My adventures among the alt-right

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 had been missing, and I felt like this was the first time I had really been able to get my arms around my core idea: that school music is a site where white privilege is reproduced. On May 8, I posted the paper on this blog, as I have with all of my grad school writing assignments. I got some gratifying rah-rah responses from other progressive music educators, with more Facebook and Twitter shares than usual, and that felt good.

I also got one strange comment:

The most interesting thing about this article is that it requires the reader to be familiar (and in agreement) with a very specific ideology (postmodernist relativism) in order to be understood according to the author’s intentions. To a normal educated person, the content of this article reads as shockingly racist, and deeply morally confused. In order for it to sound somewhat palatable, and not like the incredibly racist screed that it is, the author has had to torturously render the entire thing using a strict postmodernist vocabulary.

I’m used to cultural conservatives calling me racist for talking about racism. But I wasn’t sure why this guy was harping on the word “postmodernist.” It’s an accurate description of my scholarly approach, but it also describes every other mainstream academic in the world. It would be like disparaging me by calling me an American. This is before I found out that “postmodernism” is a Jordan Peterson buzzword.

Then, a couple of weeks later, the real excitement began.

Make Music Ed Great Again
Continue reading “My adventures among the alt-right”

Some news

I’ve had an idea for a while to try writing an intro-level project-based music technology textbook. My friend Will Kuhn, the coolest high school music teacher in America, has been working on a book for people who want to start a project-based music technology program at their school (Will started an awesome one at his.) We recently decided to merge our efforts, Voltron-like, so I have put my thing on the back burner and am now the second author on Will’s thing. We emailed out the proposal today. Think warm thoughts!

Colbert typing

Scratching “This Is America”

One of my projects for this summer is to realize my decades-old ambition to learn how to scratch. I borrowed a Korg Kaoss DJ controller from a friend, downloaded Serato, and have been fumbling with it for a week now. The Kaoss DJ leaves much to be desired. The built-in Kaoss Pad is cool, but otherwise it’s too small and finicky. I will definitely want to upgrade to something with big chunky buttons and more haptic feedback in general. Still, the Kaoss DJ is enough to get started with.

For my first serious remix, I thought I would take on Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”–I have the acapella and the instrumental, and it feels like a timely song. I put the instrumental on one deck and the acapella on the other, and did my best to improvise a mix in real time. If you want to hear the result, email me.

I mostly approached this as “soloing” with the acapella, using the instrumental as my “rhythm section.” But I did some improvising with the instrumental too, by looping, and by jumping around between cue points. I don’t consider this to be a polished work of art or anything, but I discovered some pretty cool sounds even at my basic skill level. So I’m excited to see where this leads.

Continue reading “Scratching “This Is America””

Separating children from their parents at the border is morally wrong

Call your representatives, especially if they’re Republicans. Demand that this stop. “But what about Obama?” He’s not the president anymore. “But what about the laws?” This isn’t a law, it’s a policy instituted very recently, which can be reversed in an instant by Sessions or Trump. “But what about illegal immigration?” No harm done by illegal immigration can possibly outweigh the harm we’re doing to these kids and their parents. “But what about the Democrats?” I don’t want to hear any ignorant both-sides-ism. We are all morally culpable, but the people who control all three branches of the federal government are the most culpable. Call them.

Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it

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 the urban underclass culture of hatred of authority (especially of the police, the teacher, and the boss), indifference to learning, misogyny, sex stripped of love or commitment, hustling, resentment, drug trafficking and using, tolerance of lawbreaking, and rage, rage, rage, the hallmark of keeping it real. That’s the message rap hammers home constantly with its mind-numbing rhythm.

I have heard this idea voiced by many conservatives. There are many different ways to demonstrate that racism is alive and well, and that black people who resent authority are well motivated. The clearest proof is America’s horrifying prison system.

Pager 2007 p 21
Continue reading “Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it”

Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live

This video recently made the rounds on Facebook:

I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I would do the same thing with this one.

Continue reading “Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live”

The orchestra hit as a possible future for classical music

In my paper about whiteness in music education, I tried to make a point about sampling classical music that my professor was (rightly) confused about. So I’m going to use this post to unpack the idea some more. I was arguing that, while we should definitely decanonize the curriculum, that doesn’t mean we need to stop teaching Western classical music. We just need to teach it differently. Rather than seeing the canonical masterpieces as being carved in marble, we should use them as raw material for the creation of new music.

When I think about a happy future for classical music, I think of the orchestra hit in “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, a sample that came packaged with the Fairlight CMI.

Fairlight CMI

The orchestra hit is a sample of “The Firebird”by Igor Stravinsky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wbkKWrUD-A

This sample is the subject of an amazing musicology paper by Robert Fink: The story of ORCH5, or, the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine. Continue reading “The orchestra hit as a possible future for classical music”

This Is America

If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog, then by now you’ve probably seen the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” If you haven’t seen it, watch now. Be warned that it’s upsetting.

Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, is best known as a comedian, a writer, and an actor. He’s an intelligent and creative guy, but he’s wasn’t a likely candidate to make the most political music video of the decade. I’m not going to write about the video, because plenty of other people who know more about it have done so already. Instead, I want to talk about the song itself, which is fascinating in its own right. It was produced by Glover and Ludwig Göransson, who, aside from his work with Childish Gambino, is mostly known for scoring films and TV shows (including Community, which is how he met Glover.)

Continue reading “This Is America”

Teaching whiteness in music class

Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem.

Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post.

Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton, 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge. Meanwhile, musicians with a hip-hop background find their skills and knowledge to be of little value to institutional gatekeepers. Kendrick Lamar is a good enough musician to merit a Pulitzer Prize, but he would not be accepted into most undergraduate music education programs (Kruse, 2018).

Biz

Why is it so important that music education embrace hip-hop when students are already immersed in it outside of school? There are three main reasons. First, if music educators wish to foster students’ own musical creativity, then students must be free to create in the styles that are meaningful to them. Second, while many young people enjoy listening to hip-hop, few know how to produce it. Third, and most important, music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. The Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value. While the white mainstream loves hip-hop, America showers the people who created it with contempt (Perry, 2004, p. 27), and sometimes violence. By affording Afrodiasporic musics the respect they deserve, we will teach students to similarly value the creators of those musics.  Continue reading “Teaching whiteness in music class”

Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher

In this paper, I discuss a rap cypher held during a session of NYU’s CORE Music Program on March 3, 2018. A cypher is a group performance where rappers take turns performing improvised verses. Freestyling is to rap what jam sessions are to jazz: an improvisational form that demands both technical proficiency and a relaxed, casual confidence. I chose the cypher as the subject of ethnographic study because it crystallizes so much of what I love about rap generally. Freestyle rap in particular is an underappreciated art. While hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and possibly in the world (Hooton, 2015), the American music academy does not afford it much respect. I have heard a demoralizingly large number of musicians and educators opine that rap is not music at all. While I do not believe that rap needs academic validation, it is important to me that my fellow educators understand and appreciate the beauty of this music, so if they will not embrace it, they might at least do less to impede it.

Few rap haters will admit to being motivated by racial or class animus. Instead, they point to rap’s supposed lack of melody, or the programmed and sampled beats. Along with electronic dance music, rap in its instrumental aspect is the most repetitive popular form in American history, and schooled musicians are socialized to be contemptuous of repetition (McClary, 2004). Improvisation likewise has a low status in academic settings, because spontaneous musical expression supposedly has less significance than composed works (Nettl, 1974, p. 3). However, closer engagement with improvised rap quickly reveals its depth. For example, the predictability of the beats is a necessity to support the complex play of text, pitch, rhythm and timbre in the emcees’ flow. Only by evaluating the music by its own value system can we recognize its beauty. Continue reading “Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher”