Death Grips’ is a difficult music group to describe but many like to call them an “experimental hip hop group”, a category seemingly contrived for a group that resists classification through their mixing of different genres. Although the assignation of a genre is sometimes reductive, the “experimental” part is apt for describing the expansive nature Read More
As a “graduate candidate” in literary studies, I often ask myself whether my analyses of unpopular, neglected poems, novels and plays are culturally relevant. This short essay considers some things that are perhaps too often ignored by English scholars — the immense relevance of American popular music, how music relates to current trends in culture Read More
When it comes to listening to vinyl, NYC artist Rutherford Chang antithesizes what Franco Moretti identifies as the “typical reader of novels” in Britain up to about 1820 (Moretti 71). Instead of “a ‘generalist…who reads absolutely anything, at random’” (Moretti 71, quoting Albert Thibaudet), Chang listens to and collects anything, mostly at random, of a Read More
For this week’s probe, I’ve decided to look at the printed manuscript of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Six Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo,” written around 1720. One main contributing factor to its “messiness” is that nobody really knows when these pieces were composed, and there is little detailed information given on the manuscripts. The incomprehensibility Read More
The orchestral piece “Briony,” part of the score composed by Dario Marianelli for the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, is fundamentally a recent addition to the cultural landscape of typewriting. Despite its recency, the piece at its core makes a large-scale, conscious return to the “basics” of early media theory, fusing together Read More