If I Die, I Wanna Die in the Suburbs: Pop-Punk and the Crisis of Neoliberalism
The album cover to the Wonder Years’s third album Suburbia, I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing Read More
Querying Vulnerability
This series offers a site for self-reflexive conversations about precarity, racism, mentorship, and community. We open the series by asking the question: “What does an anti-racist music studies look like to you?” but welcome prods, nudges, and prompts to develop the conversation.Queer Affects and Big Feelings: On The I Saw the TV Glow Soundtrack
https://doi.org/10.63473/MNNX1074 Big Feelings and Critical NostalgiaReleased in January 2024, I Saw the TV Glow (ISTTVG) caused an improbable sensation for an arthouse film that never quite coheres into a recognizable genre. Though horrifying, it can’t be called a horror movie; at the same time, though highly stylized and full of teenaged existentialism,… Read More
Sonoridades movilizadas: repertorios afectivos de la lucha por la legalización del aborto
https://doi.org/10.63473/YIFW8515 En el año 2017, comenzó un periodo de transformaciones profundas para las luchas democráticas por el derecho al aborto libre y gratuito en Argentina. Entre marzo y agosto de 2018, se realizó a nivel nacional una serie de manifestaciones en apoyo a las instancias legislativas del… Read More
Vicente Fernández, Not Just for Latinx Students but for All
https://doi.org/10.63473/YNKE7548 “Y Volver, Volver~, Volver!” (And Come Back, Come Back~, Come Back!): as the explosive chorus of his signature song still mourns, Vicente Fernández Gómez, known as Chente, died on 12 December 2021 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, after 60 prolific years as a singer, actor, and film… Read More
Errantry in Three Folds
https://doi.org/10.63473/GOZG3656 Reflections on the Errant Voices Conference, April 2022 Consider the adjective “errant.” The word might describe a misbehaving child careening through the galleries of the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, or a knight cresting the peak of a mountain in search of his dragon. An errant traveler might be… Read More
Listening, Histories, and the Anthropocene
https://doi.org/10.63473/WBQO6729 Conferences are inflection points: moments where energies come together and reflect outward in new directions. The following is a report of the May 2022 “Ruptures and Convergences” Conference, hosted by the Music Studies and the Anthropocene Research Network. In the following recap of conference proceedings, I frame the… Read More
Is Country Music Quintessentially American? Or White?
https://doi.org/10.63473/NWTZ4884 The phrase “quintessentially American” arises frequently with reference to country music. In Ken Burns’s 2019 Country Music documentary series and many other instances, it reiterates an established truism—but is there any truth to it? In what sense might country, long known as white music, be quintessentially American… Read More
More Troubling Failure(s): Situating Bodies and Research in Art
https://doi.org/10.63473/VYRM8234 Ed. note: This essay is an offshoot from a lecture originally presented as the AMS Committee on Women and Gender Annual Endowed Lecture. Fred Maus and Tes Slominski read responses to that spoken delivery. These are also available to read (Maus; Slominski). I am grateful for… Read More
Anti-Asian Hate: It’s Time To Stop Playing “Chinatown, My Chinatown”
https://doi.org/10.63473/ONRS3204 Three days after the July 4th mass shooting in Chicago I woke up to a piece of news on the homepage of the World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. An elderly Korean American man in Flushing, Queens, was approached and shoved at a gas… Read More
Unsettling Peter Pan
https://doi.org/10.63473/XAAC7606 I have this theory about Indians. Actually, the theory is not really about Indians, it’s about everyone else. Here’s the thing: although I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, generally speaking white people who are interested in Indians are not very… Read More