Posted in Ryan Adams, authenticity, behind the scenes on November 21, 2007 | No Comments »
For lack of anything new to read before bed, I’ve been reading random snippets from Fonarow’s Empire of Dirt. At the beginning of Chapter 5, Performance, Authenticity, and Emotion, Fonarow includes a Harry Weinstein quote from the Los Angeles Times in 1997. In this short anecdote, Weinstein admits to having snuck in his theater after [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Adorno, Blues, commodity fetishism on November 17, 2007 | 5 Comments »
So I was delighted with the Rock seminar this blog grows out of on Tuesday of this week. We had a long and (to me, at least) thoroughly stimulating discussion of Theodore Adorno’s critique of the music industry, and some reactions to it. I am always happy when three hours of discussion slip [...]
Posted in Gender / Sexuality, South Park on November 10, 2007 | No Comments »
So anyone watch South Park this week?
http://southpark.comedycentral.com/video_by_episode.jhtml?episodeId=127947
I must say, that this wasn’t the funniest episode I’ve ever seen. It did however represent the “rock lifestyle” well through the guise of Guitar Hero. Yet this episode seems as much a parody of the hardrock life as it was a stab at the fetishization of Guitar Hero.
Another interesting [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 10, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Scott Tennant at Prety Goes with Pretty (a interesting music and lit blog) has a nice post here about the new Radiohead and Eagles albums. His point is basically that both releases (for different reasons) were like nails in the coffins of dedicated music retailers. I sort of wonder if there are any [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 10, 2007 | No Comments »
This interview at Salon with legal scholar Cass Sunstein is really interesting. It’s not obviously germane to a pop music blog, but bear with me and I’ll try to say why I found it so interesting.
Sunstein has done some suggestive research regarding political culture that shows that media fragmentation in the post-network-news era has [...]
Posted in Gender / Sexuality, Lacan, phallus on November 6, 2007 | 4 Comments »
So, I recently read Jan Jagodzinski’s Music and Youth Culture (2005) and was exposed to more psychology than I ever knew existed. After a vigorous reading (and subsequent re-reading) of some of Jacques Lacan’s terminology and Jagodzinski’s application of these terms to music, I figured the best way to see if “I get it” is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 5, 2007 | No Comments »
So the template we’re using for this blog doesn’t seem to have a way to put in trackbacks, but we’ve had some good interest in a variety of our posts.
First, I want to give a shoutout to Phil Ford at Dial M For Musicology, who has said a variety of nice things about us. That [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Jimi Hendrix, MC5 on November 4, 2007 | No Comments »
Hendrix as threat - as inspiration / challenge to white guitarists. Check out these two and their synchronized “technophallic” guitar choreogaphy. Something strikes me as being vaguely (maybe not) Hendrixian about the total performance here. Am I wrong to think so? Is the afro / noisy distorted guitar deal / bluesy lyrical structure just [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on November 2, 2007 | 5 Comments »
So seldom do things come on the radio that I think I genuinely have something to say about that today’s item on the Tarzan call on PRI’s “The World” interested me. The piece is here.
The gist of the piece is that Edgar R. Burrough’s estate (he who wrote the Tarzan books) would like [...]
