In a guest essay, Ty Matejowsky examines the once ubiquitous and now mostly forgotten movie tie-in music video format through the example of one for a movie that never existed.
Nicholas Miller returns with an essay on whiteness, country music nostalgia, and charting a new course to re-imagine the past and the future.
When it is a surprise to the editor that both stories in a comic are written and drawn by women, it takes an engaged reader to consider the actual significance.
The personal is political and sometimes – as in the case of abortion – the political is personal.
Listening to Cherrelle’s “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” in the #MeToo moment.
The dark sound and minimalist instrumentation on “If I Was Your Girlfriend” demonstrates Prince’s willingness to bend and distort expectations with a lyrical and sonic playfulness that challenges the listener to think beyond the obvious gender stereotypes inherent in most popular love songs.
You wanna hear a good joke? Nobody speak, nobody get choked.
Sammus embraces the kind of freedom afforded to grassroots, independent artists who don’t have corporate overseers menacing with strange gazes and mandates to sellout.
Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Knock Three Times” vs. Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” in the soundscape of urban living.
The best band no one has ever heard (or at the very least a quirky band whose one record brings me joy).
Defamiliarizing gender to highlight its constructedness.
“You know what you need to learn? Old school artists don’t always burn!”
A song from ’95 about the state of Black Revolution in America in light of the appeal of consumerism and individual contentment.
You can’t separate hip hop from race without looking like you’ve separated your head from sense.
1999’s appeal emerges from a sense of danger, from the scandalous possibilities of a morality unbound by the coming apocalypse, disguised as synth-heavy dance pop
Dialogics represent the rejection of a finality of meaning. It moves back and forth like a crossfade.
Songs that explore the more complex reality inherent in the tension between the intensity of romantic feelings and the experience of serialized monogamy.
The Nike commercial is simply a recapitulation of the song’s co-opting of revolutionary affect to sell popular music itself as a commodity and line the Beatles’ pockets.
Gender identity is over-determined.
The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that he devil was real.
Hip Hop got up big time, and I love that, but its focus on cultural production left its political potential untapped.
The Middle Spaces 