May 08, 2008
April 08, 2008
March 16, 2008
January 31, 2008
August 02, 2007
Pattern recognition
Snapping on the car radio, I caught a voice singing the last syllable of a song, and immediately recognized it as Tommy Makem singing the end of "Four Green Fields." Music is potent stuff.
April 17, 2007
Rap and Education
Mike O'Hare is distinctly unimpressed by rap. I'm not as hostile as he is--I can think of at least a handful of remarkably complex rap albums (in particular stuff from the late 1980s like Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Eric B. and Rakim) albums that I continue to listen to today. That said, there's a large amount of...
The Rap on Rap
Predictably, Imus' little contretemps raises questions about the relentless truly repulsive conventions of gangsta rap and its related forms. This AP story has some interesting quotes, from critics hostile to the misogynistic, violent stream of gangsta rap and from its defenders anxious to distinguish it from Imus' japes and jabs. The standard defense of this bilge is here offered by...
April 13, 2007
Acts and traits, rights and duties
Anything that gives us moral enlightenment from both Don Imus and Al Sharpton across a table from each other can't be all bad, right? Seriously, while Imus doesn't matter much, the whole episode gives us perspective on a pair of issues too often taken the wrong way. The first is a confusion of acts and traits, as in "anyone who...
February 09, 2006
Music To Drive To
This semester I'm driving from New Haven to Boston and back once a week, and have started to use the time to listen to music, which unfortunately I don't have as much time to do as I once did. Two pieces have really grabbed me, one exceptionally well-known, one not. The first are Chopin's Nocturnes. Everyone has heard them at...
