Queering Taylor Swift

So, Taylor Swift is generally pretty uninteresting to me because her music, her image, and her lyrics all shore up normative white heteropatriarchal gender roles. And, her songs may be OK, musically, they’re more meh than not. Although I would…

Taking women seriously as artists

So, it is often the case that women’s accomplishments (in art, research, business, politics, whatever) are often overlooked for, read in terms of, seen as dependent on, or otherwise secondary to their appearance. Adrian Piper has commented on the tendency…

Whatever Philosophy Is, It’s Most Certainly Not About Girls: Or, why people hate Nancy Bauer’s NYTimes column on Beauvoir and Gaga

Readers of this blog have probably safely assumed that I totally endorse Nancy Bauer’s recent contribution to the New York Times philosophy blog, “The Stone”. Her reading of Lady Gaga through Beauvoir (mainly through The Ethics of Ambiguity’s first few…

Pac, Perry, and Jacques: California (Love/Gurls) and a bit of Ranciere

Apart from their titular references to California, Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg’s “California Gurls” and Dre and TuPac’s “California Love” might appear to have little at all in common. However, the compositional genius of the Perry/Snoop track is that it…

“What is a philosopher?” — Apparently a “hip” white dude

Simon Critchley recently began a philosophy column for the New York Times, and his inaugural post poses the question “What is a Philosopher?”. Here’s the post: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/what-is-a-philosopher/?hp Below, I argue that Critchley’s philosopher practices the logic of hipness. As I…

On Gender and Misogyny in Mark Dery’s Anti-Gaga Argument

Recently, Mark Dery published a piece in “True/Slant” arguing against Lady Gaga’s intellect, artistry, and cultural value: http://trueslant.com/markdery/2010/04/20/aladdin-sane-called-he-wants-his-lightning-bolt-back-on-lady-gaga/ First, I’ll put my cards on the table (and some of you may already be quite familiar with these cards): I’m adamantly…

Synth Britania – a BBC Doc about [white dudes in] 70s/80s British Electronica

Synth Britania is available in full on YouTube, and it’s an interesting and informative enough documentary filled with a lot of good music. Some of the info is going to be redundant for a lot of serious fans of this…

“This is why events unnerve me”: Teaching Neitzsche through Joy Division/New Order/Kylie Minogue

My Existentialism class is in the midst of reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. The GS deals with a lot of the themes and ideas in Zarathustra, which is what people usually assign in Existentialism classes, but the GS treats them…

Pop and the New Millenium Music Critic

In his P2K essay, Tom Ewing argues that, in the last decade, pop finally became something that serious people (music critics, academics) took seriously. This is not so much attributable to some change or set of changes in “pop” itself,…

Phase-shifting process music as an analogue for social identitity: or, re-thinking intersectionality via “It’s Gonna Rain”

So, I’m working on am argument that social identities (race, gender, etc.) are mutually constitutive, and that metaphors of “intersection” and “blending” don’t accurately capture the ontology of social identities (as mutually constitutive). As a part of the argument, I…