Peer review of Leslie‘s essay of "Ras Trent" The lonely Island

Peer review of Leslie‘s essay of "Ras Trent" The lonely Island

The essay was about a song making fun of the Rastafarian religion. The song was done by the comics of the Saturday night live. The thesis for the paper was : “ However the words and imagery used in the song and video proves that the writers of this song have done their homework on the Rastafarian religion, making their argument valid. The Lonely Island uses a lot of ambiguous words, repetition, and humorous context throughout their lyrics, to get their point across to you.”
This explains a little of what she is going to talk about. I had a little confusion when in the beginning she said that they usually did factual things that made the song less credible but then switched over to them researching the religion so that did the make the song have some truth to it. I believe the argument of the essay is that the song was trying to make the Rastafarian religion humorous but also but also make it factual. But I’m not really quite sure what the argument was straight forward.
There are some specific examples from the text and the video. I think that there could have been a little more examples form the video. I think that she did a pretty good job with examples. The one thing that maybe I would have liked to see more of was deciphering the lyrics; she did it twice and I really liked that she did.

Examples from the text
1) what you are reading is gibberish…
This is where she starts off telling about
Them making fun of the religion, because
You can’t understand the words that are written.
2) She Quotes a specific line from the lyrics and
Then deciphers what they mean
3) she then uses another specific quote to get her
Point about the people called the “bald heads”
4) points of specific words of the text about the word
Jah which means god in the religion

Examples from the video
1) Talks about how the character is dressed and explains why he is dressed like that.

Well before or after every example she stated why she used that example. She made sure we knew why she thought the writers used these lyrics. She addresses the repetition, the humor and some rhetoric. The essay also has some of the quotes in the lyrics deciphered and what that means to the Rastafarian religion. There where some murky areas and she could have maybe used some different examples and use more rhetoric. I think the conclusion needs a little work. It ends very abruptly.


More analysis needed
1)oh fire pon Babylon and fire pon a batty boy rude boy living in the shanty dorms my roommate Nick is an ignorant bald-head.”
…Why did they use this sentence, does it invoke rhetoric?
2)“Are you there Jah? It’s me, Ras Trent.”.. you said that this invokes pathos, how?
3) you could look at ethos for this song, was it ethical to make fun of the Rastafarian religion.

The thing that sticks with me was the paragraph where she deciphers some of the lyrics. When you picked out word from the sentence and explained what they meant to the Rastafarian religion.

Reviewed by mary martin