Correlation, or causality? Within, as far as I can tell, roughly a 30 hour period: R.E.M. announces that they are breaking up; Presidential candidate Thaddeus McCotter is sought out by the media and says that he is “bummed” about the breakup; McCotter announces that he is dropping out of the Presidential race.
Incidentally, for nearly the past two decades, every time I have moved I have brought along and stuffed in the back of a new drawer a ziploc bag containing some 3.5″ floppy disks from when I was an undergraduate. The top one is labeled “G.H.M. and R.E.M.” and is a paper I spent a bunch of what-now-feels-horribly-misspent hours on, applying George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism to the observation that [now, what we would call "early"] R.E.M.’s music was more meaningful precisely because their albums didn’t include lyrics sheets and one could only occasionally make out what they were saying.
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My heart goes out to the poor TA who graded it. (And those who graded some of my own similarly earnest papers).
How much of a freak was I at the University of Iowa? I’m not even sure I wrote that paper for a class, or it was just something I did on my own.
Reminds me of an aborted project of my own linking race, class, gender, and homophobia to the the reception of the gorgeous music that is 1970s disco. Paul Lichterman did not approve, and it died.
Do I smell an edited volume? :)
> Do I smell an edited volume?
An excellent idea, surely. Working title, “Never Mind the Bollocks”.
Reminds me of that Marxian analysis of Depeche Mode that I wrote for an undergrad history course on the history of popular song…
_Unreadable Papers about Unlistenable Music_, Healy and Friese, eds., Univ. of Nebraska, 2014.