We’ve all spent years talking about taste in the age of the mp3, and how listeners can shuffle happily from Hank Williams to Too $hort to Katy Perry. Minaj might force some people to accept that a musician might have more than one inclination as well — that she might, unsurprisingly, be interested in steely rapping and sugar-rush pop at the same time.
Abebe: Nicki Minaj, Hot 97, and the Fight Over ‘Real Hip-Hop’ — Vulture
Post-Popchips reflections. Anil Dash is awesome.
One of the great struggles in trying to challenge racist aspects of culture is that we’ve moved from overt, obvious, overbearing racist practices to things that are much more nuanced, and which are often the result of bad habits or ignorance from otherwise well-intentioned people.
He was the Walt Whitman of critical theory.
Feelings have great predictive value, but opinions don’t.
The Times Herald – A room so quiet no one can stand it for more than 45 minutes
Q. If you could be president for one day what would be your first order of business?
A. […] Everyone gets free pizza making lessons (dough, sauce, etc). Crazy, right? No! It’s about teaching people to have an eye (and tongue) sensitive to quality. Pizza seems simple, but boy it’s tough at first. But then it’s pretty easy once you know what you’re doing. And you’re like: Wow! I make the best pizza in the ‘hood! And chances are, you’re right. You do. So, once you know great pizza, it’s *shocking* how little is out there. How much *bad* pizza is out there. It’s everywhere! Great pizza is actually a pretty low bar. And doesn’t have to cost that much. So it gets you thinking: “Why are these bad pizza places so bad? Why don’t they make great pizza? It’s not that hard!” And then: “Why don’t more people know what great pizza tastes like? Don’t they know how much pleasure they’re missing out on?” And then it spirals into more generalized notions of quality and sensitivity and experience. And then, *poof*, suddenly America is Japan. Or something like that.
Disco’s success at capturing glamour and sex as an aesthetic can be frightening — in approximately the same way it’s frightening to watch the world do similar things to weddings, turning them into sites of glittery yearning where one’s sense of self and love turns strangely prop-filled and expensive. This seems like one of the more-flattering reasons why rock fans treated disco with so much hostility: It’s a puritan’s gut instinct that there’s something dangerous about a sex-and-glamour bubble floating too exuberantly beyond the realm of reality, becoming too stylized and commercial. And of course straight, white, male rock fans were the ones who’d feel that fear and loathing most strongly: They’d have been the listeners with the least to gain from actively reimagining love, sex, and glamour. Disco claimed the audience with the most critical stake in reframing those things — gay, black, female, and Latino listeners chief among them.
Cf.
The Last Days of Disco: Abebe Remembers Donna Summer and Robin Gibb
Just in time. The Wirecutter is wonderful.
Atlanta = number 5 in musical artists per capita, behind Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Nashville, and Boston. Eat it, cities not in the top 5! (via)
See also evidence for Atlanta listeners being the among the most influential. We run this.
People exhibit territorial behavior when they take seats in public places, limiting themselves to small areas so they don’t have to “renegotiate” seating arrangements with other people, researchers say. In one study by Marco Costa of the University of Bologna in Italy, university students showed strong attachments to specific areas of a lecture hall; on average, each student made use of just 2.4% to 2.7% of the seating area.
Confession: at college back in the day and at work currently, I’m that jerk that, every so often, likes to take the seat where other people always sit. Always stirrin’ shit up.
Why do you always sit in the same place in meetings? – Barking up the wrong tree
A hushed theater reminds me why I love movies. But a midnight show reminds me why I love going to the movies.
It’s almost intimidating to have someone be that attentive to you.
Lethem on art and identity and betrayal:
We are so prone to feeling betrayed by the artist in some way. Because the art does something so extraordinary to us that then we find out some detail. “Oh! He stole that from Willie Dixon.” “Oh! He beat his wife.” “Oh! He picks his nose in public.” “Wait a minute. He made that thing that changed my life. This is incongruent. I don’t like it!” That’s why we get so betrayed by the knowledge of appropriations, because we’re holding art to this very weird standard where it is actually about us. It’s about our own lives.
On T.S. Elliott and art that lets you cite:
T.S. Elliott has this appendix to The Wasteland where there are all these citations. We’ll put aside the fact that probably no one ever bothers to read that. But it’s there. He tried. It’s right there. But if a painter makes a canvas, it does not have room for footnotes on it. And a lot of art, the form doesn’t invite the same kinds of embrace of transparency. The specific gestures just don’t work. So what do you do? There might be follow-up. You could speak in an interview, you could make a gesture. But you know what? Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone wants to be interviewed about their work at all. They want to just make it. And that’s okay.
On Led Zeppelin and Willie Dixon vs. Paul Simon and Graceland, and the axes of judging appropriation:
There are sort of two primary axes on which we make the individual judgment. One is: degree of transformation and the other is degree of transparency and or citation. In other words, how much do they really make something different out of what they appropriated? And how much did they make it easy to see that there was someone else’s gesture behind their own?
6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
7. Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices.
Instagram filters are just how we’ve convinced ourselves to put up with looking at each other’s inane snapshots.
If we can manufacture a good guy, we can exalt him. If we can manufacture a bad guy, we can degrade him. If we can’t decide, we can argue and call each other names. But more than anything complicated, the dialectic is always about deciding who is the bigger asshole.
Nice interview with Deron Bauman (of Clusterflock) and Tim Carmody (Snarkmarket).
TC: The best way to [figure things out for ourselves] is by making things — whether it’s a website, an app, or a little book.
DB: So the act of making becomes an act of definition.
TC: Exactly — definition in its original sense of mapping a thing’s contours, in order to make something that’s fuzzy easier to see.
Also:
Something a college professor of mine told me: it’s not about making students love the same things that you do, but showing them that they can love something just as much. And that it’s OKAY, it’s IMPORTANT, for them to find something that they love that much.
For The Body Is Not One Member, But Many: An Interview with Tim Carmody : Deron Bauman
Justin Wehr on how Community is awesome and so is TV but…
I don’t mean to be another pretentious I’m-above-TV guy, because I’m not. TV is above me. It dominates me, it makes me want to do nothing but sit in front of its glowing glory. In a real way, it scares me, because it shows me how powerless I am. […] The danger of TV and of passive entertainment more generally is not just that it takes time away from better things. The real danger is that it makes better things seem harder.
A couple months ago I set aside Sunday mornings as a sacred, no-interference-allowed time for books and nerdery. It’s a guaranteed 3-5 hours of learning. No regrets whatsoever. And then on Sunday afternoons I watch/play sports because that’s what you do.
Stephen Cohen on learning:
We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.
Working at a startup is an alternative rather than the alternative, but the career principle is the same: learning’s good and it’s wise to choose it over just about everything else. Cf. Penelope Trunk, Annie Clark, Charlie Munger, etc.
Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 5 Notes Essay
Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us “throw away” the story once it has been consumed (“devoured”), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere) …
See also: William Ball and Mills Baker writing about Robin Sloan’s app, Fish: a tap essay, discussing things like stock and flow and David Cole’s personal canon.
Mark Larson 