Tag: music

How quickly it fades

I am teaching Philosophy and Cover Songs as a first-year seminar this semester, and I worry that I don’t have any contemporary examples.

It’s weird, because I had lots of contemporary examples when I taught Philosophy and Popular Music a year and a half ago. New covers of Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck Babe” (itself just a year old) provided vivid examples of the way gender and meaning interact. Kendrick Lamar played the Superbowl halftime show, providing a vivid example of beefs in hip-hop. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter won the Grammy for best Country album, providing a great hook for thinking about genre and authenticity.

Now those are the recent past rather than now, and I don’t have anything current to replace them. It might not matter, since I had a student drop by office hours wanting to talk about 1970s classic rock.

But it’s strange to lose the sense of currency so quickly. That doesn’t happen when I teach 17th and 18th Century Philosophy.

Covers and collapse

Two small updates recently:

Back on track

In contemporary music, the recorded track is the musical object that listeners encounter the most. Some philosophers, like Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, have taken this to mean that the track is the work of art in contemporary music. Evidence for this is the importance that many musicians put on production of the track. So much so that producers become important contributors to the musical product.

Other philosophers, like Dan Burkett, Chris Bartel, and myself, have argued that song and performance are also works worthy of aesthetic attention. So there’s a plurality of works associated with every particular record.

In a recent interview with Rick Beato, the pioneering producer Todd Rundgren reflected on the importance of the track.1 He doesn’t side either with the track-centric view or with open-ended pluralism.

Continue reading “Back on track”

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:

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.’

Continue reading “Citing “Injustice””

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. Varshney2

* 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.