Information About the Project

This website was created by Makayla Benz for HIS 460: History of Rock and Roll.

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My goal with this project was to look at the difference in the way that the media looks at men and women in the music industry. I decided to do this by performing a case study on the difference in the treatment of Eminem and Britney Spears by TMZ. 

 

I began by looking at the history of women’s representation in order to identify common trends that might still be relevant today. This could include things like appearance, sexuality, etc. This information is detailed on the “Background” page. 

 

I then moved on to looking at the two artists themselves. They each have their own page documenting moments of their lives that are relevant to this argument. I chose to do these two artists for multiple reasons. They were the top selling artists of their gender in the early 2000s, and they both had similar scandals and career trajectory. 

 

Next I looked at many different TMZ articles. I chose TMZ because they are often considered to be the quintessential gossip rag, and they are known for not holding back when it came to talking about celebrities. I used every article that I was able to find on these two artists from 2006 (right after the website launched) through 2009 which is when they both began to stabilize. I recognize that I most likely missed some articles, due to TMZ’s lack of archive or beneficial search feature on their website. I do not think any missed articles would greatly change the conclusion however.

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Lastly, I took information from the articles and transformed them into a physical representation of their content in order to show the difference in the way that the two were discussed.