Guitar Hero
Advertisements have long been a cornerstone in the media. Advertising during the Super Bowl, for example, has become such a lucrative business that ad space for a 30 second commercial now costs around two million dollars.
The commercial I will be covering is for the new video game, Guitar Hero World Tour. The commercial starts out looking at a door way, with Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll playing, when Alex Rodriguez slids in, wearing a button down shirt and boxers a la Risky Business, playing a Guitar Hero controller. He is promptly joined by Tony Hawk on drums, and Michael Phelps on bass. Finally Kobe Bryant comes in with the microphone and starts singing the song. They continue to rock out till the commercial ends. The only non musical line in the commercial comes at the very end, when the announcer says “Unleash your inner rock star with Guitar Hero World Tour”. It’s a basic celebrity commercial, trying to be funny and appealing to everybody.
Kenneth Burke was a major American philosopher who worked in the field of rhetoric and aesthetics. In Burke's philosophy, social interaction and communication should be understood in terms of a pentad, which includes act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He proposed that most social interaction and communication can be approached as a form of drama whose outcomes are determined by ratios between these five pentadic elements. One of his more important ideas were the concepts of god terms and devil terms. God terms are words or images that are inherently good. Words like freedom, progress, and prosperity are all types of god terms. A commercial doesn’t necessarily need to have spoken words to have god terms in it though. For example, a commercial with nothing but a beautiful woman in a night gown and music, implies sex which can very easily be a god term. The point being that it’s not just how language is used but also how images are used in conjunction to it The commercial,...