WEEK 4 - NEW - song choice

100 years - Florence and The Machine

The main reason that I changed my artist and song choice was due to the message I wanted to convey – with my previous song choice (Nina Cried Power by Hozier), it had a closer relevance to the civil right movement despite having universal themes relevant to the protest genre; this message didn’t align with what I wanted to portray and because of this, I thought it best to change the song to something which reflected my theme of female empowerment more.

Despite not being a traditional protest song, ‘100 years’ addresses the artist’s overwhelming feelings on major events that took place in the years around the song’s release in 2018. One of the events that the song references to during this time is the #MeToo movement which was revived following the exposure of the widespread sexual-abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017. As well as this, the song also refers to the one-hundred-year anniversary of women being granted the right to vote in Great Britain; ‘A hundred arms, a hundred years’.

The main reason for choosing this song was due to the key motifs of female empowerment previously mentioned which run throughout the song. As well as this the song presents more creative freedom through its more abstract lyrics and melody which will allow me to experiment more with the aesthetics. Regarding the audience’s preference, the artist is contemporary and still active in this point in time despite being formed over ten years ago in 2007; this covers the age group of the audience’s demographic.