GOAT – Greatest of All Time If you spend anytime on hip-hop forums around the internet, you are bound to bump into the GOAT question. Who is the GOAT MC? Is Dr. Dre the GOAT producer? What is the GOAT album? Most answers to this question are so subjective as to make them meaningless, so … Read more
If you have spent any time on social media in the last couple weeks, you have surely seen the news that FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, is trying to roll back net neutrality (the Obama-era regulations that govern the internet as a Title II utility). While various opinion leaders on both sides of the aisle have … Read more
Series Introduction “The Ultimate Rule ought to be: ‘If it sounds GOOD to you, it’s bitchin’; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don’t like.” ― Frank Zappa Music has been a fundamental part of my … Read more
“De gustibus non est disputandum” (In matters of taste, there can be no disputes) -Ancient Roman adage “All life is a dispute about taste and tasting!” -Friedrich Nietzsche My wife and I have a playlist called “Orthodontist music.” It’s basically soft rock songs from the late 1990s and early 2000s that played on repeat over the … Read more
Like many people, I’ve been very upset by the events in Charlottesville over the last weekend. Like many people, I feel like a should do something, but I also feel impotent. And, like many people, I’ve seen lots of think-pieces and articles about how we should respond to these events by speaking up online. However, … Read more
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” -Mike Godwin (1995) Are you tired of comparing people to Hitler in order to win arguments online? Has calling people Stalin lost its sting? Is Mao just too “mainstream”? We all know that these traditional dictators are played … Read more
Like many, this week’s episode of Twin Peaks has me asking questions. Is David Lynch a genius who has perfected the art form of television, or is he a bullshit artist? Was 30-40 minutes of arthouse film-making stuffed in between two gruesomely violent sequences the pinnacle of television, or was this nonsense that no one can … Read more
I first stumbled across the term “alt-right” during my dissertation research in 2014, specifically as I was slogging through the thousands of threads and comments about GamerGate. A variety of alt-right Twitter figures and bloggers became regular names to me and I was often struck by their strong reliance on anti-intellectual opinion leaders who thrived … Read more
“He said let’s do a good-ass job with Chance 3” I first came across Chance the Rapper a few weeks before his second project, Acid Rap, dropped back in the spring of 2013. I even got a chance to see him on that tour, which was a fantastic show. And while Acid Rap received pretty … Read more
