For Episode 18, I am joined by cultural critic and superstar podcaster Karen Tongson to talk about teenage angst, celebrity, what makes pop music “popular,” and “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” (Episode 2, Season 5 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2019.
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.
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.
- 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