Poem:
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag And skip out for beer during commercials, because
The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be brought to you
By Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle
And leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spiro Agnew
To eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary
The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre
And will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because
The revolution will not be televised, brother
There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mae
Pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run
Or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance
NBC will not be able predict the winner
At 8:32 on report from twenty-nine districts
The revolution will not be televised
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young
Being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process
There will be no slow motion or still lifes of Roy Wilkins
Strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit
That he has been saving for just the proper occasion
“Green Acres”, “Beverly Hillbillies”, and “Hooterville Junction”
Will no longer be so damn relevant
And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane
On “Search for Tomorrow”
Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day
The revolution will not be televised
There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
And no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists
And Jackie Onassis blowing her nose
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Keys
Nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash
Engelbert Humperdinck, or The Rare Earth
The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be right back
After a message about a white tornado
White lightning, or white people
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom
The tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat
The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live
Analysis:
This paragraph of text is to tell readers in a serious tone must keep independent such as personality, do not muddle along, this revolution about the awakening of self-personality is not to be relaxed. The overall feeling of this section is serious and calm. The color of my impression on this section is blue.
One of the allusions to this passage is Nixon playing the trumpet. Nixon played the trumpet during the worst of the war and broadcast it on television to make Americans think their country was winning the war. The poet’s definition of Nixon in this poem should be that he is a liar who deceives the public. Therefore, the main meaning of this poem is not to be brainwashed by the government’s propaganda, to emancipate their own thinking. My impression of this paragraph is “lonely revolutionaries”, so my impression of this paragraph is blue.
The three people mentioned in the SAT are also popular talk show celebrities. These celebrities often tell off-color jokes on their talk shows, and indulging in these off-color jokes, according to the poet, makes people even more silly. This revolution will not make the people around you smarter, it will not make you better looking, because this revolution only exists in your head. So this passage seems to me to have a smug purple.
In this passage, Willie Mae is a great man who helped black people to awaken. NBC, a large American television station, often has a quiz show. The show is suggesting that you can’t predict whether the revolution will succeed. The message of the whole paragraph is that we should become people who have a sense of mission to revolutionize even though they know they can’t be accepted by the masses. This one I think is a promising green.
The absurd saying that pigs shoot their neighbors is actually a reference to many wonderful moments in movies and television. Whitney Young and Roy Wikins were two great men who brought a new order to the people, two great men who were not good enough for ordinary television. This section is a symbol of hope and dawn, representing the state of people slowly awakening. This paragraph I think is the symbol of dawn yellow.
11 o ‘clock is usually the time when TV stations broadcast major news, but they broadcast some unimportant and worthless news for a long time. The revolution of ideas will not be sung by singers who do not have independent ideas. This paragraph reminds us to become an independent person with independent thoughts and tastes. This section is also a symbol of hope yellow.
These paragraphs actually mention the social threats faced by black people. In those days, black people often drank coke to numb themselves. At the same time, it also reminds readers that ideological revolution can not solve any problems in life, life only once, you are in control of the overall situation. These two paragraphs are inspiring to the reader, so I think these paragraphs are vibrant orange.
This project is created to expose the dreadful situation of the individuals who’re unconscious of them being deceit. The poem was selected due to the rich connotation within, for instance, the pursuit of freedom, obscure allusions, and historical reflections.
As the theme of the poem is “the revolution will not be televised”, I chose to design a frame mimicking the television to correlate with it. Furthermore, in order to give the audience a feeling of ages, I utilized olive oil stain, juice stain and tea stain to make the corrugated paper “television” seem older. Moreover, aiming to recreate the scenario of televising, a corrugated paper axis was installed on the upper left corner of the frame to enable the book to be read by pulling every slide up, which was just like the most original TV principle.
In order to emphasize the sarcastic meaning hidden in the poem lines, I printed a series of pictures, which have drawings of entirely different meanings denoted on transparent stickers and pasted them on colored translucent cards. And because each poem expresses a different mood, the colored translucent cards covering each paragraph is a different color. With them covered or not, might give the reader entirely varied experienced, which was described in the poem of individuals that were mentally waken or not. Lastly, as the poem was written to seek mental freedom for the neglected African Americans, they were drawn on the original pages of the poems, who might disappear with whatever color covering the page. Here the colored translucent cards are like the main stream medias, who always neglected the people they didn’t care. But when the transparent card is removed, the full poem is revealed, along with a series of drawings of African Americans awakening.
