Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM, or Miss Germanotta if you’re nasty
Billed as her “industrial” album, Lady Gaga’s 2025 album Mayhem finally puts words to the aesthetic she’s been developing as her signature pop sound for nearly two decades. I’ve been on record since 2010 saying that her sonic and songwriting…
“Did you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”: 80s affirmative action backlash and contemporary alt-right masculinities
As Liam’s Bluesky posts above illustrate, the current occupants of the US presidency and vice presidency are seen to be deeply invested in the performance of a masculinity rooted in ressentiment or personal injury, and this style of masculinity is…
What kills you will make your memecoin stronger: injured masculinity and financialized media
As the second quarter of the 21st century unfolds, the music industry has become one where the majority of artists basically work for little to no money, performing labor that socially reproduces musical culture while Spotify and Live Nation make…
“A Bar Song” and the NY Bar: Shaboozey, Drake, and scalable value in a financialized music industry
In their “Year in Music 2024” post to their station website, Jacksonville, Florida Hip hop station Power 106.1 declared that “Women Run The World of Hip Hop.” NPR declared around the same time that “Southern women are shaping the sound…
The Breeders’ “Cannonball”
Cannonball, the Last Splash’s breakout hit, is also the weirdest song on the album. The Quietus’s Emily Mackay calls it a “perfect freak.” Other critics suggest the song was too “strange and unique” to be successfully covered by other acts….
LAST SPLASH as the ür-text of 90s modern rock
Though the standard narrative of 90s alternative hinges on the explosive success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Gen Z pop star Olivia Rodrigo is known for having a different take: as she told the LA Times at the end…
Relocating Rock in Resilience Discourse
In the finale to the first season of HBO’s The Penguin, organized crime mastermind Sofia Falcone/Gigante sets fire to her abusive father’s clothes and family mansion accompanied by indie rock veterans Sleigh Bells’ 2019 cover of “Where Did You Sleep…
“Girl, So Confusing,” femme cool, and resolution over resilience
In summer 2024, the figure of the “rock star”–someone who parties hard, does equally hard drugs, flouts rules of propriety, and lives a big, very spectacularly messy life–returned to the forefront of Anglophone pop culture, this time branded lime green…
On the “alt-” in alt-right and the “post-” in post-punk – more similar than you may think!
When philosopher Kwame Appiah asked “is the post- in postmodernism the post- in postcolonial?”, he was referring to their shared de-centering of (mainly) Eurocentric master narratives about universality, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. When I riffed on his 1991 article…
What I wrote/did in 2024
It’s time again for the “everything I wrote/major accomplishments for the year” posts, and here’s mine! 2024 is the 15th year of Its Her Factory’s existence: I started over on Blogger, migrated to my own domain, and now I also…
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