I read A.M. Lightner’s The Day of the Drones (W.W. Norton, 1968) while doing research for my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Though I didn’t cite it, the book is notable for its reversal of races (“black is beautiful; white is taboo”) and gender roles.  Lightner wrote several novels and… Continue reading The Day of the Drones

David Grubbs has been making notes and noise for decades, from his involvement with bands like Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and the Red Krayola to his many solo and collaborative efforts. His and Jim O’Rourke’s record under the Gastr del Sol name, Crookt, Crackt, or Fly (Drag City, 1994), remains a post-rock touchstone. He still composes… Continue reading David Grubbs: A Meaningful Pause

I always found it frustrating that self-help books are often lumped in with psychology books at the bookstore. Their mingling on the shelves seemed to do at least one of them a disservice. Even given my bias, I’ve always been mildly fascinated with self-help as a genre. In The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in… Continue reading Help Your Self

Privilege is a kind of blindness. Open doors are invisible. We only see them when they’re closed. Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown happens entirely in liminal spaces. It’s all in the edges and on the edge. It’s just as Manuel DeLanda writes in A New Philosophy of Society (2006): “In the case of ethnic communities, for… Continue reading Ethnic Recurring: Charles Yu

As an area of research, sound studies is ever playing the disciplinary underdog, and it shows in some of the scholarship. There is a lot of nominalizing and theoretic land-grabby flag-planting. Some of it is justified. Some of it is not. Swerving into its own theoretic lane, the AUDINT research unit invokes J.G. Ballard‘s description… Continue reading Sounds Abound