This episode explores the commodity structure of music as it has evolved from the beginning of the sheet music industry to today’s streaming environment. The second segment employs ideas from Nietzsche and Raymond Williams to articulate the way in which we feel our way in relation to the world and suggests that music contributes to our affective standing. The last segment looks at Guy Debord’s notion of the Society of the Spectacle and examines how we have moved from being to having to appearing. I then suggest ways in which streaming contributes to a new structure of feeling.

This episode examines how the digitalization of music has changed the mode of being (the ontology) of music. We examine the shift in music from something performed to something recorded and then to digitalization. We then examine some lawsuits concerning digital sampling and their implications and then some opportunities artists have exploited in the digital album. 

In this episode I am joined by Matt Carter to discuss the aesthetics and civics of graffiti art, or writing. We begin with the important transition in the 1960s  from older forms of graffiti to modern graffiti art, examine the integral nature of transgression to the aesthetics of the art, consider the importance of writing and the signature, and conclude by discussing the question of the ownership of public space. Episode art comes from: By derivative work: Jemandanderes (talk)Seen_bode_ny.jpg: https://www.flickr.com/people/sweet_child_of_mine/ - Seen_bode_ny.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5578651

This episode delves into a passage from Nietzsche's Gay Science on giving style to one's life to demonstrate that his view of style is not superficial but rather substantive. This giving of style creates an orbit of several of Nietzsche's most important conceptions: the need for an Ultimate (the Death of God), the dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus, the need for distance or abstraction, the importance of aesthetics, becoming what you are, and the eternal recurrence. To further examine the issue of distance, I turn to Graham Harman's view of the withdrawal of the real object and the tension he labels "allure." The last segment then applies this view of abstraction/distance and the constellation of other concepts discussed to some elements of the conscious rap of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Digable  Planets. 

This episode looks at how early country music, particularly that of the Carter Family, dealt with the position of the South after the Civil War into the early decades of the 20th century. I discuss the ideologies of the New South and the Lost Cause and how that relates to country music's concern with tradition. I then turn to a reading of Nietzsche's notion of the "death of God" to reveal that Nietzsche's primary concern wasn't with atheism but rather with the loss of an "ultimate" value that created a vibrant hierarchy of values--a loss that resonates with the South's position as portrayed in the writing of William Faulkner and the lyrics of country music. The last segment offers a close reading of "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" employing these themes. 

In this episode, I explore the business innovations of Ralph Peer: his ability to profit from the mechanical right guaranteed by the 1909 Copyright Act, his exploitation of under-explored markets, and his innovations in marketing country musicians as pop stars. This leads to a discussion of the famous Bristol Sessions and the music of Jimmie Rodgers and, especially, the Carter Family. 

This episodes examines country music as a popular (mass culture) entertainment prior to the Bristol Sessions of 1927. I investigate three contributing streams into the country music scene: Appalachian music, disaster songs, and the fiddling music of the string bands. I tease out certain contradictions in each in order to demonstrate that country music is an "invented tradition" that relies upon the past but reinvents that past into an image useful to its own concern with creation.  

In this episode I discuss phenomenon of the crossover, employing an eccentric reading of Nietzsche to elucidate one element of the success of Motown and the Supremes. We begin by discussing the way Billboard created its charts, the ways in which those charts changed over time, the crossover phenomenon of the Rock n' Roll era, and the suspension of the R&B chart during 1964 and its impact on Black music. The second segment discusses Nietzsche's concept of the overman and the role he sees suffering playing in one's affirmation of life. The final segment applies some of this thinking to Motown and the resistances it overcame with the Supremes as the primary vehicle to the mainstream. 

In this episode I discuss the business model Berry Gordy employed for Motown records, including the influences of Booker T. Washington and the Fordist model. What are the advantages and disadvantages to applying these business models to the creation of music?

This episode discusses the image of the crossroads as a central metaphor not only for the blues but for the Black condition at the turn of the 20th century. I then discuss the musical roots of the blues, the relationship of the blues to the ideals of Booker T. Washington, and the manner in which the blues navigates the liminal space between the religious and the secular, the communal and the individual, the inside and the outside.