Mass Authentic
...grounds of individuality — no more folk culture or tradition, they are strictly in the past — but instead consists of standardized, bureaucratic, massified, synthetic culture. “Authenticity” becomes commercialized nostalgia...
A Taste of Cesium
...immediately obvious. Ostriches are not in themselves a significant commodity in Japan, although their feathers play a hidden role in the automotive industry, where since the 1980s the manpower-intensive job...
Melancholic Damage
...extra-tonal electronic dance music (EDM) than with tonal pop. Many dubstep and EDM-pop songs use a combination of a soar and a pause-drop to create a musical climax. Psy’s infamous...
The Sound and the Fury
...disenfranchised, Manley had sought out the help of musicians in his campaign, like singer-producer Clancy Eccles, who recorded several songs in support of Manley including the crucial “Rod of Correction.”...
Kill Rock Stars
Jeff Jackson’s new novel is one we’ve all heard before
Mass authentic
...that preceded it. It is not something off which consumer culture and brands are parasitically leeching. Authenticity, as we commonly use the term, is a product of consumer culture, even...
Palestine is Free (If You Want It)
The right to a free and united Palestine from the river to the sea, the right of return, and the right to live in dignity under a just and lasting peace.
Haunted House
...and at freeway off-ramps in Toyota Corollas. Like slave songs for a world where everyone thinks slavery is abolished but the people don’t know they’re slaves.” But pop music, with...
The Color and the Sound
...music fandom in his work. “It was still very much the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs era for me. I told a roommate that I wanted to make stickers that...
Don't Stop Beliebing
...Reappropriate the reappropriated! Another nice culture jam or whatever would be a remix or mashup of all these songs without the lines where they talk about dancing – what’s left...
Jihad Against Jihad Against Jihad
...inequality is political inequality. Notes 1) For a (very) succinct explanation of this conflict, see Beeman, William O. 2011. “Production, Hearing and Listening: Intentional Participation in Musical Culture in the...
The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others
...Octopus: Due to its relentless focus on the drug war, viewers might easily come to the conclusion that urban Baltimore contains no music scene, no culture, and no communal organizations...
African Poetry: Kayombo Chingonyi
.... These days I can’t watch a music video online without you trolling in the comments dressed to kill in your new age binary clothes. The (n)epithet (as Christina Sharpe...
The Question of Pain
...most compelling trajectory traced in Last Days Here is that of Sean “Pellet” Pelletier’s love affair with Pentagram’s music. It is hard to imagine the kind of devotion and determination...
Rank and File Countrypolitan
...lore of country music. Upon coming to America, the story goes, she said she wanted to meet Hank Williams, whose death had legendarily taken place on New Year’s Day, 1953....
The Sonic Episteme
To use sound as a tool for theorizing and realizing a more just world, we can’t merely reform Western modernity; we must do something else entirely