Papers by Jasmine Nikka Dalusong
It is a truth that song exists as the crystallization of human's feelings. This content can be se... more It is a truth that song exists as the crystallization of human's feelings. This content can be seen from the part of the song which people call as lyric. Through lyric, the singer or the songwriter can express what s/he feels and what kind of idea s/he wants to share to the others. Sometimes, the songwriter implicitly puts in a hidden message that actually functions as the real idea of the song. In this case, people should take a closer examination upon the lyric to understand the songwriter's real idea or purpose. Imagine is the example of it. Many people believe that this song is the representation of a hope for the realization of peaceful future world. However, through this study, I found different appraisal regarding to what was described in Imagine. By applying descriptive qualitative research using Michael Riffaterre's semiotics approach, I tried to decipher the other side of Imagine song lyric meaning. The first step of this research was applying heuristic reading. This step was aimed to get the first order of semiotics system. First order semiotics system is a word meaning that follows the rule of the normative language system. In simple way, the meaning obtained was only dictionary meanings. Then after finishing this phase, the next step done was hermeneutic reading. This phase was aimed to get an integrated signification of the text meaning. After separating the signs from the overall lyric and analyzing it one by one, the significance found was that the song did not talk about peace but it was about world domination. At the same time, the phrase "world domination" became the matrix of Imagine because it reflected the whole idea of the lyric. In conclusion, Imagine does not express the hope for a peaceful future world. Imagine implicitly expresses the idea of word domination through the doctrine of atheism belief as the starting point.
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Papers by Jasmine Nikka Dalusong