Fellow NYU doctoral student and possessor of fabulous blue hair Finn Upham hosts a podcast called So Strangely that interviews music science researchers. (The podcast is named for the sublimely weird speech-to-song illusion.) Finn recently interviewed Juliet Hess, who is fearlessly examining the whiteness of university-level music education, and invited me along for additional music …
Continue reading “Talking whiteness on the So Strangely podcast”
As of this writing, the biggest song in America is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. It might also be the most interesting pop song of the 21st century so far. “Old Town Road” defies genre categorization. Like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” it sits entangled in a vast musical rhizome. Lil Nas X calls it …
Continue reading “Lil Nas X and the racial politics of country music”
When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from …
I’m currently working with Techrow Fund to develop an afterschool music technology program called The Producer Club. We’re doing the pilot program at New Design Middle School in Harlem with a group each of sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders. Techrow had approached me to teach, but I suggested that, rather than hiring a middle-aged …
I turned this post into an academic journal article with proper citations–click to read it in Visions of Research in Music Education. Also see the Adam Neely video! White people appropriating black music is America’s main contribution to world culture. Black music itself is a big deal, too, but it is dwarfed by the commercial …
Continue reading “White people with acoustic instruments covering rap songs”
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a doctorate in music education at NYU. I’ve finished my coursework, and after I do my candidacy exam this fall, I’ll be ABD (All But Dissertation, as the academics say.) (Update: I passed!) I’ve spent the summer laying the groundwork for the dissertation, and thought you …
I don’t have much to add to what everyone else is saying, except that I really love her music, more than just about anything.
Ever since Jordan Peterson’s fans started getting in my face online, I’ve been exploring his work. He’s a fascinating and disturbing character. On the one hand, he’s a respected academic and clinical psychiatrist (or, he was until recently.) He dispenses valuable self-help advice, especially for depressed and anxious young men. This fan video gets across the …
In my last semester of doctoral coursework at NYU, I took a class called Research On Urban And Minority Education, taught by Alex Freidus. For my final paper, I wrote about the racial politics of music education. I had written versions of this paper for other courses, but Alex supplied some key concepts and vocabulary I …
A gentleman named Myron Magnet, whose muttonchop sideburns have to be seen to be believed, has this to say: What is keeping down American blacks today is not racism, oppression, or lack of opportunity. That’s over. Black Americans are now free. What holds them back is the ideology of “authentic blackness”—a black identity rooted in …
Continue reading “Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it”
