Practical Criticism No.58—Pavement

In episode 58 of the Podcast for Social Research’s “Practical Criticism” series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Pavement’s “Stereo” for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual, doesn’t know what the object of the week will be. Over the course of the discussion, they explore the strange aesthetic, social, and economic category of “indie”, the potential virtues and vices of non-virtuoso performance and “de-skilling”, musical absurdism, the Benjaminian physiognomy (and anxiety) of the slacker, the surprising genius of doggerel lyrics, the vaudevillian, the dark undercurrents of comfortable emptiness in a tired nation, and music with its corners chipped.

Om Podcasten

From Plato to quantum physics, Walter Benjamin to experimental poetry, Frantz Fanon to the history of political radicalism, The Podcast for Social Research is a crucial part of our mission to forge new, organic paths for intellectual work in the twenty-first century: an ongoing, interdisciplinary series featuring members of the Institute, and occasional guests, conversing about a wide variety of intellectual issues, some perennial, some newly pressing. Each episode centers on a different topic and is accompanied by a bibliography of annotations and citations that encourages further curiosity and underscores the conversation’s place in a larger web of cultural conversations.