Welcome to Sound Philosophy, a podcast exploring philosophical and interpretive approaches to the history of popular music. This podcast is designed to offer relatively brief episodes that cover a variety of interactions between philosophical and critical thought and a range of genres and eras of popular music. Some episodes (such as the series on Nietzsche and Popular Music) will focus on the thoughts of a specific thinker; others will consider a broader topic and canvas the writings of many different philosophers. In all cases, we will be doing our own thinking through these issues, as well.
You can find this podcast on Spotify, Pocket Casts, and Anchor. Click on any of those links to hear the episodes. Enjoy!
List of Podcast Episodes
- 001 Popular Music and Mass Art
- 002 Colonial Music and the Copyright Act of 1790
- 003 Early Blackface Minstrelsy and the Racialized Other
- 004 The 19th-Century Parlor Ballad
- 005 Sousa, Nationalism, and Masculinity
- 006 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy: An Introduction
- 007 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Sections 1-2
- 008 Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and Repetition in Music
- 009 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Sections 3-25, and the 1960s Dionysian
- 010 Ragtime, Reversal, and Syncopation
- 011 An Improvisation on Nietzsche, Adorno, and the Grateful Dead
- 012 WEB DuBois, Double Consciousness, and Bert Williams’s Jonah Man
- 013 Syncretism and Highlife Music of Ghana
- 014 Nietzsche’s Rausch, Aesthetic Form, and Highlife Music
- 015 The Emergence of the Blues in the Mainstream
- 016 Booker T. at the Crossroads: Country Blues
- 017 Motown, Black Uplift, and Fordism
- 018 Crossing Over: Billboard, Nietzsche, and the Supremes
- 019 Appalachia, Disaster Songs, and Fiddling Contests: Early Country Music
- 020 Ralph Peer and the Bristol Sessions
- 021 The Carter Family and the Death of God
- 022 Jazz Rap
- 023 On Distance, Nietzsche, and Conscious Rap
- 024 Graffiti and the Aesthetics of Transgression (with Matt Carter)
- 025 Digitalization and the Ontology of Music
- 026 Feeling Otherwise: Music, Commodity, and Streaming
- 027 The Problem with Payola
- 028 DJ Kool Herc, Deconstruction, and Synecdoche (with Matt Carter and Eric Taxier)
- 029 Bossa Nova and Middle-Class Melancholy
- 030 The “First Death” of Hip Hop and “Rapper’s Delight” (with Matt Carter and Eric Taxier)
- 031 Kant’s Three Syntheses and the Album
- 032 Kant’s Syntheses and the Ontologies of Music
- 033 Singer-Songwriters of the 1970s and. the Problem of the Self
- 034 Joni Mitchell, Kant, and the Fragility of Beauty
- 035 Shortcut to Transcendence: The US Reception of Hindustani Music
- 036 The Transcendental Aesthetic of Space and Time in Hindustani Music
- 037 Progressive Rock and (Kantian) Form
- 038 Giving the Idea to Art: Kant, the Genius, and Prog Rock
- 039 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ep.1 Background (with Eric Taxier)
- 040 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ep.2 Prefaces (with Eric Taxier)
- 041 Sapere Aude: Bebop and (Kantian) Autonomy
- 042 Bebop and Freedom in Play