Sublime Human Capital: What You Buy, But I’m Not Selling

In this post I want to flesh out an idea I suggested in my CAA paper on neoliberalism’s 4D sonic episteme. Neoliberalism produces macro-level stability from micro-level variability/aleatory. So, individual subjects have to be flexible. If flexibility normalizes, then perhaps…

Ludacris’s “Rest of My Life” and Neoliberalism

On 11/11/12, Ludacris (feat. Usher & David Guetta) posted a video for his single “Rest of My life” to YouTube. Interestingly, and awesomely, this video all but explicitly posits the main claim of my article on EDM and neoliberalism in…

Record Store Day: Myth & Enlightenment

Today is “Record Store Day,” a day dedicated to the celebration of authenticity: the “realness” and warmness of vinyl records (which were often recorded w/digital equipment–remember DAT?), the “authentic” face-to-face sociality of the record store itself (somehow the IRL experience…

“Neckties” vs. “Warlords”: Yeezy and HOVA’s contesting masculinities

So, in my earlier post about Jay-Z’s DOA, I argued that he was defending a more traditional ghetto-hetero-black masculinity against Kanye’s Autotuned insurgency into hip-hop and its canon of “proper” masculinities. Kanye’s LMFAO “Paranoid” remix (Youtube below) makes it clear…

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,…

Republicans and the one-drop rule, or “He’s too moderate!”

So, scholars of social identity and oppression have long known that the boundaries of and membership in privileged groups is incredibly tightly controlled. Gay men aren’t fully or properly masculine, just as those with even one drop of non-white blood…