As is obvious to any fan of modern music, chord progression can’t be copyrighted. Today in class we were shown Axis of Awesome’s song Four Chords. I’m familiar with both and think the former is a very talented comedy band and the latter a legitimately creative song.

From there the topic changed to something much darker. I’ve always kind of known that Jim Crow was a kind of black cultural character and that’s where the term Jim Crow era derived, but it never connected to me that he was a minstrel show character. I agree with Professor O’Malley that that is very strange and I’m curious to learn more about that aspect. From there we were shown lynching postcards, a thing I never before knew existed. Something so macabre and so brutal publicized so widely seems so alien, even from what we’re taught about the post-war south. And it also made me realized that as much as students are taught about segregation and racial violence, we’re rarely if ever shown photos. I was never shown lynching photos in class prior to college; known in school text books either. It’s one thing to mentally know that over 4,000 blacks were lynched in the century after the Civil War. It’s a wholly other emotional realization to see it.

From there we listened to black artists like Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters, along with different versions of the song Darktown Strutters Ball (I liked the modern version the best). We were left considering the arbitrariness of “authenticity” and how when analyized deeply enough it’s hard to place where some songs fit and how they don’t comport to our previously recognized categories.

Today we discussed beat. I know nothing about beat and don’t pretend to be able to recognize it in songs I hear.

But I do know Disney movies, and I’m gonna focus on that. Professor O’Malley repeated referred to Mowgli from The Jungle Book as white, even a dark white. I’ve never before heard that interpretation (at least for the 1967 version, which is the clip we watched). Mowgli looks Indian and is meant to be Indian. At the end of the movie he’s entranced by an Indian girl and decides to follow her. in the 2003 sequel Mowgli is presented as a member of the local Indian community. He’s not white. Now upon rewatching I can definitely sense the black cultural influence on King Louie and the way the monkeys dance (and even scat sing!). But having an orangutan mimicking a stereotypical black performer loses its racial edge when it’s in front of a brown human lead.

Dumbo (1941) was of course mentioned, and that’s a must trickier situation. Obviously the Crows are impersonating a black minstrel show. But speaking as a white kid from central Pennsylvania, I thought they were one of the best parts of the movie. They were funny and likable. Of course I’m sure minstrel shows were meant to be entertaining as well.

I was very surprised Peter Pan (1953) wasn’t mentioned. There’s the scene with very stereotypical American Indians literally singing a song entitled “What Makes the Red Man Red.” That scene is why as a kid the Disney channel never showed the original but would constantly play the very inferior sequel, Return to Neverland (2002).

We don’t even have to mention Song of the South (1946).

And I’ll cap this off just by saying I enjoyed a lot of the swing and go go music that was played in class. Very listenable.

Today was very metaphysical and I liked that. It actually got me thinking quite a bit, and as was said today in class, thinking is placing. The human mind loves to categorize, to place, to find patterns that aren’t even really there. And when something doesn’t fit a pattern, when it can’t be placed or is out of place, that’s unnerving to most people. The example in class was an excellent one: we’re surrounded by dirt. Why is dirt in the home considered so offensive? Because it’s out of place.

So going by that simple emotional trigger, a monster, so to speak, is a thing that crosses the cognitive boundaries you have in place. A monster is a “boundary transgressor.” To explain it in the fashion of classic movie monsters, they arouse both fear and curiosity because they cross boundaries. Werewolves cross the boundary of man and animal. And everything from vampires, to zombies, to Frankenstein’s monster, to mummies, cross the boundary between living and dead. It’s a very innovative and captivating way to define “monster.”

Drawing from this, we moved onto the mental categories humans place on themselves, specifically on race. While race at its base is real and racial differences a biological fact, the exact placement and definitions of those races are very culturally and socially constructed. To use a metaphor, white and black as racial groups exist, just like water. People can be placed, biologically, into those categories. Just like water can be placed in something with a discernible definition like puddles and ponds. But when does a puddle become too big, that it becomes a pond, or something in the middle? Likewise, what is white? Those answers are much more subjective and perception based than scientific.

From there we discussed the changing racial categories in U.S. history e.g. Walter Plecker and the one-drop rule. And we ended by pointing how carnivalesque crosses traditional racial boundaries and theorize that that’s why they’re so captivating to people both then and now.

Today it was emphasized how much World War II transformed American life. And that’s a truth most people forget. World War II, like the previous world war, regimented American civilian life among regimental lines. High taxes, high spending, massive food shortages, massive shortages of a lot of life’s essentials actual, economic central planning, wage and price controls, the military draft, the mass creation of daycare and the withering of the American family unit, etc. Fascism to defeat fascism.

Next we looked at how the Cold War helped develop technology like the internet and our modern information technology. It was pointed out how much of it was due to the need for good targeting and aiming systems. We have the internet because of the Cold War. But I’d like to take a moment and bash the argument that war is a great generator of technology and without conflict we’d have no new developments. Undeniably, there is a long list of products and useful things developed based on military prototypes and created out of military necessity. I don’t deny that. But the first rule of economics, as laid out by that great Frenchman Frederic Bastiat, in economics you must look at “that which is seen, and that which is unseen.” If resources are used in a certain way, that means they were not used in another way; literally any other possible fashion. Trillions of dollars were spent over the course of the 40 year Cold War. Some of it helped lead to important things we cherish today. Most of it was wasted and might as well have been burned. If even most of this money was not wasted on illogical wars, endless foreign aid, purposeless military buildups against an overhyped threat, and subsidies to corrupt arms industry figures, what good could it have done? What if the market was allowed to allocate those trillions of dollars to their greatest use, like it does with all other things so successfully? Would we have an even better version of the internet? Would we be a decade ahead technologically? Two decades? I don’t know and can’t say with absolute certainty. But that’s the key to economics; just because something was used in one way, doesn’t mean that was it’s greatest use. We get some technological progress from war. But how much more would we get in peace?

But at the end of class it was noted that “information wants to be free.” Modern technology allows the kind of individual freedom and mass decentralization never before thought possible. Although created through central planning, the internet can possibly serve as the greatest weapon against it.

A lot of the things we discussed today went over my head because I lack any knowledge of how music works or functions (like most things). As was pointed out in class, things we don’t understand might as well be magic. Ditto on that.

We were given a lot of examples of edited sound, with different aspects manipulated to sound loud in comparison to other things. I could certainly tell a difference between new songs and old songs when shown side by side. But I can’t say I was bothered. Musicians emphasize the parts of the song they want you to hear. If the lyrics and singing want to be louder over the music, so be it. If a trumpet as to be louder or quieter than a drum, okay. Its still the musician (or whatever entity is making the music) making choices about their “art” for the consumer. I don’t mind it.

We learned about Claude Shannon and how he revolutionized how we think about information. Information, he said, requires uncertainty. It can be separated from “meaning.” Meaning is what ever human beings place on information, it isn’t the information itself. He also realized that information could placed in a basic yes/no 1/0 binary. That’s why he is the “Father of Digital Media.”

Finally we were introduced to Garage Band and the endless possibilities of combinations of songs and music. We were presented with the question of whether or not this was a bastardization of song and disrespectful to a culture’s traditions. Is it rude to take a line of southern soul and combine it with ye old Scottish bagpipes? I would give an emphatic no. Musical culture, to me, is naturally free flowing. Culture is not static, it’s evolving. And of course its expected for many, even most, to have nostalgia for the culture they had before. And at least in music (not in other aspects), cultural mixing can be endless. We still have all the classics to listen to. Their existence is not damaged by the existence of new sounds. And to be offended by such a thing shows a hair trigger sensitivity that others shouldn’t be burdened with.

Today in class we looked through two major wars in American history and how they affected American life and the efficiency movement.

First we did a basic introduction to the Cold War, one I don’t feel the need to repeat. It was more interesting when we went into the military-industrial complex. While World War I gave us the modern managerial state, World War II gave us the national-security state: a permanent war state on our shores. The war department became the defense department, the CIA was created, and the military budget grew beyond proportion to its new global mission. This of course created a huge bureaucracy, and the need for “information management”: the acquiring and organizing of information. The development of this kind of information management was closely linked to central planning.

We then moved back in time, to an older example. We discussed General Montgomery Meigs, the Army’s Quartermaster General during the Civil War. We learned how his methods of centrally planning army acquisition during the war, and his leadership of the soldier’s pensions bureau after the war (the beginning of the U.S. welfare state) was a stepping stone to modern information management. Meigs specifically designed a building in the capital to store a card catalogue system. I don’d think I dealt with that system outside of grade school but I do remember being taught about it during library sessions. The content I have no memory of because I didn’t even pay attention then, but I do remember the lessons happening.