I was really lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented musicians (and devoted music-lovers) during my graduate school years at Penn State. I say “lucky” because, despite its popular sobriquet, “Happy Valley” is most definitely not a happiness-inspiring place to live, at least not for a city girl. State College is a tiny college…
Read MoreI have a certifiably unhealthy obsession with sad songs. I think they’re the most beautiful things that human beings create, and I think you can learn far more truth about the complex, convoluted tragicomedy that is human life and community from sad songs than from all the rest of our creations combined. Among the reasons…
Read MorePhoto credit: Mike Harding (American Photo Blog) Pictured to your left is Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios, which is a tiny little building tucked away on a tiny little street just south of Stax and just north of South Parkway here in Memphis. It also just happens to be the place where one of the biggest…
Read MoreYesterday, Memphis turned out in force at W.C. Handy Park and on Beale Street to bid its final farewell in a home-going celebration for one of our city’s musical legends, B.B. King, who passed away last week. It was a dark and cloudy morning, which felt strangely appropriate, as Nature herself seemed unable to hold…
Read MoreYesterday, my good friend, fellow music-lover and ridiculously super-smart guy, Steven Thomas (Asst Professor of English and Director of Film and Media Minor, Wagner College), published on his blog a response to and critique of my post from a couple of days ago on the Thicke/Pharrell/Gaye lawsuit (“On Blurred Lines, Pop Music, Pirates/Thieves and Memphis’ Mustang Sally”). His…
Read MoreOnce again this June, I’ll be blogging the 30 Day Song Challenge, which I’ve done for the last few years. Since I began in 2011, the official list of Challenge prompts has changed several times, so this year I’ve tried to mashup the best parts of previous iterations into a new “2015” version of the…
Read MoreSince I started doing this Challenge regularly each summer, I’ve learned to loosen my grip a bit on categories like “favorite” and “least favorite” when it comes to songs, if only to avoid simply reproducing the same picks every year. That’s been a good lesson to learn, really. Kind of like when you learn that…
Read MoreThe hardest thing about picking a “least favorite” song, in my view, is that the pick needs to be something that you actually hear on a semi-regular basis. There are entire genres of music that I don’t like and don’t voluntarily listen to–experimental jazz, death metal, most jam-bandy stuff, any of that godforsaken Celtic noise that…
Read MoreThe disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…
Read MoreThis is the fifth installment of my series How It Will Go, documenting the regularity of students’ responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness. Today’s episode: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism Context in which I teach this figure text: Like Kant, I teach some variation of…
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