Just a little bit of follow up on my post about the black and queer roots of House music. In that post, I really wanted to talk about more of the individual people, but there are too many to discuss, especially when I'm working from the assumption that a lot of readers barely even know... Continue Reading →
Squeaking in just before the end of Black History Month, I'd like to write a little bit about the origins of House music. I get the impression that many people think of techno as a very white genre. Sure, it's huge in Europe, and white European artists, such as Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, are central... Continue Reading →
Hello, dear readers. I set blogging aside for a while for two reasons: I had an injury that made it physically impossible to sit and write for several months; and with how much that injury held up my dissertation work, since then, I've put 100% of writing effort into finishing in-progress chapters. I'm happy to... Continue Reading →
When I started my last post, "Where are the great black guitarists?" I kinda thought it would go, "What, are you dumb? Look at all these black guitarists!" But 2000 words later, it had become...more. So I decided to separate into two halves, one ideological and historical, the other "check out all this majesty." If... Continue Reading →
I sliced a fingertip open earlier tonight, so please forgive any egregious typos I miss. Trying to shift and hit punctuation when you can't feel the keyboard with that finger is...interesting. (Looking for Part 2?) Since it's Black History Month, I want to take a break from my dissertation research (which is so overwhelmingly white).... Continue Reading →
I once encountered a book so demanding of attention that even with my peripheral vision, walking past the ML stacks at the library, its spine jumped out at me. It was KLEZMER! Ever since, I wish every book every had such a title. (LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!) Today we're not going to talk... Continue Reading →
I want to take a slight detour to talk about socialism and folk music. If you've ever Googled "industrial music," or especially if you've done an academic database search for the term, you find a lot of material on folk music. The artists who came up were familiar—Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax—but I had... Continue Reading →
We left off before the holidays with some background on how medieval fantasy suddenly became mainstream in the '60s. There were also some other semi unintentional mirrorings of the values of the Victorian medieval revivals, where a previously fringe elements advocating for pre-industrial communal lifestyles also became more mainstream. With these cultural threads established, let's... Continue Reading →
In my last post, I tried to begin answering why medieval fantasy suddenly begins to flourish in the midst of the Space Age (which encompasses the end of WWII to about the mid-60s), in terms of some of the basic facts—namely, a bunch of medievalist fantasy sagas came out in the '50s, which were written... Continue Reading →
Maybe I just continually gloss over it, but it seems like drumming styles are frequently neglected in discussions of genres in rock music. I've realized more and more over the years how much I rely on drum style as a genre marker, just for my own ear and tastes. It's something I still have a... Continue Reading →
Katarina von Sporken
Violent Brain Fever 