Weekly Blog Post 5

The video for R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" opens with Michael Stipe singing and walking through the desert in a cowboy hat. Coupled with the fact that the video is made to look like an old-fashioned black and white movie, the video immediately establishes an emotional appeal with the audience. Stipe is seen as a down-to-earth cowboy, just a regular guy like the rest of us, and the audience can relate to that. This feeling of identification is confirmed at the end of the video when Stipe goes into a truck stop and everyone there starts singing with him. This intwines both ethos and pathos, as the audience can see Stipe as not a famous musician, but a person, and this identity evokes the emotions of the audience.

Ethos is also established by the name-dropping throughout the song. Andy Kaufman, Fred Blassie, and numerous others including Elvis, Darwin, and Moses are mentioned. Most listeners will be able to recognize these names and understand what the song is about. I had to look some of the events and information up, but when the song first came out in 1992, Andy Kaufman had only recently died and was probably still fairly well-known to the intended audience of the song. This gives a sense of credibility to the band because the audience is able to relate to the song.

Logos is brought forward in the actual lyrics of the song. The whole song is an argument about society's susceptibility to believe things and also the tendency of people, like Kaufman, to take advantage of that fact. Page 203 of Compose Design Advocate names "Lists and Repetition" and "Arguing by Example" as two forms of logos. While these aren't made blatantly obvious in "Man on the Moon" as they would be in a formal written argument, the song mentions and repeats several examples although it doesn't explain them in depth. It is then up to the audience to infer what the specific argument is, which is not that difficult.