Invitation to the Blues

Hello, I'm John Meyers, a grad student in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania. I am currently writing my dissertation about tribute bands, audiences, and historical consciousness in popular music. This blog will hopefully be a way to step back a bit from some of that very intensive writing and researching and to try my hand at making some more succinct comments about music, culture, politics, or whatever else seems interesting.

The blog title comes from a line in Don DeLillo's novel Underworld. DeLillo has FBI director J. Edgar Hoover think, after hearing of a Soviet nuclear test in 1951, "All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction." It's a heavy line, befitting the pessimism and paranoia of a man like Hoover. It's not an idea that I would have subscribed to in the 1950s, nor do I subscribe to it now. My own personal obsessions have to do with understanding how the same forces, albeit operating on different scales, effect events personal, popular, and political. I'm also sad to say that the blog will probably mostly focus on the first half of the title--my own area of relative expertise--with little attention paid to breakfast foods. But I'm open to suggestions or recipes, too.