X-Ray Spex singer Polly Styrene died today. So sad. And so soon after Ari Up!
Check out my new article in Transformations special issue on Jacques Ranciere, “These.Are.The Breaks:Rethinking Disagreement through Hip Hop“. Here’s the intro: The idea of the “break” is central to both Jacques Rancière’s theory of disagreement and to hip hop aesthetics….
When I first heard Rihanna’s “S&M” track on the radio, I was unsure how I felt about hearing a black woman say “Sticks and stones can break my bones/But chains and whips excite me.” Sure, this is about BDSM, but,…
In my previous post about Gaga’s BTW, I argued that the song’s ultimate position on identity—whether sexuality is genetic/biologically determined, or socially constructed—was hard to determine. There was a tension between the general spirit of the “born this way” rhetoric…
Avril Lavigne’s newish single “What the Hell” offers us a quick, clearly defined lesson about racial signifiers in American pop music. It all has to do with the one little arpeggiated melisma in the chorus of an otherwise vocally minimalist…
Some prefatory remarks: (1) I really, really wanted to like Gaga’s new single. (2) Musically, it’s a pretty fun dance pop track; I’m sure it will make its way in to my workout playlists. In fact, I prefer the music…
Monday night in my Critical Race Theory class, we were discussing the second half of Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended. Here, he argues that 20th (and, I think there are good reasons for also claiming 21st) century State racism/racist discourse…
Yesterday, I was prepping both a talk on Janelle Monae, and a class on Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended, when I realized that Monae’s “Cold War” single is more or less a condensed, poetic version of Foucaut’s concept of politics…
It’s more like a negative proof, or an argument ad absurdam…This “All the Christian Ladies (Put a Purity Ring On It)” sort of demonstrates all that “Single Ladies” could have been (patriarchial, misogynistic, etc.) but actually isn’t.
Or: If she ate, then let her ate and watch the money pile up… So, white feminists are all upset about “princess culture”: “ONOES, what is it doing to our girls, encouraging them to succumb to outdated stereotypes about femininity,…
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