Reachin’ Not Drowning: Songs in Conversation About Abortion
The personal is political and sometimes – as in the case of abortion – the political is personal.
“I Didn’t Mean to Turn You Kong” – Seeking out #MeToo in Pop Music
Listening to Cherrelle’s “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” in the #MeToo moment.
Imagining What Silence Looks Like: Prince & Queering the Popular Love Song
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.
“Nobody Speak” – Pulling Back the Curtain on Trumpist Politics
You wanna hear a good joke? Nobody speak, nobody get choked.
Songs in Conversation: Don’t Knock the Intimacy of Urban Sound
Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Knock Three Times” vs. Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” in the soundscape of urban living.
Songs in Conversation: Those are Some Fragile Men, Baby Doll.
Defamiliarizing gender to highlight its constructedness.
Songs In Conversation: I Can Go For Dialogics
Dialogics represent the rejection of a finality of meaning. It moves back and forth like a crossfade.
Cracking the Prototype: Serial Monogamy and the Pop Love Song
Songs that explore the more complex reality inherent in the tension between the intensity of romantic feelings and the experience of serialized monogamy.
So, You Say You Want a Revolution? It’s Gonna Be Alright, Just Buy Something.
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.
The Who’s “I’m a Boy” as Transgender Anthem
Gender identity is over-determined.
Sympathy for “Sympathy for the Devil”
The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that he devil was real.
“Movies, Museums and the Hall of Fame” – Beat Street & the Past Future of Hip Hop
Hip Hop got up big time, and I love that, but its focus on cultural production left its political potential untapped.
Rock On and Drive: Songs in Conversation
Rock n’ roll songs about rock n’ roll disillusionment.
Nothing (But Taxis): Songs in Conversation on the Environment
I prefer a song that explores our conflicted relationship to “nature.”
“And Then We Take It Higher” – Interpreting Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue”
Poor black and brown people in the West joined by music and their relation to power.
Me Up On My Pony On My Boat
Expressing a desire to retreat from complex adult desire demonstrates how painful those desires can be.
“Our baby’s gone. . .” Camp and Multivocality in The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home.”
The weird corniness of “She’s Leaving Home” comes from its perfect ability to stand for its own artifice
Alternate Futures of Wonder
Like a great deal of science fiction Stevie Wonder’s “Saturn” presents an alternate future by imagining an alternate past
Thrills, Chills, and Safe Sexuality: The Sounds of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
The “scariness” of black sexuality made palatable.
Gender Policing “This Woman’s Work”
The very act of singing what he is singing is the woman’s work he sings about.
Sometimes Samples Just Hypnotize
Hip-Hop does not eschew history, it honors it, it has a historical pluralism encoded and embedded in its foundational tracks.
