Week 3

Week 3 of NYU summer course Brain Dance: Pop/Rock Music and Literature: Getting Physical. We read excerpts from Daniel J. Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, as well as a passage from Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and Brain, in order to consider (neuro)scientific perspectives on music and writing. These included analyses of pitch, timbre, rhythm, groove and pulse; the place of the body in the creation and reception of music; music and social bonding; music and labor (The Song of the Volga Boatmen); animals singing (or are they just speaking?); courtship, mating rituals (and Jimi Hendrix as strutting peacock); music in the development of cognition, and its importance in the teenage years; music as game-playing; pre-natal music, and the value/limitations of evolutionary psychology.

We watched Cameron Crowe's 2000 film Almost Famous, and considered rock music in relation to the coming-of-age narrative: "cool" and "uncool," inside/outside and the role of the music journalist who straddles this boundary ("the enemy"); groupies, sorry "band-aids," and rock music's "traffic in women"; the music industry and the magazine's role in the publicity machine; childhood, responsibility, freedom from parents ("Rockstars have kidnapped my son!") and drugs ("I am a Golden God!"). We heard presentations about the history of MTV, psychedelic rock and cultural appropriation in hip-hop (see post further down). 

We considered the literary genre of the music review, and conducted an in-class reading of such magazines as Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Spin, Time Out New York, Vice, Kerrang!, Arthur and The Wire. We read articles by Lester Bangs including "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves" and discussed the genre of gonzo journalism: confrontational, chaotic and honest to the point of self-destruction.

This week's guest speaker was Zebidy Tank of Australian rock band Drop Tank, who illuminated us about the rewards and sacrifices of pursuing a career as a rock musician, the pros and cons of working with producers, the importance of image and promotion, the Sydney music scene, and the physical realities and interpersonal dynamics of playing in a band and performing live. Follow her career here and here.