Faculty and Graduate Research: An Evening of Pecha Kucha Presentations
by Cole WilsonThe American Studies Department tried out a new style of presentation this Friday the 6th, a PechaKucha Night. Designed by “Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture” The first PechaKucha Night was held in Tokyo February, 2003 and consisted of seven minute presentations consisting of 20 slides lasting for 20 seconds each.[1] The Austin adaptation took place on the fourth floor of Burdine Hall in the American Studies conference room and featured seven varying, thought-provoking, and engaging presentations by AMS faculty, Ph.D. candidates and masters students. Like the original invented in Japan, UT Austin’s PechaKucha Night presentations were limited to 20 slides, lasting for 20 seconds each. The topics varied from American students in Vienna, Austria to modern day interpretations of Tiki drinks and its allusions to cannibalism. Every presentation was jam packed with information that both captivated the attending audience and propagated a lively discussion following the event. Here’s a recap:Masters student Kerry Knerr connected the contemporary constructs of tiki with cannibalism through her argument that “consumption [of the contents of the iconic tiki cup] inhabits the being of the cannibal” while also carrying out the act of “consume[ing] the cannibal” itself. Knerr offered a glimpse into the history of Tiki as a physical artifact and as a romantic notion constructed by western entrepreneurs “Trader Vic” and “Don the Beach Comber.”Following Knerr was Department Chair, Dr. Steve Holescher who presented on his bi-annual maymester course in Vienna. Dr. Hoelscher outlined his course objectives: understanding memory, the city’s adaptive reuse, and the cultural norms that have grown out of Vienna complicated past. He went on to discuss how he goes about reaching these objectives. Dr. Holscher pointed to Nazi era anti-aircraft towers standing stories above the tallest buildings in the city’s center, which are impossible to remove due to the dense urban landscape, and poses the question: how does the city of Vienna deal with this permanent reminder of the past? During his class students visit sites like the Jewish Monument against fascism, the Nameless Library,[2] and Mauthausen Gestapo camp. As a former participant of Dr. Holescher’s Viennese course I can safely say each and every day is filled with impactful and insightful lessons all revolving around the city and its concept-of-self. Dr. Holesher states that students in his course are constantly prompted to answer the question: how is Viennese memory displayed and interpreted at these location.Ph.D. candidate Andrew Gansky presented a portion of his dissertation titled “Apple helps those that help themselves” next. He opens with a provocative question: “why do teachers love Apple?” Gansky goes on to argue that the answer lies somewhere in Apple-funded educational grants, a teacher-centric acknowledgement campaign, and a business model that made “people feel good consuming.” Gansky states that Apple continued their marketing techniques from the early 1970s through the 1990s, each year gaining more clout in the world of educators through their marketing grant-based, publicity-driven, education-focused business model.Next, Dr. Lauren Gutterman presented on the case of Jeannance Freeman, a lesbian woman who charged with the murder of her two children in 1960, with the aid of her lover, and mother of the children, Gertrude Nunez Jackson. Freeman was the first woman sentenced to death in the history of Oregon’s penal system; however, the sentence was reduced to life in prison four years later. Dr. Gutterman argues that Freeman was considered a villain but later became a victim in the public’s eye. Dr. Gutterman touched on Freeman’s transition from villain to victim and how that change relates to her sexual orientation. She also explored how capital punishment was distributed unto the LGBTQ community in the 60s and sheds light on Oregon’s LGBTQ population’s progress throughout the decade. For more information check out Gutterman’s synopsis through the University of Michigan here.[3]Dr. Jeff Meikle was next to present, and he did so on G.I. Pitchford’s iconic 4x6 inch portraits of the American southwest. Dr. Meikle explains that Pitchford sold (in bulk), captured, colored, and altered the post cards that would later create Americas notions of the “open road,” perhaps anticipating Jack Kerouac’s widely read On the Road. From his iconic, almost generic, sunset, to his incorporation of blossoming American technology like the automobile, highway, city center, or, in one famous instance, Hoover Dam, Pichford’s work has captivated the American imagination and instilled a picturesque romanticism of the continental southwest unlike any other artist before him or scene.Masters student Josh Kopin presented on portions of his thesis concerning Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts gang and their allegorical ode to adulthood. Kopin argues that Charlie Brown counters the American nuclear family by presenting an allusion to the American worker, similar to Charlie Chaplin’s “Industrial Man.” By becoming consumers, fulfilling parental roles, and their acknowledgement of finite American cultural minutia (as evident in the gangs interest in works like “War and Hate”) the Peanuts are both children, and adults, possibly more so than Chaplin’s Industrial Man.Lastly, Dr. Randy Lewis’ centered his presentation around the artistic interpretation of modern day surveillance. Dr. Lewis remarked on how artist action is at its heart a cultural barometer and went on to discuss how contemporary artists like Zach Blas[4], Karin Krommes[5], and Josh Kline[6] have thus expressed an uneasiness surrounding the practice. From drones to street cameras, artists have taken on the task of digesting and presenting these surveillance practices.If you missed out, that’s alright! There is a PechaKuch Night planned for the Spring you can catch next semester. Keep in touch with the blog, the UT AMS website, our Facebook page, twitter feed, or wherever you get your UT Austin AMS news for more info on the next PechaKucha Night.
[1] PechaKucha.org. “PechaKucha About” Klein Dytham Architecture. http://www.pechakucha.org/faq[2] “Holocaust Monument a.k.a. Nameless Library (2000)” University of Florida school of Art and Art History, http://art-tech.arts.ufl.edu/~kecipes/whiteread/holocaust.html.[3] Gutterman, Lauren “Saving Jeannace June Freeman: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of Homophobia in Oregon, 1961-1964.” University of Michigan. https://lsa.umich.edu/women/news-events/all-events/archived-events/2015/03/saving-jeannace-june-freeman--capital-punishment-and-the-transfo.html[4] Blas, Zach. “Facial Weponization Suit” http://www.zachblas.info/projects/facial-weaponization-suit.[5] Facebook. “Karin Krommes” https://www.facebook.com/karinsabinekrommes/[6] Kline, Josh. http://47canal.us/main.php?1=jk&2=pics
Alumni Voices: Mike O'Connor
Since earning his Ph.D. from the UT American studies program, Mike O’Connor has taught U. S. history at universities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. He has published articles in the scholarly journals Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties. While at UT, Mike’s writing was featured in the Austin American-Statesman and he wrote a weekly column for the Daily Texan. One of the original bloggers on the U.S. Intellectual History site, he later founded (with several others) the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. His book, A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism, will be out later this month.How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?It took me many years to realize that my winding intellectual path was fundamentally focused on one theme: the influence and expression of philosophical liberalism in the United States. Before I came to UT, I took my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy. Since graduating from the American studies program, I have been teaching US history. My book tells the story of the changing debate over the role of government in the national economy, in order to contest the contemporary conservative narrative that suggests that the nation was “founded on” the principles of laissez faire. As such, it engages with economics, politics, history and public affairs. I’ve even published an article on Star Trek. Though these projects might seem unrelated, all of them, I now see, have served as vehicles for my attempt to understand, analyze and explain the influence of liberalism in American thought, culture, politics and economics.In order to get at this question, I needed to synthesize the insights and perspectives of many different disciplinary approaches. That sort of eclecticism is something that I cultivated during my time at the University of Texas. The AMS program gave me both the tools and the confidence to pursue the particular questions that sparked my interest, and to reimagine academic disciplines as inviting resources rather than forbidding boundaries. Without the interdisciplinarity that I learned in the department, I would not have been able to recognize the coherent intellectual program at the root of my various disciplinary forays.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?I have so much advice! Pretty much all of it stems from things that I gradually learned both during and after school, but wish that I had been able to figure out a little earlier in my graduate career. Hopefully, today’s students are more savvy than I was, and don’t need to be told any of those things. But just in case, here are my nuggets of wisdom, such as they are:
- Start thinking about your life after graduate school now. I decided to get my Ph.D. after working as an adjunct for two years. I thought I was getting a better credential so that I could keep doing the same job in a more stable and permanent way. Seven years after graduating, staying in the profession has necessitated three moves (and counting) to different states. That stability and permanence has eluded me. I have lots of friends in the same situation; they are smart, accomplished people who are great writers with good projects. If you decide to pursue academic employment, be aware that the odds are that you will wind up in a similar situation. (The number of people who think that they are talented enough to avoid that fate is much greater than the number of jobs.) Consider doing something else. But since chasing that dream is what I know about, any advice that I have is directed at those who wish to move in that direction.
- If you decide that you do want to pursue a permanent academic position, be aware that such jobs are rare in American studies. If you’re thinking that your interdisciplinary work qualifies you for jobs in another discipline, remember that to get such a position you have to beat out people who actually have a degree in that field. History, for example, might seem pretty similar to American studies, but from the historian’s perspective the two are worlds apart. You cannot assume that the content of your work makes you relevant to those who work in other fields. You need to “talk the talk.” Actively participate in your secondary field or subfield by taking its classes, reading its journals, attending its conferences, and the like.
- It is unfortunate but true that your CV is a scoreboard. If there are not enough points on it—in the form of fellowships, published articles, national conference presentations, strong recommendations from prestigious senior faculty and, increasingly, a book contract—it is unlikely to make the first cut for any job search. (For U.S. history jobs, which is just what I happen to know about, a typical tenure-track job opening will get 200 applicants.) From a very early point in your graduate career, everything that you do needs to be focused on accumulating those points. If your course papers cannot serve as the basis of dissertation chapters or published articles, then take different courses. You should have a dissertation topic before you start reading for oral exams, because a list that you read that doesn’t help you prepare for your dissertation represents a lot of misspent time. Encyclopedia articles and book reviews score very few points but take up a lot of time that you could use on other things. Avoid them. It is, in my opinion, a basic unfairness of academic life that the things that will put points on your scoreboard tend to go to the people who have gotten them in the past. You can’t fix this injustice, so your only hope is to try to be one of the people who benefit from it.
- Network both inside and outside of UT. The American studies program allows you tremendous flexibility to interact with faculty all over campus. Take advantage of it! But interdisciplinary work can sometimes lead to very specific topics, and the best connection you need to make might be someone far away. Don’t be afraid to pursue such connections by reaching out to those you do not know. In my experience, academics are surprisingly receptive to those who share similar interests. I have found that, for example, senior scholars are often willing to join a conference panel proposed by a graduate student, especially if the conference itself is one that they wanted to attend anyway.
- The networking consideration leads to a related point: use the Internet. As a graduate student, I connected over email with eight other people from around the country with an interest in American intellectual history. Lacking institutional support, we started a blog. Within a few years, we were putting on a national conference for 125 people that was written up in the New York Times. Today our little blog has morphed into a legitimate academic organization that mediates the vast majority of my intellectual life. Blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds and other venues can help you meet people and root yourself in a given intellectual community.
I really enjoyed being part of the American studies department at UT. It provided me with a lot of freedom to grow into the scholar that I wanted to become. The department and its faculty offer tremendous opportunities to achieve the same thing for yourself. Good luck!
5 Questions with Dr. Shirley Thompson
Today we bring you a new entry in one of our favorite series of AMS :: ATX: an interview with Dr. Shirley Thompson, associate professor of American Studies and Associate Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Dr. Thompson was also recently awarded a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for her research on property, economics, and law.
What was your favorite project to work on and why?I have to say my favorite was everything relating to my New Orleans project, which was my dissertation, and turned into my first book, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. First of all because I’m someone whose native constitution is more conducive to more quiet, solitary, archival research, and the New Orleans archival situation is just amazing. Because New Orleans was so long a French colony, governed by civil code, there’s a different bureaucracy in place, which means that a lot of the transactions that would fall under the radar in another kind of space, an Anglo-American space, had to be attended by a notary, had to be heavily detailed, recorded and filed for future reference. It was also really litigious on the civil side: you had neighbors bringing suit against neighbors for civil infractions. It was a highly contestable, really rich culture of recording disagreement and recording interactions. The logic of the archives is really interesting too, to trace people, who while I was working I thought of as characters, through their various material interactions, to witness them buying and selling property, interacting with their families, their neighbors – it brought history alive and made me feel really intimate with the people I was studying. The archival situation was really rich for me, and I could spend hours in a room, totally engrossed, in the historical events that were unfolding.But beyond that, when I came out of those archives, the place itself was completely engaging. New Orleans opened me up to something I’ve always been interested in, which is maps, and thinking about various ways of experiencing and representing space, and marking the overlapping projects of placemaking – how these projects come together or fail to come together within a city, or town, a geographical unit. It’s not hard in New Orleans because it wears its history on its sleeve, but I began to really pay attention to how the city itself is a palimpsest, and use that as a kind of guide for thinking about how to tell the stories that I thought were important. And New Orleans, in terms of its placement, pulled me into a transnational perspective that I found really transformative for my way of thinking about US history, thinking about African American history and its relationship to a broader stream of African diasporic thought.The New Orleans project opened all that up for me. I’ve also done some more creative pieces on New Orleans recently. I find that it’s a city that stokes my creative imagination.I love going back and talking to people in New Orleans. One thing about the city is that the people who are from there and live there are, a lot of them, historians – not formally, but they’re really engaged with the history of their families, the history of their communities, how other people represent them. They’re very savvy about representations of New Orleans, what their city might mean, what their culture has given to the world, and all the consequences of that. They’re very articulate about it, and very willing to engage you on all of those levels. I see it as an ongoing project. Every time I go back, I’m thrown back in the midst of these broader questions about the city, race and the city, and questions of representation. How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?People get really excited to talk about race. There’s always a call for a national conversation about race. But every time that conversation gets started, people clam up, and get offended, and back away from the conversation. So, I think careful, critical, studies of the history of race and racism, the legacies of white supremacy, how these take different shapes in different times, and bringing these histories to bear on the present and investigate just what those connections are – I see myself as helping to facilitate these conversations. These conversations help to clarify some of these connections, and trace out these linkages between history and the present. It’s important work. Society is often averse history, period. Let alone the history of racism and white supremacy.I also think, between academia and the broader society, for me, those lines aren’t so stark. One of the things I’ve come to realize teaching at UT is that the classroom is where that intersection takes place in the most sustained way in my life. When I’m in the classroom, I’m teaching students who may not see themselves – who probably don’t see themselves – as academics, but who see themselves as regular people, who are just recently graduated from high school, out in the world for the first time, and they are stepping into settings where they’re actually taking a risk on learning about things they don’t know, and interacting with people they wouldn’t normally interact with. This includes me, an African American woman professor. For the demographics of UT, most people aren’t accustomed to seeing black people in roles like this. I see it as a challenge and an opportunity to figure out ways of facilitating these new, kind of fragile interactions that students are having around really difficult topics like the history of slavery, like race and place. It’s hard work. I’ve come to reconcile myself to the fact that this is part of the work I’m called to do here at this particular institution. What projects or people have inspired your work?I haven’t formally taken on a project about slavery, but slavery informs everything I do and all the questions that I ask. So, the legacies of slavery in many respects inspire me. My first book was about free people of color in New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the US. But I’m not talking about actual enslaved people as the primary focus of that book. The new project that I’m working on is about African Americans and conceptions of property and ownership: how have black people dealt with the legacies of enslavement, of being owned as property, in their attempts to own things themselves, and participate in this broader culture of property in ways that both correspond to mainstream American understandings of property, but also challenge them and subvert them as well? So the legacy of slavery is a thread through this project, but, again, it’s not about slavery! But I’m really inspired by artists, writers, scholars, who take on the day-to-day realities of the history of slavery head on.I think slave narratives themselves are a huge inspiration. A lot of these narratives I read multiple times as a student, or on my own, as a general coming of age. But as I’ve taught them, and re-read them, I’ve tried to re-read them with fresh eyes – I remember the first time I taught Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, it just brought me to tears, the clear articulation of what the experience of enslavement was, then his attempts to use that brutal experience to forge a broader political project.I’m also inspired by scholars who write about slavery, and there are two in particular that I’ve come back to both in my scholarship and my teaching. Saidiya Hartman, both her Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother are texts that I find remarkable in their ability to weave together theoretical claims, to attempt to theorize the afterlives of slavery and theorize the limits of freedom, given the entanglements of slavery and freedom. And in Lose Your Mother, her blending of memoir, historical research, and ethnography is exemplary. Stephanie Smallwood is another historian I keep circling back to – she strikes a really interesting tone in her unflinching look at the gruesomeness of the commodification of bodies, of African captives, and the transformation of these captives into slaves. I think her attention to the details of the process, as a process, is paradigm shifting. Those historians continue to inspire me.I draw a lot of inspiration from literature as well. Faulkner and Toni Morrison are the two that have really influenced me over time. I remember in graduate school, taking one summer out and devoting it to reading as much of Faulkner as I could, and that was transformative in shifting my perspective, of beginning to think creatively about the range of different emotional responses to enslavement, different psychological responses to the predicament of enslavement, and for thinking about the ontology of slavery for both masters and the enslaved. Morrison has had a similar effect on me, and she continues to! Every time I think I’ve had an insight, and then read, or re-read one of her books, I realize that, oh, she’s had that very same insight and then some. And so it keeps pushing me to different, deeper levels of analysis. What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your teaching and research? What it seems to always boil down to, for me, is a sense of a bifurcated background and bifurcated experience with education from a very young age. On the one hand, I was in this generation that was integrating the public schools in my suburban county in metro Atlanta for the first time. Brown v Board was obviously long before that. That was a generation of people on the front lines. My own experience of integration in the 1970s and 1980s didn’t have that dramatic sense confrontation that you come to expect from photos of the Civil Rights movement. I was more like a guinea pig. I felt like these formal educational settings didn’t have a place for me conceptually, or they were downright hostile to my presence, which was disorienting. Sometimes the slights were very subtle, which was even more disorienting. My parents had attended segregated schools and their experiences didn’t really translate to my situation. My few peers and I were all kind of creating this thing as we went along.But also, my parents and grandparents were heavily involved in African American institutional spaces, institutional life, especially education. My mother just retired as a math professor at Morehouse College, and my dad was a literature and religion professor and an administrator at many historically black colleges and universities over the course of his career, so my sense of being shut out of the social and cultural life of preschool, or junior high, or high school, didn’t really affect me as much as it might have, because when I came home I was in the midst of this really rich, long, institutional culture. That was always the other part of it.Beyond that, the library in my house was very well stocked with world classics, but also especially with African American literature and criticism – but not just Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, but the work of African American scholars who were friends and acquaintances of my parents, and other scholarship as well. I had a sense that I could do this, that I could be a critic, a scholar of history and literature, in spite of the fact that everyone in the outside world was baffled by presence – much less my ambitions. I’m really grateful to have had that kind of background, to have been able to draw from the strength of that kind of situation.The upshot of that for me is that I feel like I’m in a mainstream academic institution, but don’t feel bound by its limitations. I know that there’s a history of building alternative spaces to pursue knowledge of peoples and communities that are disregarded by these mainstream spaces. I feel if UT closed tomorrow, there are, or could be, other spaces to do the kind of work that I do. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?I’m really excited about my property project. It grew out of my experience researching and writing the New Orleans book, when I realized that one of the ways that black people and free people of color tried to stake a claim to belonging in the city was to buy property and own property, to create these transactions that make them proprietors in their own minds and in the eyes of other people. Also, thinking of New Orleans as a slave market, where the logics of property take on a really gruesome shape, and how that gruesomeness helps to form a foundation for the economic life not just of the nation but the world more broadly. This alerted me to the contradictions of property, some of the conundrums in the way that relation has been articulated over time. I want to pick apart some of those conundrums of property: how are property and personhood bound up with one another? How does one get at the difficulty of discerning an origin to proprietorship and also an end to it – what stories do people tell about the origin of their property rights, how they struggle to convey their rights to their property beyond their deaths even – How does one get at the way in which property rights make sacred and secular claims at the same time? How does property depend on and create norms of gender propriety? All these questions are really interesting, and I’ve been thinking about these questions for awhile. But only recently in the last year have I really faced the fact – or the opportunity and excitement! – of admitting that I don’t know enough about the economy and economics as a field, or some of the legal aspects of property to do this right. Getting the opportunity to push pause for a bit and actually study more methodically in these areas is really exciting to me.The Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship is giving me the next year off from teaching to take classes in economics, and to reach back in my previous life as someone who was actually good at math and apply it to a set of claims that means something to me currently, which is a great feeling.Also last summer I part of the inaugural History of Capitalism Summer Camp held at Cornell University, which was an effort to bring together scholars in an emergent field – who are concerned about economic history but do not want to abandon social and cultural history as well. People are trying to find a way to bridge this divide and to re-infuse cliometrics – that old notion of cliometrics! – with an understanding of culture, politics, and aesthetics so that we can speak more fully to our current economic crises and those that have gone before. In one sentence, what is American Studies to you?American Studies is taking all the things that America says about itself to make it cohere as a nation and to help it authorize its imperial projects around the world, to take all these stories and to turn them inside out and then pick away at their guts. Interview by Jeannette Vaught.
Departmental Theme: The Music of [In]security
As part of our department's 2013-2014 theme, we've compiled a collaborative Spotify playlist containing songs that relate to notions of security and insecurity. Today, we feature a few of those selections introduced by members of our departmental community, who opine on the relationships between sound and security. So kick your Wednesday off with some tunes and a little fancy scholarly footwork that sheds a little more light on some well-known (or not-so-well-known) favorites. The depth of some of these songs may surprise you. Enjoy.And, if you're a Spotify user, be sure to subscribe to the playlist at the link above.
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Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, "Nowhere To Run" (1965)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17yfqxoSTFM]
Ostensibly about the difficulty of walking away from a bad relationship, the jarringly upbeat “Nowhere to Run” is more of a ghost story. The phantom lover haunts dreams, the bathroom mirror, and other people’s faces. Reeves knows its time to go, but she can’t find a way out. GIs took over the song as a metaphor for the quagmire of Vietnam. Today, considering the quagmire of bankrupt Detroit, the Vandellas’ joyous romp through an auto plant in their promotional video offers an almost spectral image of a distant, happier past. - Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
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Steve Earle, "Rich Man's War" (2004)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjT6B6IFUU8]Steve Earle makes an appearance on the list. His “Rich Man’s War” is part of the most recent incarnation of Earle—a songwriter with politics on the sleeve and class consciousness in the heart. But it makes me think of an earlier, Appalachian-inspired Steve Earle—that of the “Copperhead Road,” bootlegging, fast cars, and law-breaking days. That Steve Earle had it the other way around, class on the sleeve and politics in the noisy heartbeat underneath. To my ears, both bring more layers to the question of security/insecurity. To “Are we secure or are we insecure?” Earle adds, “Did we build this prison ourselves?” and “How do we get out of this cycle?” As his “Satellite Radio” puts it: “Is there anybody listening to earth tonight?” Because it might just be us who are here to figure it all out. - Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
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Bruce Cockburn, "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" (1984)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vCww3j2-w]
Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Everything about Cockburn’s piece screams the eighties—from its cheesy keyboard patches to its scathing critique of the US pursuit of the strategy of supposedly “low intensity conflict” in Central America. The pacifist folkie’s mounting frustration leads to dreams of high-powered vigilantism two years after the first Rambo movie and two years before the Iran-Contra affair made Ollie North a household name. - Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
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Jeff Buckley, "Grace" (1994)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67K-8Y3SEQc]
Jeff Buckley's "Grace," the title track from the artist's only self-released album, embodies the emotional volatility of nineties alternative rock. At once a driving hard rock anthem and a surprisingly tender expression of a man's resignation to his own demise, "Grace" is a nexus among uncertainty, alienation, and shrill-but-powerful panic stoked when death knocks at the door. Such themes are well at home in the disaffected Gen-X musical world also inhabited by the pre-emo likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. But fear not. That messy snarl of ostensibly inevitable misery is ameliorated, at least in part, by the power of love (no Back to the Future allusion intended, although Marty McFly certainly had reason to feel insecure). Much as love provides some semblance of stability, the raw finality of death is, sez Buckley, perhaps the greatest source of security we can hope for. - Carrie Andersen
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Loretta Lynn, “Who Says God is Dead?” (1968)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4e7LKB0DCA]
The coal-miner’s daughter takes on Friedrich Nietzsche. “Who says God is dead? I’m talking with him now.” In 1966, Time magazine published an infamous “God is Dead” cover story that cited the 19th-century philosopher while reporting on the increasing secularism and atheism in the United States. Loretta Lynn wasn’t having it. Lynn reasserts her unwavering faith, her personal relationship with God, and her refusal to believe the mainstream media—complete with chicken picking guitar and a countripolitan Nashville choir. - Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
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Hayden, "Lonely Security Guard" (2002)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrwQv13WAGY]
I was a security guard for about a year (the art museum preferred to call us “gallery attendants”) and it was the easiest, most mind-numbing job I’ve ever had. There didn’t seem to be many requirements beyond passing a drug test and the ability to remain standing for hours at a time. I’d like to think that we were capable workers who stood guard over priceless Rembrandts and Van Goghs, but probably people thought of us as little more than the art museum equivalent of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.Hayden (Paul Desser) takes a jocular, almost sympathetic view of one security guard in particular. This lonely guard passes time by creating origami: “with his hands and an old receipt he makes a swan so real it breathes.” He fixates on his paper creations at the expense of actually performing his duties which the narrator sees as ineptness and an opportunity to attempt shoplifting. He is emboldened by the inattention of the security guard (“So I grabbed the first thing I saw and walked right out the front door”) but the would-be thief soon finds he has made a mistake: “But he had just made a paper sword and threw me right down on the floor / And everyone standing near that store witnessed a one-sided war.”The song is bookended by two very different observations about the security guard. Both agree that he “looks so mean from afar,” but the narrator’s original assertion of the security guard’s harmlessness (“he could not hurt a flea”) has turned into a genuine fear: “When you get up close you’ll see / that he’s no cup of tea.” The security guard, butt of jokes and unfavorable stereotypes, has won this round. - Brendan Gaughen
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The sounds of surveillance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPcTinqLiUU]
What does surveillance sound like? I wish it sounded like The Clash’s “London Calling”---a distortion-pedal retort to the dehumanization of the control society. Politically and musically, that would be lovely. But I fear the cryptic tonality of the surveillance assemblage is best captured by something less heroically hopeful, something that is not on our department's wonderful list of surveillance songs. What I'm imagining is the generically dulcet tones of Muzak. Consider the weird echoes between these seemingly distant forms. Like surveillance, Muzak is often present but unnoticed as we move through public space. Like surveillance, Muzak is an institutional presence at the edge of consciousness, a bit of electronic infrastructure designed to promote certain behaviors and affective states (for example, one encourages a pleasant orgy of consumption in a shopping center, while the other ramps up tension to flush out criminality). Both are aesthetically uninspired, whether it's the dulling pleasantness of “The Girl from Ipanema” lurking in the sonic underbrush of the mall or the gawking ugliness of plastic CCTV cameras (not to mention depressed security guards wobbling past the Orange Julius on their Segways). I'm starting to wonder: maybe surveillance is the Muzak of the 21st century---the banal, quietly soul-crushing soundtrack of our lives? If only Joe Strummer were here to sing about that. - Dr. Randy Lewis
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The Mountain Goats, "In the Craters on the Moon" (2008)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZZ_EAr7Ces]
Since their early days making low-fi home recordings on a boombox, The Mountain Goats have had a penchant for making music about regret, domestic unease (or outright distress), and places both glorious and inglorious. "In the Craters on the Moon," off their Heretic Pride album of 2008, features further forays into the geography of fear and resignation with the first verse and chorus intoning, "If the light hurts your eyes / Stay in your room all day / When the room fills with smoke / Lie down on the floor / In the declining years / Of the long war." As it turns out, Mountain Goats songwriter John Darnielle and comic book artist Jeffery Lewis made a comic explaining each song on Heretic Pride (check it out here). Darnielle had the following to say about In the Craters on the Moon: "It is the natural condition of my characters, when a few of them have gathered together, to find themselves secluded in a near-lightless room waiting for some unspecified disaster. Frankly I suspect that this is the natural condition of a pretty hefty percentage of the general populace. The people in this song have reached a point of comfort with their dread; ready for panic to set in, relishing the moment." I can't think of a better description of life in a surveillance state amidst the smoke of NSA mass data collection than living in a near-lightless room waiting for an unspecified disaster. - Emily RoehlThis is a song that raises more questions than it answers. It begins with a sparse guitar and drum, gradually accompanied by a haunting violin, before building to a crescendo around the two-minute mark and then quieting again. Each short four line stanza seems to be about giving up and being powerless against stronger forces, though it’s unclear from whose perspective the story is told.One can interpret the song as a commentary on America’s recent involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, describing “blind desert rats in the moonlight / too far from shore.” This interpretation gives certain lines additional meaning. “When the room fills with smoke / lie down on the floor” reads like something out of a military manual and “Empty room with a light bulb where the phone starts to ring / everybody gets nervous, nobody says anything” may hint at torture. Regardless, the song remains pessimistic throughout, nearly closing with the line “Ugly things in the darkness, worse things in store.”These suggestions all come “in the declining years of the long war,” but whose war? Are these suggestions are directed at those who are in the midst of a political conflict or an internal emotional crisis? The rhetorical vagueness allows the listener to imagine a multitude of situations, each of them foreboding. Whether the song is about a dirty war or emotional paralysis, “In the Craters of the Moon” draws the listener into some dark and very insecure places. - Brendan Gaughen
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Laurie Anderson, “O Superman (For Massenet)” (1981)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIqA3i2zQw]
A meditation on the threat, alienation, and warmth of technology, “O Superman” became a surprise charting single in 1981. The looped backing track can sound like an intimate whisper or anxious hyperventilation, depending on your mood. There are planes and answering machines, mistaken identities and the military industrial complex. But don’t worry. Even when love, justice, and force have been exhausted, there is still Mom. Hi, Mom! - Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
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MC5, "Let Me Try" (1970)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBYqdA6DIvs]
The voice of “Let Me Try” sees the other, the vulnerable subject, and wants to protect her. The slow, creepy crawl-along of the jangly rock rhythm guitar, the crooning of the Mc5’s Rob Tyner, and the frenetic begging chorus construct a lullaby whose music enacts the movement of a cradle to convince her that he can soothe her pain. But the care promised, which begins as a mutually beneficial symbiosis, gives way to a lurking appropriation in this pleading offer: transubstantiation. The protection he begs to provide comes at a steep price, and the leveling fire marks the subject’s loss of autonomy and agency. The song ends with an easy “la da da da," calming her as she disappears into him; the consequence of accepting his security. - Julie Kantor
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Deltron 3030, "Virus" (2000)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrEdbKwivCI]In high school, I knew I was a huge nerd who liked rap. I also knew there were concept albums that were largely reserved for rock-and-roll, 1970s baby-boomer types. Bumping Deltron 3030 in my first car was a kind of liberation. On 'Virus,' Deltron, AKA Del the Funky Homo Sapien, AKA Teren Delvon Jones, proposes a plot to do away with all manner of global capitalism. It was heaven sent, especially since there were lots of references to computer science concepts. He considers the consequences of his actions, but ultimately, he surmises it is much more reasonable to shut society down compared to our miserable (soon to be?) corporate existence."The last punks walk around like masked monksReady to manipulate the data base and break through emHuman rights come in a hundredth placeMass production has always been number oneNew Earth has become a repugnant placeSo its time to spread the fear and the thunder some"The Deltron 3030 hypermodern, space-rap form of dissent is much more optimistic: ex-mech operator takes matters into his own hands after space stations and trans-galactic corps. create global apartheid. It seemed pretty plausible to me. Plus this sort of dystopian future is a lot more slamming thanks to Dan the Automator's production:"I want to make a super virusStrong enough to cause blackouts in every single metropolisCuz they don't wanna unify usSo fuck it total anarchyCan't nobody stop us"Now that's autonomy! - Robert Oxford
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Sheena Easton, "Morning Train (9 to 5)" (1980)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AolugX-YuPc]
A breathless ode to the security of full-time employment in the age in deindustrialization. Her baby goes to work. Every day. This enables him to afford to take the singer to restaurants. They go to the movies. It is unclear if Easton’s character has a job of her own or if she waits at home each day, but is clear that it took the economic malaise of the era to make a steady commuter job sound as sexy as it does in this song. - Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
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Descendents, "Suburban Home" (1982)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfy9ZqKUJjU]
“I want to be stereotyped. I want to be classified.” Spoken in a deadpan voice, these are the first two lines to the Descendents’ “Suburban Home.” The song uses an ironic narrator who claims to want everything he actually detests – to be classified, to be a clone, to be masochistic, to be a statistic. Rejecting (or pretending to reject) the punk ethos of austerity, the narrator claims, “I don’t want no hippie pad, I want a house just like mom and dad!” Growing up in the suburban expanse of Los Angeles’ South Bay, Descendents’ bass player Tony Lombardo (who wrote the song) recognized the upward aspiration of his parents’ generation and a certain level of comfort and security attained through possessions – the job, the house, and the predictable lifestyle that goes along with it. Written and recorded while still in his teens, Suburban Home is partly a playful jab at what he saw as misguided ambition and partly an excuse to underachieve.The song starts side B of their first full-length album, whose title itself, Milo Goes to College, suggests the possibility of financial security in Reagan’s America achieved through higher education. The group went on hiatus from 1983-85 while lead singer Milo Aukerman left for college (he would later earn a doctorate in biology from UC San Diego), which seems to suggest they actually did believe in the importance of education. In barely a minute and a half, “Suburban Home” jokingly critiques the notion of security through consumption and conformity. Ironic though it may be, it ultimately fails to undermine what Lombardo saw as the self-absorbed ambitions of suburban homeowners. - Brendan Gaughen