Hurt, sang by country music legend, Johnny Cash, was released in 2002 and is a sensational example of rhetoric. The intended audience for this song is anyone who is a fan of Johnny Cash, country music, rhetoric, and ultimately music in general. The song reaches out to anyone with feelings of guilt or remorse about their life or decisions they have made throughout it, and also anyone that struggles with the concept of accepting mortality. Constraints one may have while listening to the song are beliefs on death, religion, and common values. The exigence, which will also be discussed throughout this explication, is the life of Johnny Cash. The song begins with using the emotional appeal, pathos, to make the reader feel sadness and melancholy.…show more content… He has regrets about the person he has become and has a different vision of himself he wishes he would have been. His sweetest friend, Jesus Christ, has been there for him throughout all the hurt and suffering he has gone through. He is ashamed of his drug addiction and is asking Jesus what have I become? This is a display of solidarity, because many Christians feel this way at some point in life when we are trying to live the way the Lord wants us to live but fail. As we get older we begin to slowly lose those we love, because death is inescapable. This line indicates pathos as it makes the reader feel sadness and grief towards those they have known and lost. The older you become, especially singing this song at seventy-one, losing those you know to death becomes much more of a reality. In the end everyone will eventually face the inevitable death. The next line displays kairos because at the time of singing the song, Cash truly did have it all. Though he has anything he could want or need from the legendary career he has built he refers to it as an empire of dirt. Because everyone he knows has passed away, all of the materialistic things in his life are no longer what is meaningful to him. After realizing this he sees that all that he has achieved is really just mere dirt, nothing truly important. His relationship with Jesus Christ and those he loves is what brings true value to his life, not the fame and fortune he acquired throughout his career. Because of the fame he feels he made many mistakes and let people down, and hurt those he loved the most. He uses self-display to describe that he will continue to let people down and make them hurt because he cannot escape his past and the regrets he
