“Negging” is a tactic pickup artists use to get women’s attention. It’s basically the opposite of a compliment: you tell someone something negative about them, comment on a less-than-ideal quality, etc. The idea is that it undermines the recipient’s confidence…
In my 2014 Noisey article on Meghan Trainor & Nicki Minaj, I said that in pop music (and beyond) white feminist aesthetics tend to focus on representations of the body (body image, objectification), whereas black feminist aesthetics tend to focus…
Justin Bieber’s new trio of Dance-Anthems-with-Greg-James friendly comeback singles draw on the latest trends in British dance pop. This makes him sound, especially to US pop audiences, as really fresh, forward, and trendsetting. He totally bros it up with Diplo…
I’m teaching the last chapter of Halberstam’s In A Queer Time And Place, the chapter on queer music subcultures. I’m more interested in the music part than the subculture parts (the sounds more than the ethnography or critical geography or…
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police is considering adopting a policy that prohibits people with arrest/criminal records from being in specific “high-crime” areas called “safety zones”. As the Charlotte Observer‘s Steve Harrison explains, Here is how they would work: If CMPD found an area…
It’s time for SPEP this year, and that means it’s time for me to post the text of my paper (that’s link to a gdoc). My session is Thursday afternoon, and I’ll be doing the typical Robin thing where I take a…
In my social & political philosophy class, we’re beginning the course by talking about social contract theory. The other day we considered Charles Mills’ claim that a theory of a prior “domination contract” would put us “in a position to…
For as influential as Attali’s Noise has been, most scholars have sidestepped its central claim: “music is prophecy” (11). It feels really undersupported; Attali asserts that music anticipates or foreshadows social change, but he doesn’t seem to provide anything more…
Gus Stadler published a smart and needed critique of the whiteness of sound studies as a discipline. It’s a great piece, and not just because it quotes me, lol. I wanted to post a few informal reflections on the piece,…
I got married 10 years ago this October, one month after I defended my dissertation, so I think that this question is more historical than speculative: there were songs played at my wedding…not like I remember what they were. We…
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