Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 315

July 31, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Temple Colleagues

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]A trio of colleagues from the Temple University graduate program who have embarked on the next stages of their scholarly careers (as has the Temple classmate about whom I’ve written before in this space, Jeff Renye).1)      Matt Chambers: Matt’s first book, Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics , was just published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. He teaches at Poland’s Univesity of Lodz, as a faculty member in Transatlantic and Media Studies. I can’t wait to see where my long-ago Temple office-mate, and one of the best poets and poet-scholars I know, goes next!2)      April Logan: Between taking part in an NEH institute, directing a Salisbury University conference on American Women Writers of Color, and working with the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society—as well as raising twins!—April’s been plenty busy in recent years. All those interests come together in her book project on representation and late 19thcentury African American women writers, which I very much look forward to reading!3)      Gina Masucci MacKenzie: Gina’s first book, The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim (Ohio State, 2008), established her immediately as a vital new voice in theater and drama studies. Since then she’s continued to develop her scholarly interests and profile, while editing a new Barnes & Noble edition of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and coordinating writing at Philadelphia’s Holy Family University. Like all of the scholars on whom I’ve focused this week, she’s clearly just getting started!July Recap this weekend,BenPS. One more time: scholars you’d share?

July 30, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Paul Edwards

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]Three compelling blog posts from the BU graduate student, fellow NEASA Council member, and very talented young AmericanStudier to watch. I won’t say anything about them, as I’d rather you check out Paul’s thoughtful, interdisciplinary, engaging voice and ideas directly.1)      Why I Watch Film2)      Science Fiction in the Suburbs3)      Woman in the AsylumGreat models for what interdisciplinary, online, public AmericanStudies scholarship can engage, include, and do!Last scholar tomorrow,BenPS. Scholars you’d share?

July 29, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Christine Yao

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]Three exemplary scholarly projects from a Cornell graduate student who’s poised to take the next step.1)      Her published articles: Christine’s two articles reflect two distinct but complementary sides to her scholarly interests and work. “Visualizing Race Science in Benito Cereno” models her unique connections of 19thcentury science, race theory, and literary practice, using Melville’s complex story as a case study. “Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of Bestial Indian” rethinks the genre of the gothic through those ongoing interests and concepts, and recovers a vital role for Brockden Brown’s early American novel in the process.2)      Her HASTAC blog: I’m not sure why I haven’t written about the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) previously in this space—but I’m making amends for that oversight today! HASTAC’s website is a model scholarly and public community and conversation, and that includes the numerous unique and engaging blogs it hosts. At Christine’s HASTAC blog, she has written compellingly about Google and Sui Sin Far, indie video game developers and social justice movements, and many other 21st century, public scholarly topics and questions.3)      Her dissertation: I’ll let the description of this ground-breaking project on Christine’s Cornell webpage speak for itself: “Her dissertation Feeling Subjects: Science and Law in Nineteenth-Century America challenges the conventional opposition between affect and the purportedly dispassionate disciplines of American science and law. Through analyzing writing from the American Renaissance alongside literature by African American and Asian American writers, the project explores the roles of feeling and unfeeling in navigating the tension between the twin discourses of science and law as both tools of oppression and resistance.” Can’t wait to read it!Next scholar tomorrow,BenPS. Scholars you’d share?

July 28, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Vetri Nathan

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]Two reasons why an Italian Professor can still be featured on AmericanStudies.Yeah, okay, Vetri Nathanis Assistant Professor of Italian at UMass Boston, but I’m not going to apologize for featuring him in a series on AmericanStudies scholars. For one thing, I’ve had the chance to work with Vetri for the last year and a half in his role on the Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Board, where he’s the Member-at-Large for Diversity. In that role, Vetri has been instrumental not only in organizing sessinos and special events for our NeMLA conferences, but also and to my mind even more importantly in advocating for the diverse community of scholars, teachers, graduate students, independent scholars, and higher ed professionals who comprise NeMLA. Those questions of academic community and labor are at the heart of 21stcentury American higher education, and Vetri’s doing great work in advocating for and supporting them.Even if he weren’t performing that vital organizational role, however, Vetri’s interdisciplinary, transnational scholarly work would more than qualify him for this week’s series. After this year’s NeMLA conference, I kicked off my week of recaps with a post on a wonderful seminar on transnational Italian-American connections, influences, and conversations. Vetri’s work to datehas focused more fully on Italian culture and society than did that seminar’s papers; but in his central interests in migration and immigration, globalization and transnational relationships, and cinema (which in and of itself is of course a hugely transnational medium and force), he has modeled a transnational as well as interdisciplinary scholarly approach, one that considers any one 20th and 21st century culture through the lens of those broader but just as complex and analytical frames.  I know we Americans (and Americanists?) have a tendency to see everything through our own lens, so I should make clear that I’m not trying to claim either Italy or Vetri’s scholarly work on it as a part of the global United States or the like. They deserve and demand to be read and analyzed on their own complex terms to be sure. Instead, I’m trying to make clear that AmericanStudies, both as a scholarly discipline and as my blog, contains multitudes—and that connecting the work that we and I do to scholars like Vetri both reflects that 21stcentury breadth and can only benefit our own perspectives, analyses, and scholarly identities. Next scholar tomorrow,BenPS. Scholars you’d share?

July 27, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Luke Dietrich

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]Three of the many reasons to keep an eye on Lucas Dietrich.1)      His organizational service: While still a graduate student at UNH, Luke contributed significantly to one of my favorite scholarly organizations, the New England American Studies Association (NEASA) Council. He’s also brought a lot to conferences for the Northeast MLA (NeMLA), the American Literature Association (ALA), and THATCamp, among other work. Now that Luke has received his PhD and moved into the next stage of his career (with a gig at Lesley University), I look for him to add his voice to these and other organizations even more fully.2)      His online scholarship: I first met Luke through Twitter, where he’s one of the many young scholars turning that social media site into a nuanced, thoughtful, evolving, communal conversation. He’s also written for a number of other websites and spaces, as illustrated by for the Humor in America blog. In these and other ways, Luke is modeling what 21st century public scholarship can be and offer, and I look forward to seeing where he takes his online writing and voice next.3)      His dissertation project: Those first two arenas would be meaningful even if Luke didn’t have a first book in the works that seems destined to blow everyone away. But he does—that recently defended dissertation, on the role that turn of the 20th century publishing and print culture played in the careers of ethnic authors such as Charles Chesnutt and Sui Sin Far, promises to become a truly ground-breaking, innovative, important book project. I’ve spent a good part of the last decade thinking about Chesnutt, Far, and their contemporaries, and every time I’ve heard Luke share elements of his work, he has added immeasurably to my perspective and knowledge. Can’t wait for the book!Next scholar tomorrow,BenPS. Scholars you’d share?

July 25-26, 2015: Crowd-sourced Hits

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ve AmericanStudied five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. This crowd-sourced post draws on the responses and other nominees of fellow ChartStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]On Twitter, my former FSU colleague (and current writing superstar) Ian Williams nominates “The Ting Tings’ ‘That’s Not My Name’ as a possible feminist anthem.”
Gregory Laski writes that “an old student of mine once wrote great essay on ‘Party in the USA’ as a democratic meditation. I found it convincing.”
Josh Paddison shares that he “once taught Ke$ha’s ‘Die Young’ video in a New Religious Movements class! Students were surprised.”
Osvaldo Oyola, one of our best analyzers of pop music and culture, shares this wonderful blog post.On Facebook, my former Temple colleague Jeff Renye notes that “Autotune sucks,” which reminds me of one of my favorite recent hip hop hits, Jay-Z’s “D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)” [that explicit excerpted version is NSFW].My former FSU student and current professional editor and blogger Erin Fay highlights “censorship on the radio” as something she’s “never understood,” focusing on “‘Semi-Charmed Life’ by Third Eye Blind” as an example of a song that “gets butchered on the radio. But that song is interesting in that it sounds so light and peppy despite being about meth.” Jeff adds “‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam” to that thread.Finally, New England American Studies Association webmaster par excellance Jonathan Silverman shares these thoughts on teaching music:
“One of my duties as a roving scholar was to give workshops on subjects of my hosts’ choosing. Often this turned out to be a seminar on how to teach music in the classroom. I often use music as a way of helping students write about subjects that are not literature; I find by introducing the idea of argumentation and evidence on subjects that are not familiar to students, that they are able to think easier about the macro ideas behind paper writing rather than the familiar process of literature interpretation.
My workshop was a meta-version of what I often do in my class—we listen to a song, and I have students write down 10 things about the song as they listen to it. And then I give them the song lyrics and we go over it again, trying to come up with an argument.
I often used Sufjan Stevens’ song “Casimir Pulaski Day,” the story about the death of young woman from cancer, because it had a story, the music was simple but sophisticated, and the students rarely had heard it. In Norway, no one had actually heard of Stevens, who was a Brooklyn coffee shop darling when I lived there.
I remember once in a classroom at Pace that students were on the verge of crying after we had gone through the process of breaking down the song, which begins with the guitar and voice, then adds a banjo for the next verse, and finally a guitar for the final verse. We figure out together (I try to hang back in the discussion) the themes of loss, young romance, and the questioning of religious faith. Exercises like this are often ones of discovery for both myself and the students. One time, a student alerted me to the line “the cardinal hits the window” when the narrator’s would-be girlfriend dies was probably a religious one; I only get such insights when I leave myself out of it.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Any other hits you’d highlight?

July 24, 2015: Billboard #1s: “Tik Tok”

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]On a hit that’s as terrible ethically as it is artistically, and its one redeeming moment.It seems crystal clear to me that the moment we utter a line like, “Music [or anything else] was so much better when I was young,” we have given in to the clichés of aging and have nothing left to do but to sit on our front porch and yell at neighborhood kids to get off our lawns. And in truth, many of the recent end-of-year #1 hits have been unique and strong songs by important young artists from whom I expect to hear a lot more in the years to come: I’d cite Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”(2011) and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” (2013), to name only two. So too with the chart’s early years: for every Perry Como or Nat King Cole classic on the list there’s one by Percy Faith or Kitty Kallen, limited, gimmicky #1 hits that have been long forgotten. Which is to say, pop music is as full of treasure as well as trash as it’s ever been—but with all that said, the subject of today’s post, Ke$ha’s mammoth dance hit “Tik Tok” (2010), definitely falls at the latter end of the spectrum.“Tik Tok” isn’t just terrible musically, although it is that—Ke$ha isn’t much of a singer (she more or less “raps” the majority of her songs, and yes, those scare quotes are entirely warranted); while she certainly can deliver a catchy hook, her songs tend to be extremely repetitive musically, internally as well as across her career to date, and “Tik Tok” is no exception. But far worse, to my mind, is the song’s (and even more the video’s) thoroughgoing embrace of a lifestyle so debauched and destructive that the singer waking up hungover (or perhaps still drunk) in a suburban bathtub and “brushing [her] teeth with a bottle of Jack” is one of the video’s and song’s more subdued moments. I’ve got nothing against debauchery per se, and indeed agree with the Beastie Boys that we’ve got to fight, for our right, to parrrrrr-ty. But from this first hit of hers through every other song and stage of her career to date, Ke$ha has made clear that excessive partying—partying so hard that you literally cannot remember the day before and thus have to enact it all over again today—is not an escape or release valve to complement the rest of our lives and responsibilities, but our sole purpose in life, a single-minded dedication to be embraced and celebrated.Maybe it makes me more of that clichéd old geezer than I like to admit, but I just can’t go along with that ethos. Moreover, I have to agree with the themes of Sia’s far more nuanced party hit “Chandelier”(2014), which the Australian singer opens with the haunting lines, “Party girls don’t get hurt/Can’t feel anything, when will I learn?” I haven’t seen Ke$ha express even a fraction of that kind of self-reflection or thoughtfulness, but in the spirit of fairness, I will note that the bridge of “Tik Tok” changes the song’s dynamic slightly. “DJ, you build me up/You break me down/My heart it pounds/Yeah, you got me,” Ke$sha sings (indeed, actually sings) there, and for a moment it seems that her speaker recognizes both that there’s an emotional core to the music and experiences she’s seeking and that those purposes reflect gaps as well as needs in this lifestyle. But if she does reach for that more subtle gesture, it certainly doesn’t last—right after the bridge the music stops, Ke$ha raps “Now, the party don’t start ‘til I walk in,” and we’re right back where we were. Which is perhaps where we’ve always been with pop music—among the trash, seeking those moments of treasure.Crowd-sourced chart this weekend,BenPS. So one more time, what do you think? Other hits you’d highlight?

July 23, 2015: Billboard #1s: “Gangsta’s Paradise”

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]On the #1 hit that changed, portrayed, and perhaps exploited the game.Popular culture often lags behind cultural trends: rap really exploded onto the national scene with two prominent 1988 albums (if not before), but Coolio’s 1995 hit “Gangsta’s Paradise” (off the soundtrack of the Michelle Pfeiffer film Dangerous Minds) was the first rap song to reach end-of-year #1 status on the Billboard charts. The Pfeiffer film, about a teacher who takes a class of students on whom everyone else has given up and helps them believe in themselves, was anything but new by 1995; indeed, one of the first such films, The Blackboard Jungle (1955), celebrated its 40th anniversary that same year. But despite that sense of cultural familiarity, Coolio’s hit took the film, artist, and popular music to new places, dominating the charts as no prior rap song had, making his accompanying album of the same title a mega-bestseller, and leaving a lasting legacy that would influence many other soundtracks and hitmakers in the years to come.
The necessary combination of timing, cultural zeitgeist, and just plain luck that goes into making a mega-hit is likely impossible to pin down (or music producers would have long ago done so), but there’s no question that the authenticity which Coolio brought to “Gangsta’s” played a role in its success. A product of the same Compton streets immortalized by N.W.A. and in the film Boyz in the Hood (1991), by the time he released his debut album It Takes a Thief (1994) Coolio had done time in prison for larceny (as part of his membership in the youthful Baby Crips gang) and had suffered from and defeated a crack addiction, among other setbacks and struggles. Which is to say, when Pfeiffer (in character) approaches Coolio at the start of the song’s famous videoand asks, “You wanna tell me what this is all about?,” she’s asking someone who knows. And when Coolio’s speaker raps lines such as “I’m 23 now, but will I live to see 24?/The way things are going I don’t know,” the then-32 year old rapper was certainly summoning up the doubts and fears in and with which he had lived for so long.
At the same time that Coolio brought the authenticity of his childhood neighborhood and experiences to “Gangta’s Paradise,” though, it’d be possible to argue that he also—like the film with which he shared his song—exploited them for commercial, cultural success. The song itself has a little of that “have your cake and eat it too” hypocrisy, particularly in lines that boast of (even while the song as a whole seems to bemoan the need for) the speaker’s toughness, his ever-present guns, his street cred. That dynamic was a part of gangsta rapthroughout its existence, and not just in the more overtly celebratory songs; even those songs and artists that offered a critical lens on the culture of the streets could at the same time give in to its allure and mythos. Moreover, it’s fair to ask whether a song like “Gangsta’s Paradise” led more audience members to give Coolio’s speaker the understanding and empathy for which he asks in the powerful concluding verse, or whether it led instead to more cultural embraces and appropriations of gangsta culture. Yet whatever its effects—and they were undoubtedly multiple and are not either-or—Coolio’s song was a watershed moment for the Billboard charts, and for American pop music more broadly.Last #1 hit tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other hits you’d highlight?

July 22, 2015: Billboard #1s: “Bridge Over Troubled Water”

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]On a surprisingly quiet and potent #1 hit, and the possibilities and limitations of art.I’ll readily admit that I when I started looking into the history of Billboard end-of-year #1 hits, I was expecting to find a lot of, well, crap. But while there are certainly songs on the list that qualify (see my upcoming Friday post for one very recent such example), I would say by and large that the #1s took me by pleasant surprise. Not necessarily in the entirely out-of-left-field way that yesterday’s choice, “The Battle of New Orleans,” did; but nonetheless as songs that I wouldn’t have expected to be the most successful pop hit of their given year. That’s certainly true of 1970’s #1 pop song, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s quiet, moving “Bridge over Troubled Water.” A recitation of what the speaker will do for his down-and-out addressee, and one that builds to a particularly beautiful final verse image of companionship and hope, “Bridge” is a hugely inspiring #1 hit.That would be the case in any year and time period, but I believe that “Bridge” is particularly inspiring in—and perhaps became such a huge hit because of—its 1970 moment. This was the moment, after all, when the optimisms of the 60s and their accompanying social and cultural movements had begun to give way to what Jimmy Carter would famously define, in his 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, as the “malaise” of the 70s, a national downturn only deepened by post-1970 events such as the Watergate scandal and defeat in the Vietnam War. When Simon and Garfunkel’s speaker tells “you” that “when times get rough” he will serve as a “bridge over troubled water,” that is, he’s not just addressing a hypothetical individual and his or her future—he’s referring quite precisely to what has begun to happen in the nation’s communal present, and pledging to “take your part when darkness comes and pain is all around.” And when he closes by imagining that “all your dreams are on their way, now,” he’s envisioning an end to those troubles, a better future about which he “will ease your mind.”Which is a beautiful image and hope, but of course did not actually come to pass for America in the decade after Simon and Garfunkel’s #1 hit. Nor did the subsequent popularity of disco throughout that decade, including end-of-year #1 hits by Roberta Flack and Andy Gibb, necessarily elide those communal troubles and pains (although perhaps disco helped for a few moments…). It’s entirely unfair to ask any individual song or artist, or even all songs and artists, to perform such cultural work—but it also begs the eternal question of whether a feel-good anthem like Simon and Garfunkel’s (or even more fully feel-good ones like those subsequent disco hits) serves more as an opiate for the masses than a source of genuine inspiration. That’s a far bigger question than I can address in one paragraph, or one post, or even one weeklong series on popular culture—but it’s an AmericanStudies question to be sure, and one raised with particular clarity by Simon and Garfunkel’s inspiring 1970 #1 hit.Next #1 hit tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other hits you’d highlight?

July 21, 2015: Billboard #1s: “The Battle of New Orleans”

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]On the #1 hit that stands alone, and why it’s worth remembering.By the late 1950s, rock ‘n roll (or at least the emerging genres and artists that would come to constitute it) was here to stay, as illustrated by Elvis Presley’s back to back end-of-year #1 hits, “Heartbreak Hotel”(1956) and “All Shook Up”(1957). But I’ve written a good bit in this space about both the complex Presley and the cross-cultural rise of rock ‘n roll, so I wanted here to focus on a very different late 1950s #1 hit, a song distinct both from its contemporaries and from just about any other hit on the end-of-year list: Johnny Horton’s 1959 country music cover of Jimmy Driftwood’s American folk anthem “The Battle of New Orleans,” itself based on the classic fiddle tune “the 8thof January” (the battle’s date). Horton’s version was not only the #1 pop and country song of 1959, but was ranked by Billboard as the 28thranked song and #1 country song from the chart’s first 50 years, making it one of the most successful songs of the century by these measures. The collaborative nature of popular music about which I wrote in yesterday’s post is even more evident, and more multi-part and unique, in Horton’s hit. Driftwoodwas a high school principal in Arkansas who decided to write lyrics about the battle and set them to the folk tune’s existing music; his version became popular, and he was discovered by country artist and producer Don Warden and given an RCA contract in 1958 to record a dozen songs. The song has since been covered many times, but never as successfully as its first cover, by the newly popular country and rockabilly artist Johnny Horton; Horton’s cover appeared on his debut album, The Spectacular Johnny Horton (1959), and not only catapulted the song to international visibility but launched a brief craze for “historical ballads” by Horton and others (as exemplified by Horton’s second album, Johnny Horton Makes History [1960]). Had Horton not tragically been killed in a car accident in November 1960, who knows how many other such American histories he might have turned into #1 hits.“The Battle of New Orleans” represents more than just a collaborative creation and a pop culture trend, however—it also validates Driftwood’s initial impulse and illustrates the power of cultural texts to educate. I’m not suggesting that the song’s lyrics can take the place of a history book, although the references to geography, chronology, and Old Hickory are accurate as far as they go (the lines about using an alligator as a substitute cannon, not so much). But more importantly, the song could serve, as so many folk songs do, as a starting point for learning more about the American histories to which it refers—and in this case, those histories are among our nation’s most interesting, cross-cultural, and too often forgotten. Moreover, as a moment featuring the song on the first season of Treme indicates, the song remains a vital part of the history and culture of its unique American city. All good reasons to keep singing the most unexpected #1 hit in Billboard history.Next #1 hit tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other hits you’d highlight?