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…
Surprise surprise, I like to break songs down more than I like to write them; analysis is more my thing than composition. I’ve been thinking about this question for days, and, honestly, I keep coming up with null set. Like,…
So, for me, the point of seeing live music is social–listening and dancing with other people. This is probably because the music I like most generally sounds better when recorded: there’s a lot of subtle details that just don’t always…
I made a Beats playlist titled “Fed Up”–it’s full of songs to listen to when I’m angry. But, there are a lot of different kinds of anger–some more seething, some more immediately aggressive. Whatever kind of anger I’m feeling, I…
Ok, in sticking with yesterday’s substitution of “DJ” for “Bar Band,” I’ll pick a song DJs should stop playing in their sets. I’m really tempted to say something like “All songs by VNV Nation,” but as with all the ‘dislike’ challenges…
Sooooo…mainly because I think more like a DJ and less like a person in a band, I’m just changing this to “A song that should be in every DJ’s set.” Bar bands and DJs are both in the business of…
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