No Wave legend James Chance passed away this week after a long illness. You can read up on his career in the many obits, such as this one from Pitchfork. Musically he was like a combination of Ornette Coleman and…
I’m working on finishing the first draft of my book GOOD VIBES ONLY: PHENOMENOLOGY, ALGORITHMS, AND BIOPOLITICS and I’ve finished a first draft of the final chapter. This is the chapter that’s explicitly about phenomenology, and it draws together a…
The “train beat” is a drum riff typically located in country music (Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” is a commonly-cited example), but it’s found across the blues-rock spectrum. My personal favorite example of it is Ministry feat. Gibby Haynes’s “Jesus Built…
Many of you know that I wrote a book about “the last great independent” modern rock radio station, 97X WOXY/woxy.com. Today, May 13, 2024, is the twentieth anniversary of the first time the station went off the air after the…
I’m working on the last chapter of the vibes book, which is about critical phenomenology and ethics. Try as I might, I could not avoid talking about the TESCREAL bundle, or the hegemonic ideologies among techbros today. Happy reading! The…
I am working on the final chapter of GOOD VIBES ONLY; it’s about how critical phenomenology can be used to theorize both how the biopolitics of legitimation works and what we might do to think and act critically against it….
In early April 2024, Taylor Swift released five Apple Music playlists that reorder her old work into five vibes, each based on one of the stereotypical “stages of grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The playlists reorganize her previous…
Though Peloton makes most of its money selling exercise equipment, people tend to talk about it less like Apple (whose streaming service Apple Music exists mainly to drive sales of hardware like iPhones) and more like other streaming services like…
In 2024 a new Bob Dylan biopic was released, and it was announced that each of the four Beatles would be getting an individual biopic from director Sam Mendes. Despite over a decade of renewed attention to underrecognized figures like…
New York Governor Kathy Hochul infamously deployed the National Guard to secure NYC subway stations against a perceived uptick in violent crime. Defending her decision on MSNBC, Hochul explains: “We have seen a number of crimes, and again, not statistically…
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