Month: September 2020

Two episodes of Sound Philosophy have just been posted, both dealing with Highlife Music from Ghana. Episode 13, “Syncretism and Highlife Music of Ghana,” discusses syncretism (the amalgamation of different religions, philosophies, cultures, or schools of thought) as it applies to music in the colonial situation of Ghana at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Syncretism is not simple amalgamation, however. It can involve accommodation but it can also be a subtle form of rebellion. Using this concept as a platform, I turn to various forms of Ghanian popular music that fed into highlife and then the early years of highlife itself. I take a close look at the song “Yaa Amponsah,” first recorded by the Kumasi Trio (featuring Kwame Asare, also known as Jacob Sam, on guitar) in 1928. 

Episode 14, “Nietzsche’s Rausch, Aesthetic Form, and Highlife Music,” uses Highlife music of Ghana to investigate a Nietzschean take on aesthetic attunement (what he terms Rausch), aesthetic form, and the production of the self. I begin by outlining how Ghanians employed ahaha, konkoma, and dance highlife to create a new sense of self for young people after the colonialist disruption of traditional modes of life and hierarchy. I then to turn to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s ideas concerning aesthetic attunement which is disinterested and yet passionate in order to assess how music might be employed in the production of the self. In the last segment, I broach the issue of Nietzschean “bad conscience” as it pertains to the colonial situation. I end by imagining how highlife music might be construed as a reversal of bad conscience, a way of turning the suffering of the passions into joy. 

Listen and enjoy!

The newest episode of Sound Philosophy is now available. It is entitled: “WEB DuBois, Double Consciousness, and Bert Williams’s Jonah Man.” This episode examines WEB DuBois’s notion of “double consciousness,” which he defines as a way in which Blacks have both the opportunity and the curse of seeing the world in a manner he suggests was unavailable to Whites. I read from the two essays in which DuBois employs the term and address some of the difficulties facing its interpretation. I then employ the term to examine the participation of Black performers in Blackface minstrelsy, specifically James Bland and Bert Williams. Our focus turns to Williams’s signature character, the Jonah Man, which I construe as a subtle and sly critique of social indifference. 

Check it out!

Two new episodes of Sound Philosophy are going live today.

Episode 9, “Nietzsche Birth of Tragedy Sections 3-25 and the 1960s Dionysian,” is another installment in our series exploring the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche and their application to issues in popular music. This episode provides an overview of the remainder of The Birth of Tragedy (following on from Episode 7) with a focus on the emergence of the Socratic impulse and its connection to an overemphasis on logic and rationality at the expense of the instinctual drives of the Apollinian and the Dionysian. Then I discuss elements of the connection between the Apollinian and Dionysian as manifested in the “symbolic dream image.” After introducing Herbert Marcuse’s accusations against the conformity of modern society, I explore various notions surrounding the very popular conception of the Dionysian in the United States of 1960s: the resistance to the “madness” of instrumental rationality, the need for creative spontaneity, but also the threat of a possible fascist element within the Dionysian. I conclude with some thoughts about the Apollinian and the Dionysian as they relate to the Grateful Dead. 

Episode 10, “Ragtime, Reversal, and Syncopation,” switches gears away from Nietzsche (we will return to him soon). Starting with the reversals of cultural borrowing or appropriation in the cakewalk, this episode examines ragtime and its various inversions or reversals. I discuss the emergence of ragtime out of the coon song with all of its problematic racial representations, the “problem” of Black music at the turn of the 20th century (and the lack of Black musical representation in the official program of the Columbian Exposition),  the efforts of composers such as Scott Joplin to transform ragtime into a quasi-classical form of instrumental music, and the objections voiced by James Weldon Johnson to the “nationalism” of the ragtime craze versus the “racialism” of its origins. The episode concludes with a discussion of syncopation and its eerie corporeality.

I hope you enjoy both!!