Tin Pan Alley to Records: For Your Listening Pleasure

Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker

The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross

Even the New Yorker catches up:

"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”

These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"

The Sound Begins: Popular Music Readings II

Rufus Thomas, DJ Extraordinaire

in Garofalo:

-Chapter 2: Blues and Country Music: Mass Media and the Construction of Race
-Chapter 3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight”: The Rise of Rhythm and Blues

Charlie Gillet from The Sound of the City, "The Sound Begins"
Nelson George from The Death of Rhythm and Blues, "Dark Voices in the Night"

Pre-War Specialties: Blues & Hillbillies

Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy

Eisenstein Diagram

Here are the 'notes' re: the taxonomy of Hot and Cold media.
+
Ben Reynolds, "The Printing Press" + "Industrial Production"
from The Coming Revolution (Zero Books, 2018)


Below is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Conference' program from 1977 where McLuhan discusses and responds to audience questions on his main theoretical ideas. If we don't get to watch and discuss this in class please watch it on your own:

Monopolies of Knowledge and Space/Time Bias

Harold Innis, "The Bias of Communication" from The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2008; orig. 1951)

Art & Folk

The virtuoso instrumentalist and composer as superstar: Franz Liszt.

Good interview on WNYC's Soundcheck with Tim Blanning author of The Triumph of Music, a 'social history' of musicians in the west and how they went from being considered merely servants to being 'stars'. This is an excellent example of metacontextual musical knowledge. Required listening.

Download entire interview mp3 here.

I Want My MTV

Sunil Manghani, "The Pleasures of (Music) Video"
from Arnold et al (eds), Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Mathias Korsgaard, "Defining Music Video"
from Korsgaard, Music Video After MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media and Popular Music (Routledge, 2017)

The TV and Media Industry Podcasts

The Business; Hosted by Kim Masters, Saturdays on KCRW
The Spin-Off; Hosted by Joe Adalian & Mike Schneider on KCRW
(nb. while The Spin-Off is currently off the air and not updating, the archives are still up and contain a treasure trove of information and reflections on the state of television)
Media Business Matters with Amanda Lotz and Alex Intner

Bonus Podcast:
On The Media; Hosted by Brooke Gladstone & Bob Garfield, Fridays on WNYC

As we said in class, please subscribe to The Business and Media Business Matters and listen to new episodes regularly throughout the semester. Episodes are 30 minutes each so easily digestible. In any case definitely do listen to the opening 'News Banter' section in The Business but stay on for the in depth interviews with industry people (producers, showrunners, directors, writers, media executives, etc.). This is  a chance to hear talk about film and television that goes beyond the gossip platitudes or faux-criticism that we usually get about the media. Host Kim Masters asks the right questions in regards to deals, arrangements, finacing, etc. and Amanda Lotz and her co-host dig deep into the industrial and infrastructural transformations of the media industries.

In addition to the new episodes here are some past episodes that can complement your readings and our discussions in class in these first weeks of the semester.
(In addition to KCRW's website you can find The Business on iTunes, Spotify and Google Play)

from The Business:
The Year in Film and Television: 2015 Edition (from Dec. 28, 2015)
The Year in Film and Television: 2016 Edition (Dec. 26, 2016)
Lessons Learned: Industry Insights from Memorable Guests (from Oct. 9, 2017)
Mega Banter Year In Review 2017 (from Dec. 25, 2017)

from Media Business Matters listen to the Media Business Year in Review episode as well as the episodes on
-Open TV and the Creative Possibilities of Internet-Distributed Television
-The Business of YouTube and Social Media Entertainment
plus the in-depth interview with Amanda Lotz herself about her new book We Now Disrupt This Broadcast

Ep 47 Author Interview: We Now Disrupt This Broadcast

Alex Intner and Amanda Lotz

 

Download

from The Spin-Off:
Summer 2015's TCA's: Streaming Media Boom & Networks as Brands (from Aug. 13, 2015)
Fall TV Fails to Excite; New Faces in Late Night (from Oct. 1, 2015)
TV Development Trends and Behind-the-Scenes Drama (from Oct. 28, 2015)

The Evolution of Streaming and a Late Night Check-In (from Nov. 17, 2015)
The Year That Was Peak TV, Tackling Tough Social Issues (from Dec. 23, 2015)
Cord Cobblers and What TV Can Learn from 'Making a Murderer' (from Jan. 20, 2016)
The Year in Television (from Dec. 21, 2016).

As a bonus check out some of the bloggers mentioned in this Complex article:
The 25 Best TV Bloggers.

Finally, remember that the treasure trove about everything TV is Twitter. If you are on Twitter you might want to start following the various hosts of The Business and The Spin-Off and branch out from there (see who they follow, who they retweet, etc).

TV: The Idiot Box, the Electronic Babysitter, the Toaster with Pictures, "Drug of the Nation, Breeding Ignorance and Feeding Radiation"...

Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society"
originally in Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Michele Hilmes, "Cable, Satellite and Digital Technologies"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Television"

Enjoy some tunes about TV below:

Communications: Ritual vs. Transmission? Works vs. Acts? Message vs. Text?

from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

**Reading Media Theory Table of Contents for Presentations**

Popular Music: Music Becomes A Thing

Readings Week 1&2:

in Garofalo, Rockin' Out:
-Introduction + Chapter 1: Tin Pan Alley

in Cambridge Companion:
-Introduction + Chronology
-Theberge, "'Plugged In': Technology & Popular Music"
-Frith, "The Popular Music Industry"
-Frith, "Pop Music"

from Durham & Kellner (eds), Media & Cultural Studies: Keyworks
-Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.

from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing

Grimes, "Genesis" Live Session for KEXP

Welcome To Spring 2019

UPDATE: COM 470 Advanced Media Theory Final Study Guide + Race and Gender Study Guide

After the wise and profound words of Father Guido, words which are so perfectly comforting during exam crunch times, here is the much agonized for study guide:

COM 470 Study Guide

CMS 360 Race & Gender Study Guide

Final Reading Quiz Readings Recap

The reading quiz on Wednesday will include basic questions based on the following articles (assigned since the midterm):

Bart Beaty - "Searching for Artists in the Entertainment Empire" from Comics Versus Art
Jeffrey A. Brown - "Ethnography: Wearing One's Fandom"
Brian Swafford - "Critical Ethnography: The Comics Shop As Cultural Clubhouse"
Charles Hatfield, "An Art of Tensions"
Bart Beaty, "Autobiography as Authenticity"
Ann Miller, Narrative Theory and Bande Dessinée from Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Intellect, 2008)


What I am primarily interested is your ability to synthesize the following points:

a) The relation of the comics medium and the comics form to the realm of culture, creativity and artistic production.
b) The role of fans in the legitimation of comics.
c) What Hatfield means when he defines comics as an 'art of tensions'.
d) Elements of Narratology.