Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.
https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home
It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.
2025-10-17 18:05:35
The repetitiveness of reggaeton is a feature, rather than a bug, for most fans of the genre. It's meant for dancing to in a hot, sweaty club, or blasting in the car, or for (as my students tell me) "vibing" to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
A lot of modern popular music is meant to be a background soundtrack for the listeners' noisy lives. It takes a couple weeks for my students to learn how to actively listen and to match speeds with music that is trying to be more than just a simple expression of a single thought or feeling, strung together in a playlist full of similar songs.
This life brought to you by The Algorithm.
2025-10-17 17:16:54
If I were to formulate a hunch about "Yonaguni," I'd say that there are a few different synergies at work there. Given El Conejo Malo's gender fluidity, we might consider how Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan might stand in for a similar dynamic between Puerto Rico and the US.
Of course it also lets him cross over into the Kpop and Jpop audiences while stepping around the US (and, as you note, English language lyrics). Between reggaeton and the Asian pop scenes one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.
Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.
https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home
It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.
The repetitiveness of reggaeton is a feature, rather than a bug, for most fans of the genre. It's meant for dancing to in a hot, sweaty club, or blasting in the car, or for (as my students tell me) "vibing" to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
A lot of modern popular music is meant to be a background soundtrack for the listeners' noisy lives. It takes a couple weeks for my students to learn how to actively listen and to match speeds with music that is trying to be more than just a simple expression of a single thought or feeling, strung together in a playlist full of similar songs.
This life brought to you by The Algorithm.
If I were to formulate a hunch about "Yonaguni," I'd say that there are a few different synergies at work there. Given El Conejo Malo's gender fluidity, we might consider how Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan might stand in for a similar dynamic between Puerto Rico and the US.
Of course it also lets him cross over into the Kpop and Jpop audiences while stepping around the US (and, as you note, English language lyrics). Between reggaeton and the Asian pop scenes one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.