For many years now, this blog has drawn between 1000 and 1800 visits per day. Sometimes it dips below 1000, on rare occasions it goes above 2000. Suddenly, about eight days ago, the Google stats app showed that the blog was getting between 6000 and 8000 visits a day. What is up?
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
22 comments:
Trump indictment.
“Still here”
Three possibilities: 1. The great jokes in the comments. 2. MS checking in every 15 seconds to see if the ban is rescinded. 3. The attraction and existential comfort of seeing 'still here', the internet's equivalent of television's burning log in the fireplace.--Most likely, as David Zimmerman says, the Trump indictment. If you additionally posted about Taylor Swift, you'd crack 10,000.
Now if I only knew who Taylor Swift was.
She is a wildly successful pop singer.
The quantum leap in site visits could be a case of “spam traffic.” An intelligible account of this shady stuff can be found on, for example: https://www.digitalstrategyone.com/identify-and-filter-out-spam-traffic-in-google-analytics/
Dear Professor--
Recently I learned from Freddie DeBoer's blog that there's now a Taylor Swift question on the NYU application for admission. We're different generations, but we can both still remember when it was the height of fashion to make learned remarks about Madonna (the singer, not the Lord's mother); it's like that. I only recently listened to Taylor Swift, in particular her album 1989, when I was stuck for a few hours in traffic in Southern California. I composed an answer to NYU's questions in my head, then jotted it down when I made it home, and posted it on my blog. I immodestly put the link here, only because it contains everything you need to know on the topic: https://johnrapko.com/blog
The question of Taylor Swift has vexed me for some time. One the one hand, I feel a nagging duty to analyze this social (but mostly economic) phenomenon. On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to care enough to do this, because the music does not interest me in any way. But this last point is itself kind of interesting; TS has been churning out the hits for quite some time now, such that you’d think that at least some small part of her *oeuvre* would have caught my ear … But, no, nothing. It’s almost like musical Teflon, it uncannily slides right off of my auditory nerves.
Is it merely the fact that I’m TOO OLD? I don’t think so. As a counter-example, consider Harry Styles and his song about eating “watermelon” (nudge-wink). It’s catchy, I can appreciate it, even if it’s written for the kids. So while I’m pretty sure I must have heard TS, I nevertheless canouldn’t tell you if I actually have done so. This music has left no imprint at all.
But now I’m gratified to learn that John Rapko, having felt similarly guilty about TS, has done the work (which means that now I don’t have to). My favorite line (from his blog):
“There’s no passion, no yearning, no life-affirming vulgarity, no grief, no regret in Swift’s songs. Instead, it’s as if the sentiments of a jaded 25-year-old woman are expressed in the vocabulary and emotional armature of a 15 year-old girl. Swift’s persona sings as if ‘relationships’ are nothing but persistent irritants in an otherwise Instagrammable life.”
Ha ha! Ha ha! This must be the source of the appeal of her music to all the 15-year-old girls of my acquaintance. And its failure to appeal—in any way at all—to us old guys.
So much for the music. What of TS the … person? (By “person” I mean: the body, the bank account, the real estate?) TS is not merely a jaded 33-year-old woman, she’s a tall, blonde, extremely good-looking (leggy!), and very (very, very, VERY) rich jaded 33-year-old. She elicits in me just a bit of that old, involuntary, Pavlovian response of hungry salivation that I get for the unattainable and completely uninterested. In sum, she’s a home-grown, self-made, (but ultimately store-brand) Jemima Goldsmith.
John Rapko’s blog description of (the appearance of) Taylor Swift is well worth reading. It reminds me of Colin McGinn’s description (in his autobiography) of Oxford logician Michael Dummett’s "pasty" white face that made Dummett look like he'd been "dunked in a barrel of flour and then licked his lips.”
Definitely my very little empirically ideal idea of Kant and your lectures on YouTube is what made me a “fan” of Robert Paul Wolff
Thank you sir.
I still await the imminent virality of my piece on Taylor Swift. On the topic of people doing the work so you don't have to, while we await the professor's next 'still here' I'd like to recommend the high-spirited takedowns of contemporary movies and tv shows by Eileen Jones (who is also the widow of the sublime Felipe Gutterriez mentioned in my blog post). She writes them regularly for The Jacobin. Her rarer positive recommendations are also interesting (though often too positive for my taste); recently she alerted me to the thoroughly enjoyable 'White House Plumbers', with Justin Theroux chewing the scenery as G.Gordon Liddy, something that seems up the entertainment alley of many of the commentators here.
TS: The Ideological Critique
John Rapko started this, I aim to finish it. But first, a “shout out” to my homies, the Frankfurt School. Why they called that? Because they were interested in how the sausage gets made, of course … (Frankfurter means “hot dog” in German).
The music of TS, as we established yesterday, defies analysis. But the business of TS is almost thing of beauty. Here’s what I mean: two (or three?) years ago, a friend of mine decided, after much prompting from below, to take her two daughters (ages 15 and 16) to a Taylor Swift concert. Being a good liberal, she subjected TS’s lyrics to extensive analysis beforehand; determined that they passed her searching ideological scrutiny; and only after this did she purchase the (mind-bogglingly expensive) tickets.
What did I learn? That TS doesn’t sing songs so much as she broadcasts “messages” for females that are crafted to appeal to both 50-year-old New York Times readers AND their offspring. Girl Power! (From a Girl Boss.) There’s nothing in there that could possibly offend an NPR host, a DEI or Title IX officer, any pants-suited HR director, Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Sandberg, or a “concerned parent”. My friend duly read out a number of extracts from these “lyrics” to me over the phone, accompanied by their (crushingly obvious) glosses … but just like TS’s music, the words defy any kind of mental purchase. In one ear, out the other. I got straight to the point: “So how much did these tickets cost? …. Jesus Christ!”
I multiplied this figure by the number of seats in the arena, then by the number of dates on the tour. Musically, lyrically, this stuff seems pretty worthless, and TS herself on stage may look and act like a plastic FemBot … but you gotta look at the ENTERPRISE as a whole to see the … uh … Beauty? … in it. OK, “beauty” is the wrong word. It’s weird, it’s grotesque, it’s not like anything from the world of “art”, it is clearly a product of the world of business.
A note on the philosophy of song, apropos of songs that defy analysis: in English at least there's very little on the philosophy of song per se, as opposed to a large literature in the philosophy of music. A great deal of the philosophy of vocal music treats opera. The only philosophically penetrating and perhaps profound work I know in the philosophy of song is by an English professor, Mark W. Booth, in his The Experience of Songs. Early on he notes and tries to make sense of two prominent features of songs: the fact that, considered as poetry, lyrics are often quite awful; and the fact that in a great many songs one can drop verses, or sing them in a different order, and it does no aesthetic harm (recall when Jimi Hendrix is doing 'Like a Rolling Stone' at the Monterey Pop Festival: "Yes, I know I missed a verse; don't worry" at 5'27" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smpP-xqLXs4&ab_channel=YASTOHYA). I have no reason to disagree with the ideological critique of Taylor, but I think one ought to approach lyrics in the total context of the song, with attention to the particular performance (consider the transformation of Memphis Minnie's pedestrian 'When the Levee Breaks' lyrics into Led Zepplin's version, or, conversely, when an English fellow tells you that he's going down to Rosedale and take his rider by his side.).--That's it for me on this topic. The good news is that the professor has just announced he's still here.
The model for “experiencing” song is birdsong. “Toodle-oo” and so on, she-dooby wah-wah ratty tatty. Meaning? I’m sorry, you must be looking for prose, that department is down the hall.
Nevertheless, I’m a pedant, I can’t help myself, I have to think about the WORDS and what they MEAN .... But as every girlfriend I’ve ever had has told me: NOBODY CARES about the words! (meaning, you listen to the WORDS? That’s your problem in a nutshell …)
On a related topic, consider all the poets who indulge in bad thinking … from the harmlessly goofy (Ted Hughes, astrology) to reactionary Torygraph op-ed-ese (Philip Larkin, Homage to a Government) … to the downright sinister (Ezra Pound, passim).
John Rapko,
You might look at Jeanette Bicknell, "Philosophy of Song and Singing," Theodore Gracyk, "Making Meaning in Popular Song" or "Rhythm and Noise: an Aesthetics of Rock," or P.D. Magnus, "A Philosophy of Cover Songs."
John Pillette,
One needn't be a pedant to think that lyrics are important in some, not all, songs. A couple of examples from the so-called Great American Songbook, just off top of head -- Cole Porter, "Miss Otis Regrets" or (I forget the composer or composers) "The Lady is a Tramp" (great renditions of both by Ella Fitzgerald btw). Or "They Can't Take That Away From Me." The list could go on. The lyrics are pretty crucial to a number of Beatles songs -- "Eleanor Rigby" or "Lady Madonna" or "Yesterday." Lyrics don't have to be profound to work. E.g. "New York State of Mind" (I'm only rarely in a NY state of mind myself, but whatever). "What a Wonderful World." Etc. Then there's Dylan, not someone I wd listen to a lot (just personal taste), but his lyrics are v esteemed at least by some people and prize-givers.
When both lyrics and music are forgettable, I don't understand the appeal, though once a cult of sorts develops around a particular singer it may cease to matter...
P.s. Some lyrics perhaps can be depreciated by over-exposure, which may have happened with a song like "Over the Rainbow," though if one can imagine a person hearing it for the first time in a movie theater in 1939, it's still good.
T. J.--Thanks. I actually learned of the Booth book from Bicknell's. It seems to me that Booth's book is considerably more illuminating than those three, but I very much agree with you that all three of those books must also be consulted by anyone interested in the issues.--On the importance of the meaning of the lyrics: of course there are countless songs where the lyrics are aesthetically or artistically important. But one of things that incited my (philosophical) interest in songs is the phenomenon where we've heard a song countless times, think of ourselves as both knowing and loving the song, and yet . . . we don't know the lyrics, or perhaps not much more than the chorus. One of my test cases a few years ago was Hank Williams's 'Jambalaya'. Most people will tell you (or at least me) that they like or love the song. So I asked: Complete the opening lines: 'Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh, my-oh/ Me gotta . . . " What is it me gotta do? I never found a person who knew (I'd had to look it up when I was memorizing the song a few years ago). What does this tell us about the appeal or the pleasure in songs?--I was also struck recently when Brian Leiter posted a Kinks song and asked for readers' favorites. To my mind the lyrics of the Kinks's songs, e.g. 'Victoria', are often soured by archness and cleverness. So when The Fall covered 'Victoria', Mark E. Smith dropped the first two smarmy lines, so started with 'And the rich were so mean', then used his Mancunian accent to make words less definite or articulate, dropped the silly bridge, and took the song from a ditty to an anthem. Again, it seems to me that this is one of the central phenomena in songs that a philosophy must try to make sense of.
I neglected the link: Here's Mark and the gang making 'Victoria' what it should have been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FJkUVY7e6Q&ab_channel=1967ngre
One of the more ironic, forced marriages of lyrics and melody is our “Star Spangled Banner,’ whose melody derives (or was plagiarized) from the 18th century English drinking club song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” the signature tune of the Anacreontic Society. And we have stuffy, early 20th century Anglicans to thank (or, rather, to blame) for the debasement of John Bunyan’s pilgrimage poem “Who Would True Valour See” into the aptly-named Percy Dearmer’s god-awful bowdlerized lyrics of the hymn “He Who Would Valiant Be,” set to the tune of an old English folk song called “Monk’s Gate.” (To be valiant for Dearmer was to “follow the Master”—i.e., Jesus. To show valour was for Bunyan to fight with hobgoblins and foul fiends.) Choral renditions of both versions are available for free on the internet, as is a raucous rendering of Bunyan’s words set to the tune of “Monk’s Gate” by Maddy Prior. I like to think that Bunyan would have (much) preferred Prior’s rendition. And then there is the, beyond words, terrible, jingoistic “I Vow to Thee, My Country” lyrics set to part of Holst’s Jupiter movement from his Planets symphony. JR mentioned The Kinks. It seems to me that their Lola was ahead of its time. Though what they were really saying there, eluded (and still eludes) me.
I’d forgotten about this!
This really brings me back. Brix Smith (lead guitar) was one of my minor heart-throbs. A nice Jewish girl from Chicago …. a Bennington grad … AND she plays the guitar in an English post-punk/new-wave band?!? What’s not to love?
I think that she was the one responsible for turning the Fall into an outfit that people like me (Elvis Costello fans) liked to listen to.
Agreed, this cover adds a dose of vinegar to the original and improves on it.
But back to the serious questions: Is there room for irony in popular music? See, e.g. “Oliver’s Army” and the inability to process its “controversial” lyrics today.
As for whether the words really matter … let’s consider how Prince was able to produce both Cole-Porter-esque stuff (“Cream”) AND nonsense (passim), as demanded by context.
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