The performance of “Glory” by rapper Common and singer John Legend during the 2015 Oscar Awards was phenomenal and breathtaking. “Glory” is the theme song to the movie “Selma” during the era when Dr. Martin Luther King led marches in 1965 for voting rights whereas the black community could have the freedom to vote. This performance was not only impacted because of the vital history it proclaims but also because of the current recurring incidents involving police shootings of unarmed black men (Michael Brown), which has led to multiple protests across the country. For its history intent, the relevance of today’s times an most importantly being African American female. Furthermore, the lyrics speak on the predicaments of the black American population and calls upon them to fight for their rights and for peace in which we all deserve.
Furthermore, thru this composition, it is my claim and or argument that Common and John Legend is not merely singing about the historical past , but also it is a warning that the history is bound to repeat itself if we fail to remember the past. This is noted in the constant repetitive chorus line,
“One day, when the glory comes
It will be ours, it will be ours
Oh, one day, when the war is one
We will be sure, we will be here sure
Oh, glory, glory Oh, glory, glory.”
Even its lyrics have a meaning of times past and the future to come. It is evident by the lyric ” One day” indicating that the glory is not yet, but yet the war rages on. Numerous performing artists have used this type of musical artisanship to express and portray historical as well as present-day culturalism. For instance, in the article The Write to Rock, Racial Mythologies, Feminist Theory, and the Pleasures of Rock Music Criticism, written by Daphne A. Brooks asserts the following concerning rock music, “clearly, the rockism erupting out of acid cultural arts journalism generated a cult of ‘taste and authenticity that infected writing” about pop performance for some time. “Rockism” treated rock as “normative”, programming, as critic Douglas Wolk points out, “the way people write about music, “mak {ing} it harder to understand any other kind of music on its own terms,’ and “chain{ing} artists, audience, and critic “to an ideal tooted in particular moment of the past, in which a gifted lyricist is by default a “new Dylan”.
The performance also seems to demonstrate through its numerous background singers collective bodies at work, meaning that there exist and or connections between mobilizing as an active force rather than individual desire. That we can only achieve justice, thru the involvement of the young, the elderly, the black person as well as the white person. It is my argument, therefore, that the performance by Common and Legend, Glory, could be emphasizing the disengagement of the noted population in modern times. Along these same lines, Music in the Shadow of Doubt edited by Eric Weisbard alludes to the notion “Given a generation-long shift from industrial era group consumerism to post industrial economic gaps, queasy celebrity something to be disidentified with now; emotionally claimed through, rather than in resistance to, persona or collective breakdown.” Weisbard further emphasizes, “After exploring turbulences of self, suburbs, and sovereignty, we move on to tensions around the genres that constitute pop’s “worlds.” Music genres, cemented in a half century of Fordism and Keynesianism, as the entry of dispossessed groups, in particular African Americans, into consumer economies corresponded to heightened social and political clout, have become a much murkier category in postindustrial, postmodern, post-civil rights America.” It is further apparent by Common and Legend that they are under the correct impression through music and this kind of audience could bring about social change. For instance, Ann Powers in her book “A Spy in the House of Love, THREE PERSPECTIVES ON FEMINIST ROCK CRITICISM, (In memory of Ellen Willis), writes “realizing what the pop life and the feminist life shared is what made me able to conceive of myself as a feminist pop critic in the first place. The late, great Ellen Willis- the most significant feminist critic of rock’s classic era who was a columnist for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1975- always talked about both music and politics in terms of the power of pleasure. Ann Powers further philosophizes that Willis believed that individuals and the communities and eventually society could be enlightened by the “ecstatic experience” of visions expressed through music’s rhythm and noise and that such joy might lead us to create different ways of loving and of sharing power.
In the final analysis, Common and Legend call our attention to the notion that if we as a people take our acquired freedom, we are doomed to allow history to repeat itself. They, therefore, abolish all Americans especially minorities that they should not do unto others what they have done to you. “History repeats itself.”
The following critical model as helped and influenced me in writing this critical analysis of the performance Glory by John Legend and Common:

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Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton