BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, Ep. 18: “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” with Karen Tongson

I have always found it strange that “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” is one of the lowest-rated episodes of Black Mirror, because it is one of my favorites of the “aimed-at-Americans-era” BM episodes. I think a lot of the prejudice against this episode can be tied to people’s general reluctance to consider how complex popular music, popular culture, 

Dr. Karen Tongson is Professor of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies & Ethnicity, and Chair of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the author of two books: Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019; nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction; Best Music Books of 2019, Pitchfork; longlisted for The Believer Book Award, 2020), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in NPR, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in other scholarly and public forums. She has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory (Duke University Press), and NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy (NYU Press). Postmillennial Pop, the award-winning book series she co-edits with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, has published over twenty titles. 

Previously a panelist on MaximumFun.org’s Pop Rocket Podcast, she now cohosts the GenX-themed podcast, Waiting to X-hale, with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh.

Tongson is currently the director of a faculty-led initiative called the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Popular Culture–a start-up podcast network housed in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, and comprised of faculty across Dornsife and other schools committed to transposing scholarly research on popular culture to broader publics. 

You can listen to our “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” conversation in its entirety here:

Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:

• Full soundtrack of “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”
• What is a “momager”?
• Abolfazi Alipour, “Brain technology in Black Mirror: Technological Myths or Real Technology?” (Conversations in Science at Indiana University, 2019)
• Holographic “Prince” at the 2018 Super Bowl
• Leigh M. Johnson, “On Blurred Lines, Pop Music, and Memphis’ ‘Mustang Sally'” (2015)
• Nine Inch Nails, “Head Like a Hole” 
• Nine Inch Nails, “Right Where It Belongs”
• Carpenters, “Close to You”
• Dionne Warwick, “Close to You”
• Barry Manilow, “I Write the Songs”
• Judith Butler, The Lesbian Phallus and The Morphological Imaginary (2011)
• Jordana Rosenberg, “Butler’s ‘Lesbian Phallus’; or, What Can Deconstruction Feel?” (Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2003) 
• “The Maths Behind Music” (University of Surrey, 2012)
• Nadine Gaab and Jennifer Zuk, “Is there a Link Between Music and Math?” (Scientific American, 2017)
• Josh Duboff, “Why Is Pop Music Suddenly Obsessed with the Late 90’s?” (Vanity Fair, 2018)
• “The Axis of Awesome” (the I/V/vi chord progression in pop songs, mashed up)
• Live version of “The Axis of Awesome” 
• TikTok pop song mashups: here, here, here, and here
• Leigh M. Johnson, “Why ‘Exile On Main Street Gets My Rocks Off” 
• Alexander Cheves, “What Does ‘Queer’ Mean? 9 LGBTQ People Explain How They Love, Hate, and Understand the Word Queer” (2019)
• Whale Song: A Workshop (Daniela Gesundheit & Sarah Kessler)
• HBO series Years and Years