Dylan and The Moon’s cover of “Yellow” made me tear up a bit. It’s a capable cover of a pretty song, of course, but it lands harder than that. The artist is trans, and it is edited to be a duet with his pre-transition self.
Continue reading “Singing to the future, singing to the past”Tag: music
Citing “Injustice”
My paper with Emmie Malone, Popular Music and Art-interpretive Injustice, has appeared in a recent issue of Inquiry. Here’s a sentence from the conclusion, which can serve as a pull quote:
Continue reading “Citing “Injustice””We hope the examples we have given make an initial case for adding to the already crowded field of philosophical terms that take the form ‘some adjective injustice.’
I keep having said things
At Daily Nous, my paper with Emmie and Brandon on genre ontology is among the Heap of Links. It’s free to download at the journal.
Continue reading “I keep having said things”A draft and a fragment
Today I posted a new draft, coauthored with Ron McClamrock: Reflections on popular music and collapse phenomena
Continue reading “A draft and a fragment”Updated drafts with ten different coauthors
Updated drafts posted in the last few weeks:
* Who’s sorry now: User preferences among Rote, Empathic, and Explanatory apologies from LLM chatbots, with Zahra Ashktorab, Alessandra Buccella, Jason D’Cruz, Zoë Fowler, Andrew Gill, Kei Leung, John Richards, and Kush R. Varshney1
* Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit, with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz
* Music genres as historical individuals, with Emmie Malone and Brandon Polite
And 1000 screaming Argonauts
My exchange with Brandon Polite, from last summer’s author meets critic session, has now been publised in Contemporary Aesthetics.
I’ve posted a draft of a paper about They Might Be Giants (in particular) and art interpretation (in general). Is context infinite, like the Longines Symphonette? If you happen to take a look, feedback is welcome.
The strangeness of the living present
Via the Otus Shrine, I came across this new illustration by Erol Otus which depicts the guitarist Tom Morello jamming out with monsters not of this Earth. It was commissioned by Morello’s friend Dan B. Weiss as a gift for Morello’s 60th-birthday. Appropriately, it distorts my sense of time in a way that feels impossible.
Continue reading “The strangeness of the living present”AV Undercover lives!
On YouTube, I stumbled across “We’re just GWAR” a campy parody of “I’m just Ken.” The video mentions, just at the beginning, that it’s the return of A.V. Undercover.
The show was on what I can now call a 7 year hiatus, but which looked during that interval like an ignominious demise. A handful of the videos were posted to YouTube by other people, but most of them were gone.
As part of the reboot, they’ve reposted the archives. So the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s awesome cover of “Debra”, which seemed like it was lost to time, is also back.
Music is weird again
The YouTube show Blind Covers is back!
I blogged about the show years ago, before their long hiatus. Since that post, I wrote a whole book about cover songs in which I elaborate my principled refusal to define cover. But I totally understand if you want to say that new music for old lyrics isn’t a cover per se.
That tracks
In arguing for the exclusive primacy of the studio track as the work in rock music, Theodore Gracyk points out that the Beatles stopped touring as they became fixated on sophisticated albums. I heard an interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg today which upends the example.
Continue reading “That tracks”