Songs in Conversation: Prince & Peter Gabriel Making It Big
Putting two songs on aspirational success released a decade apart into conversation 26 years later.
Putting two songs on aspirational success released a decade apart into conversation 26 years later.
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.
Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Knock Three Times” vs. Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” in the soundscape of urban living.
Defamiliarizing gender to highlight its constructedness.
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.
Rock n’ roll songs about rock n’ roll disillusionment.
I prefer a song that explores our conflicted relationship to “nature.”
Poor black and brown people in the West joined by music and their relation to power.
Expressing a desire to retreat from complex adult desire demonstrates how painful those desires can be.
The weird corniness of “She’s Leaving Home” comes from its perfect ability to stand for its own artifice
Like a great deal of science fiction Stevie Wonder’s “Saturn” presents an alternate future by imagining an alternate past
The “scariness” of black sexuality made palatable.
The very act of singing what he is singing is the woman’s work he sings about.