New Boots & Contracts

Consider this a rough draft of an equally rough idea, barfing something out in words for later clean-up. I was listening to The Clash’s “All The Young Punks” yesterday at the gym. Its full title is “All The Young Punks…

Nietzsche, Wagner, Biopolitics, Race, & Music

“Wagner makes music sick” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 664). “Life itself has become a problem” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 681). To mark Wagner’s bicentennial, the Guardian published this essay on the connection many of his contemporaries made between his music and mental…

Attali, Acoustics, Neoliberalism

I had to cut this from an article I’m working on b/c it doesn’t exactly fit with the flow of the argument, but the point is really important: Attali thinks repetition, or the “statistical and global conceptions of movement of…

This is the Sound of Uncool: Spandau Ballet & the Biopolitics of Cool

So what sorts of practices would or could potentially critique or subvert neoliberalism? I agree with Jason Read’s claim that “a political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom, and possibility”…

Taking MIDIjunkies Into The Death, v 2.0

This is the revision of a previous post, which was a draft of some material I was working on for an article. I’ve finished a more polished draft (note: not a final draft, or a finalized draft, or my final…

Taking MIDIjunkies Into the Death

Here’s a sample of something that I’ve been scrambling to complete before a rapidly-approaching deadline. This is still definitely in progress, so your feedback is most welcome!             In this post, I discuss a pair of songs on Atari Teenage…

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Pop Music: An Overview

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the logic of biopolitical neoliberalism as it manifests in contemporary pop music (and a little bit in 20th c avant-garde art music). In the same way that classical liberalism and tonal harmony…

Death Metal and the Power Over Life

This post is not making claims or coming to conclusions, but setting up a line of inquiry for further research. I have a pretty good sense of the overarching idea, but I need some more firm evidence to back it…

Hangover the Limit: More on neoliberalism as a system of musical organization

I’ve been writing a lot about how the logic of biopolitical neoliberalism manifests in musical practices. For example, here is post about the contrast between classically liberal tonal harmony and contemporary EDM-influenced pop structures. I want to pick up where…

My Life Would Suck Without You/Where Have You Been All My Life: Tension-and-Release Structures In Tonal Rock and Non-Tonal EDM-Pop

In this post, I contrast the formal elements in the song and video for Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” with the formal elements in the song and video for Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been All My Life.”…