Americans, or American people, are the citizens of the United States of America. The country is home to people of different national origins. As a result, Americans do not equate their nationality with ethnicity, but with citizenship. Aside from the Native American population, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries.
Despite its multi-ethnic composition, the culture held in common by most Americans is referred to as mainstream American culture, a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of Western European immigrants. It also includes influences of African American culture. Westward expansion integrated the Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of the Southwest and brought close contact with the culture of Mexico. Large-scale immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Southern and Eastern Europe introduced a variety of elements. Immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America has also had impact. A cultural melting pot, or pluralistic salad bowl, describes the way in which generations of Americans have celebrated and exchanged distinctive cultural characteristics.
Trevor Noah (born 20 February 1984) is an award winningSouth African comedian. He has also been a radio DJ, actor and TV host.
Trevor Noah had a small role on the South African soap opera, Isidingo in 2002, when he was 18. He then began hosting his own radio show Noah’s Ark on Gauteng’s leading youth radio station, Yfm. Noah then went on to host an educational program on SABC2 followed by hosting The Real Goboza, a gossip show on SABC1.
Noah dropped his radio show and acting to focus on comedy, and has performed with South African comedians such as Riaad Moosa, Darren Simpson, Marc Lottering, Barry Hilton and Nik Rabinowitz, international comedians such as Paul Rodriguez, Carl Barron and Paul Zerdin, and as the opening act for Gabriel Iglesias in November 2007 and Canadian comedian Russell Peters on his South African tour.
Noah has performed all around South Africa in The Blacks Only Comedy Show, Heavyweight Comedy Jam, the Vodacom Campus Comedy Tour, the Cape Town International Comedy Festival, the Jozi Comedy Festival, and Bafunny Bafunny. His stand up comedy specials include The Daywalker, and Crazy Normal both of which have been released on DVD.
Dylan Moran (born 3 November 1971) is an Irish stand-up comedian, writer, actor and filmmaker. He is best known for his sardonic observational comedy, the UK television sitcom Black Books (which he co-wrote and starred in), and his work with Simon Pegg in Shaun of the Dead and Run Fatboy Run. Moran also appeared as one of the two lead characters in the Irish black comedy titled A Film with Me in It in 2008. He is a regular performer at national and international comedy festivals including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Just for Laughs Montreal Comedy Festival, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and the Kilkenny Comedy Festival. In 2007 he was voted the 17th greatest stand-up comic on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups and again in the updated 2010 list as the 14th greatest stand-up comic. In 2012, he became the first professional English-speaking comedian ever to perform in Russia, after two sold-out shows in neighboring Estonia, with his routine referencing Russia's new law banning "homosexual propaganda" and jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Robert James "Bob" Ritchie (born January 17, 1971), known by his stage name Kid Rock, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, multi-instrumentalist and rapper with five Grammy Awards nominations. Kid Rock released several studio albums that mostly went unnoticed before his 1998 record Devil Without a Cause, released with Atlantic Records, sold 11 million albums behind the hits, "Bawitdaba", "Cowboy", and "Only God Knows Why". In 2000, he released The History of Rock, a compilation of remixed and remastered versions of songs from previous albums as well as the hit single, "American Bad Ass" and the previously unreleased "Abortion".
Kid Rock released the follow-up in 2001, Cocky. After a slow start, his country-flavored hit "Picture" with Sheryl Crow resurrected the album and it went gold as a single and pushed the album's sales over 5 million. It was followed by 2003's self-titled release, which went platinum in the USA and reached No. 8 on the Billboard charts. In 2006 he released Live Trucker, a greatest hits live album that went mostly unnoticed.
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his left-wing political and social activism (including humanitarian work). He is a two-time Academy Award winner for his roles in Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008), as well as the recipient of a Golden Globe Award for the former and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the latter.
Penn began his acting career in television with a brief appearance in a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie, directed by his father Leo Penn. Following his film debut in 1981's Taps and a diverse range of film roles in the 1980s, Penn emerged as a prominent leading actor with the 1995 drama film Dead Man Walking, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination and the Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Penn received another two Oscar nominations for Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001), before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and a second one in 2008 for Milk. He has also won a Best Actor Award of the Cannes Film Festival for She's So Lovely (1997), and two Best Actor Awards at the Venice Film Festival for Hurlyburly (1998) and 21 Grams (2003).
We are Americans.
We are Americans, oh yeah!
We carry great big guns
'Cause we are Americans!
Oh yeah!
We're strong (we're strong!)
And we're free (we're free!)
We are Coke, We are Pepsi
'Cause we are Americans
We are Americans.
What we'd like to do for you right now, is a short history of the United States of America. First of all a short scene depicting the United States of America, and their diplomacy.
Hey pal, do whatever I tell ya!
I got a really big gun here...
All right then.
Yeah! Secondly a short scene depicting the United States of America, and their economy, yeah!
Hey pal, gimme all your money.
I got a really big gun here...
All right!
And thirdly a short scene depicting the United States of America, and I'm sure we all understand their foreign policy, yeah!
Hey pal, let's go fight a war in Iraq.
Okay! Where's Iraq?
Yeah!
And finally a short scene depicting the United States of America, and the settlement, the settlement of that great nation, we know and love as the USA, yeah.
Hey you Indian. Here's a bunch of glass beads, gimme all your land.
I got a great big gun here.
Nice beads!
We are Americans
We are Americans, ah yeah!
We carry great big guns, yeah!
'Cause we are Americans
We're strong (we're strong!)
And we're free (we're free!)
We are Coke, We are Pepsi
And we wear
Canadian flags
When we travel
On our bags
'Cause we are Americans (ah yeah!)
We are Americans (c'mon everybody, make like you're at Woodstock, yeah!)
We are Americans
We are Americans
We are Americans, Here we go!
We are Americans
We are Americans.
We are Americans, oh yeah!
We carry great big guns
'Cause we are Americans!
Oh yeah!
We're strong (we're strong!)
And we're free (we're free!)
We are Coke, We are Pepsi
'Cause we are Americans
We are Americans.
What we'd like to do for you right now, is a short history of the United States of America. First of all a short scene depicting the United States of America, and their diplomacy.
Hey pal, do whatever I tell ya!
No!
I got a really big gun here...
All right then.
Yeah! Secondly a short scene depicting the United States of America, and their economy, yeah!
Hey pal, gimme all your money.
No!
I got a really big gun here...
All right!
And thirdly a short scene depicting the United States of America, and I'm sure we all understand their foreign policy, yeah!
Hey pal, let's go fight a war in Iraq.
Okay! Where's Iraq?
Yeah!
And finally a short scene depicting the United States of America, and the settlement, the settlement of that great nation, we know and love as the USA, yeah.
Hey you Indian. Here's a bunch of glass beads, gimme all your land.
No.
I got a great big gun here.
Nice beads!
We are Americans
We are Americans, ah yeah!
We carry great big guns, yeah!
'Cause we are Americans
We're strong (we're strong!)
And we're free (we're free!)
We are Coke, We are Pepsi
And we wear
Canadian flags
When we travel
On our bags
'Cause we are Americans (ah yeah!)
We are Americans (c'mon everybody, make like you're at Woodstock, yeah!)
We are Americans
We are Americans
We are Americans, Here we go!
We are Americans
Everything I do... I do it for you.
I appeared out of the dark after your father passed
I stood and took the place of all that emptiness
You said that you never thought that god existed
But someone had to answer to coincidences
So we'll just play it safe
And we'll forget that we ever had any questions
I said I'd give you everything I had
when I had nothing left
but I might just bring you down
I went from filling to becoming all that emptiness
that I saw inside you
And I would stay if I could just learn to shut my mouth
'Cause everything I say just makes it so much worse
I work my hands down to the bone
So everything I touch just feels like stone
Well, yeah, I sold myself short
You don't need me
No one does
Because I'm nothing, I'm no one
I don't care if I make it
I'm stranded, I'm nowhere
I'm straight up sinking
I'm not letting anyone bother trying to patch these leaks
There's nothing to hold, there's nothing to keep
My ship has sailed
I got stranded before the storm took over
There's only one way out
I was so tempted to give in a head for clearer weather
But there's a knot in my gut that screams,
"You won't end up closer."
There's only one way out
And it's the hardest one to take
And I'm not scared
No, I'm not
Because I'm nothing, I'm no one
I don't care if I make it
I'm stranded, I'm nowhere
I'm straight up sinking
I'm not letting anyone bother trying to patch these leaks
There's nothing to hold, there's nothing to keep
And I prayed every single night before I slept