Antonoffied pop vs brat & the stakes of elite musical taste in pop’s girlboss era
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, as I’ve been spending the summer finishing up bigger projects like the first draft of Good Vibes Only and the proposal for the second edition of Resilience & Melancholy. Another…
Some thoughts on James Chance & No Wave
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…
Intro to chapter 5 of GOOD VIBES ONLY
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…
Rodrigo’s “get him back!,” Funky Drummer, & gendered resilience
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…
97X’s Final FM Broadcast Was 20 Years Ago Today
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…
Vibes and the TESCREAL Bundle as Corporate Phenomenology
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…
Draft intro to Chapter 5 of Good Vibes Only
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….
Taylor Swift’s New Grief-Vibes Playlists Turn Her Old Albums Into The Musical Equivalent of Securitized Assets
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…
Peloton Musicology, volume 1
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…
Pop Music’s Franchise Era
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…
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