Guest Post: In the Mode

This week I contributed a guest post to my friend Peter Shirts' excellent music blog, Signifying Sound and Fury. As a teaser, my post was inspired by this clip:

Major Scaled #2 : REM - "Recovering My Religion" from major scaled on Vimeo.

I love websites like The A.V. Club, books like Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, and podcasts like Pop Culture Happy Hour where really intelligent and insightful people use their considerable analytical powers to deconstruct pop culture artifacts like Ducktales or Saved by the Bell. Peter's music blog often (but not always) exists at this same intersection of scholarly analysis and pop culture.

Peter has a master's degree in musicology from the University of Michigan (full disclosure: we were roommates), and the mission statement of the blog is to use actual musical terminology when discussing music to create a more articulate musical dialogue, even when discussing something as seemingly trivial as "Gangnam Style." I think this is a worthy goal in this age where supposed music "experts" like Randy Jackson completely lack musical vocabulary and can only use lazy qualitative platitudes like "I just wasn't feeling it" or pseudo-terms like "Your performance was pitchy" (with a "yo dawg" thrown in somewhere for good measure).

So please check out my post, and sign up to follow Peter's blog, Signifying Sound and Fury.