A somewhat whimsical musing on music videos by Fall Out Boy and Beyoncé, all through the lens of Lucretius by way of John Rahn.

From 1990 to 1999 MTV promoted a series of 288 music videos called “Buzz Clips”, designed to highlight emerging artists and genres. Such promotion had a measurable impact on an artists’ earnings and record sales. To date, the kinds of musical and visual practices MTV promoted have not been quantitatively analyzed. Just what made some videos Buzzw…[Read more]

A consideration of 14 collaborative music videos by Emil Nava and Calvin Harris, closing with a close analysis of their work on Rihanna’s “This is What You Came For” (2016).

Brad Osborn. 2010. “Beyond Verse and Chorus: Experimental Song Forms in Post-Millennial Rock Music.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington.

Brad Osborn. 2018. Review of Music Theory Remixed: A Blended Approach for the Practicing Musician. Oxford University Press. Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, vol. 31

Analyzing 3 Icelandic music videos

Math rock’s most salient compositional facet is its cyclical repetition of ostinati featuring changing and odd-cardinality meters.

Musicologists have recently begun applying the diverse philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari to music. Most contributors strive for rigorous adherence to early Deleuzian principles-a position I refer to as “orthodox”-and are therefore hesitant to posit any sort of musical objecthood or listener subjectivity. By contrast, this article espouses an…[Read more]

Since the dawn of experimental rock’s second coming in the new millennium, experimental artists have begun distancing themselves from Top-40 artists through formal structures that eschew recapitulatory verse/chorus conventions altogether. In order to understand the correlation between genre and form more thoroughly, this paper provides a t…[Read more]