Music since the year 2000 has gone through three phases, which can be bracketed by the most prominent popular song at the turn of each decade. 1. … Baby One More Time by Britney Spears (1999) 2. Bad Romance by Lady Gaga (2009) 3. bad guy by Billie Eilish (2019) While the first and second … Continue reading Donda, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, and the sonic revolution of the 2020s
Tag: Prophecy
My February prophecy of the evolution of the crisis with Russia and China, and my hopes for the future of music and politics
In February on the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I wrote a piece which prophesied the recent turn towards more American antagonism towards China and more suspicion of the strategy of aggression towards Russia fuelled by Nato’s expansion. Now prominent academics are speaking out — using the language I used at the time, namely … Continue reading My February prophecy of the evolution of the crisis with Russia and China, and my hopes for the future of music and politics
The Rings of Power, the Harfoots and the Babylonian Exile
What’s the point of living if we aren’t living good? Malva Harfoot, Rings of Power. A lot of people make fun of Rings of Power. But we compare it with the past. We don’t see how it leads into the future. We think Rings of Power echoes Lord Of the Rings. But it is nothing … Continue reading The Rings of Power, the Harfoots and the Babylonian Exile
Plato, Rousseau, and the politics of philosophy
A recent book by Cambridge intellectual historian Christopher Brooke traces Philosophic Pride not to its usual imagined source, a utopian faith in abstractions, but to Stoicism, which places faith in the concrete world around us. Philosophers’ inflated sense of self comes out of, well, the self, as physically instantiated in our biological constitution. Eventually, Stoicism … Continue reading Plato, Rousseau, and the politics of philosophy
Edmund Wilson 