After much debate I chose the Nirvana hit song, “Dumb,” and focused mainly on the stanza,
My heart is broke/but I have some glue/help me inhale/and mend it with you
The text to me is melancholy, like someone who has accepted their despair and recognizes their own broken state. The imagery is powerful and demands emotions and textures. The text is a first-person narrative, thus you put yourself into that crushing perspective, when you feel broken and resort to a habit to deal with the pain. We all have our own forms of band-aids or glue to repair our hearts, perhaps comfort food or reading a book. From some research I did I realized the song was originally reputed as a drug-reference, but I believe that it can be taken in the more general sense as well, that we all have habits to help cope with pain. It doesn’t have to be smoking, but this is what I chose from interpreting the text and from my own experience/smoking habit. There is no suggestion of healing . . . only patching or fixing: temporary solutions. Optimistically I will be able to visually re-create the lonely sentiments in the lyrics but also that vague flicker of hope: that there’s someone to help patch the band-aids on. Because the lyrics are so raw, I wanted the images/text to be raw as well, that it would in fact be as raw and realistic as possible, to use real materials (i.e. use lines of glue to write in cursive, overlapping band-aids for letters) to write out the sentence. One of my main inspirations for this comes from my recent project on Sagmeister, as he often would do large typography out of real materials. http://www.sagmeister.com/work8.html
Similarly he worked with the other typographer we discussed in class, Marian Bantjes, who did the typographic piece out of sugar. I enjoyed this as well because it explores working with a more difficult and feisty medium, it can be messy but it seems to me that the results are pleasantly surprising. http://www.bantjes.com/index.php?id=218
I also liked the typographer that Hannah had showed to the class, because its another example of how to use real life materials to create text, then giving you the option to manipulate the new text digitally.