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

Rhetorical Analysis of The talk Heads Once in a lifespan Kenneth Burkes Five Master Terms exist to bring to light the motivation goat, theoretically, any 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 dustup and meaning using the tools of language available. This doesnt just apply to long-winded theses regarding the nature of dramatistic meaning, though perhaps something alike that would be more up Burkes alley. No, in this case I plan to utilize his methods for a more seemingly 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 render a feat of rhetorical analysis few have considered possible by analyzing the song Once in a Lifetime by The Talking Heads. I emphasize the difficulty of this analysis because I fear that I am about to embark on a journey to make grit out of madness a 1 984 documentary of the bands music is entitled Stop Making Sense, for one example. For another more drastic example, songwriter David Byrne was one of the most intentionally abstract lyricists of his time in an early episode 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 showgirl 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 summarize my application, however, for the sake of my own understanding. The superior Term here is Act, the balance between essence and existence carefully held by Byrnes dialectic of water and time as a merged sameness. Working symbiotically with Act is the idea of Agent, a theoretical character defined as finding, investigating, and determining a situation without Acting within it. Byrnes purpose is to know right or wrong in the Scene of his lifetime. The Agency through which he defines truth within the Scene is time, which shares more than a fingers breadth 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 propensity to stop making sense.