Rhetorical Analysis of The Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” Essay

Rhetorical Analysis of The talk Heads Once in a Lifetime Kenneth Burkes basketball team Master Terms exist to bring to light the motivation behind, theoretically, whatever bit of text to which we care to apply them. The beauty of this Pentad is its fundamentality in regards to the motivations humans have in creating linguistic communication and meaning using the tools of style available. This doesnt just apply to long-winded theses regarding the nature of dramatistic meaning, though peradventure something like that would be more up Burkes alley. No, in this case I plan to utilize his methods for a more on the face of it mundane example, the motivations behind something as simple as song lyrics.I say song lyrics are simple, but in this case I am going to attempt a feat of rhetorical depth psychology few have considered possible by analyzing the song Once in a Lifetime by The Talking Heads. I emphasize the bother of this analysis because I fear that I am about to enrol on a journey to make sense out of unwiseness a 1984 documentary of the bands music is entitled percentage point Making Sense, for angiotensin-converting enzyme example. For another more drastic example, songwriter David Byrne was one of the most intentionally abstract lyricists of his time in an early incident of apparent madness, he took to the stage of his college and shaved his hair and beard in front of the faculty to the accompaniment of piano accordion and a chorus girl displaying phrases in Russian. He was promptly ejected from that school. Regardless, his song Once in a Lifetime is symbolic of the introspective, neurotic, and post-modern approach he often uses to create his lyrical identity. Though I at first found it to be a rough fit, I believe the Pentad can be successfully applied to describe the motivation ... ...it becomes clear that everything is unclear. I will add up my application, however, for the sake of my own understanding. The dominant Term here i s actuate, the balance amidst essence and existence carefully held by Byrnes dialectic of urine and time as a unified sameness. Working symbiotically with Act is the idea of Agent, a theoretical character defined as finding, investigating, and find a situation without Acting within it. Byrnes purpose is to get along right or wrong in the Scene of his lifetime. The Agency by dint of which he defines truth within the Scene is time, which shares more than a fingers fullness of space with my first term, Act. Ive come to the end of the analysis with a sense that Ive just begun a lot of fancy words to describe the futility of change. I did preface this application by noting The Talking Heads list to stop making sense.