Pop music deals in ‘obsequious’ gestures, and in this respect Taylor Swift is no exception. 1 Indeed, she has a gift for poetic compression, in distilling life-size dramas into relatable technicolor vignettes. (She has herself characterized some of her lyrics…
Mad Max: Fury Road invites its audience onto a journey of restoration. Both ‘Mad’ Max and Furiosa are haunted by their pasts and seek redemption for their actions. Two immanent realities represent the ‘death of the world’ in Fury Road:…
The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland — L. M. Montgomery1 In his book, The Shattering of Loneliness, Erik Varden illustrates the…
Reading Plato’s Phaedrus, we learn that Socrates disapproved of writing. The funny thing is that Plato, who was his student, felt it appropriate to write that down. Socrates saw philosophy as a living practice, an unending journey towards truth in…
Our lives are populated with narratives. Whether we’re reading a novel, listening to a true-crime podcast, keeping up with the latest political developments or following the life of a meme on social media, everywhere we look we find ourselves emersed…
In 2013, American actor, writer and musician Donald Glover told an interviewer in promotion of his upcoming studio album: ‘I don’t want to make albums anymore, anyway. Cause I feel like it’s just kind of silly to make albums… like…
Timothy D. Taylor. Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024, $26.95 E-book. From singing hymns in church, to passing buskers on the pavement, to strumming the guitar at my window, to playing an album…
Lest anyone remains among Transpositions readership who has missed the copious memos, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have released records.1 In an era where our collective attention span marches ever nearer the infinitesimal under endless torrents of content, daily created and…
Perhaps unfairly, pop music elicits a variety of negative images—erratic crowds of fangirls, producers who prioritise formulaic constructions over creative innovation, sensational aesthetics trickling down into cheap trends that come as quickly as they go. Charitable accounts of the affective…