During my undergraduate days, my friends and I used to play a silly game. Whenever a situation or topic came up and they pointed to me, I would attempt to recite a relevant rap lyric. Sometimes it was a stretch to get Ice-T or the Beastie Boys to fit a late-night Waffle House run, but… Continue reading Intertextual Orientation: The Pop Palimpsest
William Melvin Kelley’s debut novel, A Different Drummer (Doubleday, 1962), imagines a different America, one where a slave revolt reconfigured the civil war and the nation thereafter. Three weeks before its release, Kelley flipped the term “woke” into its current common parlance in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. His central point was that the… Continue reading The Alterity of Cool
As it always does, my to-read stack has already doubled just from compiling and editing this year’s Summer Reading List. Get ready to add to yours, because there’s plenty below that you’re going to have to check out. There are so many books to read and so many ways to read them, you have no excuse… Continue reading Summer Reading List, 2017
The perpetual now of digital media makes it difficult to contextualize events in time: watching old SNL sketches and trying to explain what it was like to watch them live on television, playing old records and trying to capture what it was like the first time the world heard that sound, talking about where you… Continue reading Placing the Playback: Hip-hop in Context
Depending on the fandom, our attention to music can span from the insignificance of wallpaper to the altar upon we sacrifice our days. It can be everything from decoration to downright worship. I probably tend more toward the latter than the former, but you probably already know that. Of all the things that December brings,… Continue reading Top 14, 2014
