and an attempt at wiping out our people and culture. It is known as “Pan-Turkism”. According to author David Babayan, Pan-Turkism is, “unification of all Turkic peoples or Turkic world in a single state, under the leadership of Turkey.” He goes on to say, “the Armenian people paid the highest price for the ideology of Pan-Turkism” (The Artsakh Problem and the Ideology of Pan-Turkism, Pg 78).

One reason why this idea of Pan-Turkism is so scary is because the “president” of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is really more of a dictator. In an article written in the New Yorker following Turkey’s 2017 “election”, Dexter Filkins (a journalist famous for his coverage of the war in Iraq/Afghanistan) said, “Erdogan declared himself the winner of a nationwide referendum that all but brings Turkish democracy to an end…effectively making him [Erdogan] a dictator” (Turkey’s Vote Makes Erdogan Effectively a Dictator, The New Yorker).

As I mentioned earlier, this is an attempt at eliminating our culture. Cultures are lost in the world for so many reasons, violence and war are not the only reasons. In Kincaid’s A Small Place, the difference between perception of a land by natives and tourists are discussed. “The Antigua that I knew…is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now”, says Kincaid (A Small Place, Pg 23). In this reading she explains how Antigua is a poor country and its residents cannot afford to go on vacation like those from other countries. Because of this, they lose their own culture and become known from the outsider perspective us tourists have. We view places like Antigua as vacation destinations and do not understand or embrace any of their traditions, food, music, dance, etc. They have lost their culture due to tourism and lack of money. Armenia is losing their culture due to violence and loss of land.

Bibliography:

Babayan, David. “The Artsakh Problem and the Ideology of Pan-Turkism.” Aug. 2011.

Filkins, Dexter. “Turkey’s Vote Makes Erdogan Effectively a Dictator.” The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2017, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/turkeys-vote-makes-erdogan-effectively-a-dictator.

Kevorkian, Raymond. The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.