O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has withered from the lake,And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel’s granary is full,And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy brow,With anguish moist and fever-dew,And on thy cheeks a fading roseFast withereth too. I met a ladyContinue reading “Ballad of a Selfish Boy”
Tag Archives: Romanticism
AI and Talking Heads, Part III: Why Sentient Machines Will Never Exist
In my previous post, I made a distinction between “Strong” AI and “Weak” AI and then went on to describe how Weak AI works. I explained that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT convert words to numbers and then calculate the statistically most probable words and sentences that will follow any given words and sentences.Continue reading “AI and Talking Heads, Part III: Why Sentient Machines Will Never Exist”
“I Can’t Believe We Made It”: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African-American Women Hip Hop and R’n’B Artists
Another problematic of Romanticism for rock (and therefore North American pop music in general) is Romanticism’s pernicious racism, which I will show instigated the very origins of rock and roll. Romantic ideologies of racial categories and hierarchies fed into the mythologies of white artists drawing from supposedly vulgar, primitive Black music for sexuality, physicality, andContinue reading ““I Can’t Believe We Made It”: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African-American Women Hip Hop and R’n’B Artists”
“Laughing with a Mouth of Blood”: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque
Many of St. Vincent’s songs, videos, and stage acts use grotesque scenarios and images to examine the roles we play and the identities we create and embody as well as the anxieties associated with them. They employ “exaggeration, distortion, or unexpected combination” to construct and inhabit subjectivities that are inescapably hybrid and often monstrous: simultaneouslyContinue reading ““Laughing with a Mouth of Blood”: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque”
“Our Generation”: Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock
The rock revolution was often connected with male performers and masculine energy; as critics of gender and rock have noted, “rock’n’roll in excelsis… [is] male ferocity, resentment, [and] virulence” …as rock was the aesthetic of masculine energy in the 1960s, the French Revolution expressed its aesthetic energy in Romanticism, which dominated art, literature, and musicContinue reading ““Our Generation”: Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock”
The Philosophy of Contemporary Song 