Literary devices are often used in pop songs to give off a certain mood or setting. Katy Perry uses repetition, imagery, allusion and alliterations in her song ” Wide Awake” to explain how an event can cause a person to grow or change in perspective. Changing how they see someone or something and change how they feel about things. By using these devices it created a realization and regretful mood and tone to her song. This makes her song personal and emotional which allows many people to relate and therefore sells songs. You will find that majority of stars out there choose deep and meaningful things to sing about to sell more albums.
One way she created the mood of her song Wide Awake was by using repetition. In the very beginning she states that she’s wide awake, meaning that she has come to realize her mistakes and is seeing things from a different point of view now after the fact. Also she repeats falling from cloud nine throughout the song as well. Falling from cloud nine is afigure of speechsaying that she was in love and happy but then she fell out of love (falling from cloud nine) and became heartbroken. Falling from cloud nine isn’t necessarily considered a good thing and that’s exactly what she was saying.
Using repetition to create a mood for the song and to hook the listeners into listening to the story behind of the song. Another way she added meaning to her song was by using Imagery. In almost every song that there is there is some sort of imagery warped into it. Because without some sort of story line or description the song wouldn’t be any good or entertaining and people wouldn’t want to listen to it. In Katie’s song she creates the image of thunder rumbling and castles crumbling. That creates a picture in your head of the actual emotion that she’s feeling.
Describing her heart break like the cracks and loud booms of thunder during storm, a storm like the break up she’s going through. And also describing the same thing with an old castle that’s finally worn down and falls apart. Lastly I want to talk about the overall meaning of the song. Throughout the song Katy puts in several literary devices as the ones in the paragraphs above but the entire song itself is just a huge metaphor. In the chorus of her song she says ” Gravity hurts, you made it so sweet till I woke up on the concrete. ” Majority of her song revolves around these lyrics.
Because she’s comparing her break up and her realization of what went wrong to earth’s gravity. Which states whatever goes up must come down, just like her love for him whoever he is had to come to an end eventually and that hurts. In the end all songs are made up different combinations of literary deices and descriptions of real life feelings. these were just some examples using the famous Katy Perry’s most recent song. Songs are just really long poems that speak the truth about life itself and how can you create a poem without structure? You can’t, and that’s why we use literary devices to build a structure for our writing.
