Music
October 16, 2018

Building the Pop Music Empire, Part 2 (Olivia Currin Duell)

The following is the second part in a two-part installment. The first part can be found here. Popular music artists as intertextual commodities Indeed, when fans support an artist with such ferocity, and both consume and contribute to the artist’s empire, the studio album can remain an important and lucrative…

Poetry
October 10, 2018

Cyberculture And The New Digital (“Xperimental”) Poetics – An Interview With Daniel Y. Harris And Irene Koronas (Esthesis Editors)

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the ancient Christian thinker Tertullian pointedly asked in highlighting the apparent incommensurability between the two dominant discourses of his day – philosophy and religious revelation. Daniel Y. Harris Today, considering the disconsolation of the arts and humanities amidst the digitization of all life…

Music
October 6, 2018

Building The Pop Music Empire, Part 1 (Olivia Currin Duell)

The following if the first part in a two-part installment. Author Note: The following was written in 2015 and details how critical discussion of popular music is largely missing from the field of media studies. This essay discusses how popular music fits into a media studies theoretical framework, and more…

Poetry
September 11, 2018

“Cattle of the Lord” – An Interview with Poet Rosa Alice Branco (Millicent Borges Accardi)

The following interview originally appeared in the Portuguese American Journal. One of today’s most admired Portuguese-language poets, Rosa Alice Branco, with ten collections of poetry published around the world, has recently been introduced to readers in the United States. Branco’s first bilingual collection, Cattle of the Lord in English and Portuguese,…

Contemporary Art Uncategorized
May 20, 2018

Degenerate Art and The Modern (Sue Wightman)

“IT’S A SICKENING OUTRAGE! Sadistic! Obscene! Evil! ……. These people are the wreckers of civilization!” (Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn) The ‘Prostitution’ Exhibition at the ICA, London caused an outcry in the national press and parliament.  Debate raged against the ‘degenerate’ nature of the show. Yet again art was testing the…

Contemporary Music Music Popular Music
May 13, 2018

Heavy Metal As Surrogate Religion – Exploring The Metal Subculture (Katrina Lavender)

According to the Office for National Statistics, Heavy Metal has recently become an official religion, with 6200 followers in 2011. Music as a cultural artefact clearly exemplifies the intersection of religion and popular culture. Andy Bennett states, in Cultures of Popular Music, that the heavy metal genre, which originated in…