"Soldier Soundtracks to War"

Blog post #3

I chose Dick Gordon's piece entitled "Soldier Soundtracks to War." This show contained three separate stories.

Soldier Soundtracks to War

This story incorporated helicopter sounds and gun sounds into the podcast before any soldiers were interviewed, setting up the scene and mood of the piece.

The song Indestructible develops self-confidence in one specific soldier interviewed, allowing him to remained focused while on duty. On the other hand, a staff sergeant was interviewed and explained his love of gospel music. The music on his iPod connected his view of the war to a spiritual warfare. When a woman was interviewed, she explained the culture shock of being a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman fighting in Iraq. On her iPod contained country songs, including lyrics such as "I'm not scared to grab my gun and fight for my homeland." This particular song encourages her to continue fighting for her country, even though she is often looked at as weak in the Iraqi world.

Other selections included on the soldier's iPods are used as their individual survival strategy. Dick Gordon explains music's impact and use while going into war. An interviewee explains how rock songs pump him up before going into battle. In contrast, slower songs like Home by Blake Shelton talks about being surrounded by many people, but feeling like you want to go home. Another soldier explains this choice, as she reflects on her family and desire to return back to them. Just hearing the music in the background while the interviewees shared their thoughts allowed me to envision what they went through as they listened to their iPod while in service.

Dick Gordon uses breaks in between the separate interviews to give a quick wrap-up of the story and let listeners know what's coming up next. Longer clips of the musical selections are also used to give breaks between stories.

No Revolution

This story explains of the unrest in Egypt, before Mubarak stepped down. Without seeing the people interviewed, I could really focus on exactly what they were saying and sense their emotions in their voice. One man explained how he dug a cave in his bedroom just to escape the shelling and gunfire. His description of the stench and the smallness of the cave really gave me a sense of his frustration with the unrest, however, he was thankful for the cave's protection. This story made me think of this world news in Egypt in a more personal way, just by hearing the Egyptians' stories in their own words.

Furthermore, the story describes the level of fear escalating in Egypt. Abdi, the station's correspondent in Somalia, accounts for the violence happening at his university. Overall, I felt that this part of the show displayed a more personal account of the events in Egypt instead of a broad news update you can see on television news.

Dick Gordon gives a preview into the final story, about a model-turned-writer describing the ups and downs of the fashion industry.

The Anonymous Model

The name of this piece is the title of the column of the featured interviewee, Jenna Sauers. Dick Gordon first offers information of how Jenna first got into modeling. Jenna then describes her experiences with the modeling industry; the majority of models only work and make enough to cover their expenses. She never reached "superstar" status and said she was too old at 21.

Her column came about on jezebel.com, so that Jenna could have a chance to speak about the topics and issues facing the fashion world. Her insight made me look at modeling in a different light--that the business faces deep problems otherwise unknown to the general public. Everything that models eat or do with their life has an impact on their job and essentially, their measurements are job qualifications.

After hearing Jenna talk about embracing freelance writing, I thought it was interesting that she now has control of her work, rather than being told what to do when she was a model. The story concluded with a peppy song related to modeling, which I thought was fitting to the piece and kept me interested until the end of the program.

Overall, I felt the show was very well put-together, even though the three stories were diverse and somewhat unrelated. Dick Gordon did a good job in connecting them however, and the musical clips kept the show easy and interesting to listen to.