brettworks

• An article about the intersection of music criticism and music fandom.

“The tepid music reviews often miss the fact that ‘music’ is something that Swift stopped selling long ago. Instead, she has spent two decades building the foundation of a fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives across eleven blockbuster installments. She is not creating standalone albums but, rather, a musical franchise.

“…any critique of Swift’s work that doesn’t consider her role as one of the most prominent narrators of our time—and certainly anything that critiques her work as one-dimensional when she’s playing a kind of 4-D chess—will fail to speak to even the most casual of her fans. And without an understanding of the Swiftverse, very little of Swift’s music, or Taylor Swift herself, will ever make any sense.”

• A classic article on the manipulation of musical patterns.

“…it seems like a good idea at this stage of computer music’s evolution to look at plain old fashioned non-electronic music and to try to extract a basic ‘library’ consisting of the most elemental transformations which have consistently been successfully used on musical patterns, a basic group of ‘tried-and-true’ musical manipulations.”

• An article on attention.

“What appears at first to be a crisis of attention may be a narrowing of the way we interpret its value: an emergency about where—and with what goal—we look.”