From my teenage years I had and still have a favorite song, the name of it is “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. And to this day I still like this song. I can remember every night before I would go to bed I would turn the radio on in my bedroom and find a station that was playing it and would listen to it in its entirety. Since I shared a bedroom with four sisters it was very seldom that I would get to listen to the music I like since I was the youngest. So we made a rule that whoever went to bed first got to listen to their music. This was fine until three of us were racing down the hall to our bedroom and someone shoved someone else and there shoulder went through the wall. So dad had to fix it when he got home from work. He was not very happy about it because that meant putting up new wall paper.
The song is about a young couple named Laura and Tommy, that are madly in love with each other and he wanted to enter a stock car race so that he could try to win a $1000. But this is a very sad song because he tried to call her to tell her that he was going to be late and had to leave a message with her mother that he wanted to enter a stock car race and that he would be late. In the song he raced his stock car but something happened and he crashed which was very sad because he never go to speak to Laura again. The way I understood this song was he was trying to save up enough money to get his love a ring but instead he lost his life for her. Now this happens on the roads and not at a stock car race. Kids will race on the roads instead of at a track and usually this does not end up with anything good. It sometimes will be over a girl but usually just to show off how fast they can go.
The stereotype in this song would be the young teenage kids think that there is nothing between the love for one another and death. It does not matter to them how dangerous something is they will do it if it shows that special person how much they love each other. Tommy raced his car to just to get enough money to get Laura an engagement ring but instead he lost his life for her. And Laura will never see him again and will have to find another man but if this was her first love the next one will never be the same as Tommy.
The force that contributed to this tragedy was if there would not have been a stock car race then this would not have happened and Tommy and Laura would have went and did something else this night. And of course this song would have never been written about this couple it would have been about some other couple that this would have happened to. But Tommy was into stock car racing and if it did not happen this time it would have eventually because stock cars back then did not have the protection that they do know. His stock car was probably a car that was not equipped with the roll bars and seat belts.
The stereotypes described in this song would be the teenagers of all types. In the 1970’s all teenagers wanted the coolest and fastest car just so that the girls would go out with them. And I was one of them. If a guy did not have a cool car like a Chevy Camaro then the girls did not want anything to do with them unless they were a great athlete. And Tommy was one of the guys with a cool car so Laura followed her love except this time she was not home to take the phone call from him and could not see his last race.
I would say that this era of stereotypes would be a positive entity because this is the people of tomorrow. When they mature into young adults they will realize that fancy and fast cars are not everything. And that is not the only thing the girls want. There is looks and personality that has to go along with these fancy and fast cars that the ladies want from a man. Laura thought that she had all of this but was never able to find out since Tommy crashed his car at the race. But in the eyes of parents the stereotypes would be negative entity with losing a child at such a young age. No parent should go through this with losing a child at any age. But what is bad this stereotype is still happening today.
Stereotypes emerge without being aware that they are happening. This is a part of life. With teenagers they are a stereotypes group and there will always be this group because there are always teenagers and they will have their own group and type of people that they hang out with. No two teenagers from the same family will have the same stereotypes because they have different personalities. You have the younger teenagers and the older and a little mature teenagers and their stereotypes are different. The younger ones think that they are always right and that you cannot change them and the older ones are starting to see that they are not always right and are starting to become adults and see that the parents or adults in their lives are right. If Tommy’s parents would have intervened he would have been able to see Laura instead of racing his car.
No comments:
Post a Comment