daphne brooks at USC on March 31, 2008

The USC Annenberg Research Seminar Series
&
The Popular Music Project of The Norman Lear Center

Present

Staring at the Sun:
Remixing the Diasporic Drone on TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain

A Talk By

Daphne A. Brooks
Princeton University

Geoffrey Cowan Forum (Annenberg Room 207),
12:00 p.m.
March 31, 2008




Join students and faculty for a presentation by Daphne A. Brooks, associate professor of English at Princeton University. Her topic: "Staring at the sun: Remixing the diasporic drone on TV on the radio's return to cookie mountain." From Professor Brooks: "It's all about (diasporic) time on Brooklyn underground art rebel outfit TV on the Radio's back-to-back masterpiece albums, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes and Return to Cookie Mountain. Listen to the postmodern doo-wop dirge of ‘Ambulance’ (on Youth) or the inter-oceanic goth blues of ‘Blues from Down Here’ (on Mountain) and you can hear the sound of a band cutting through the stillness of (rock) time, stealing fragments of Pere Ubu punk wave, staring-at-the Sun Ra bursts of the ethereal and Funkadelic hardcore jollies, walking a tightrope of musical influences that play with and at the margins of past, present, and future not-so-love(ly) sounds. This paper examines the way that black diaspora as a concept works itself out in the sounds of TV on the Radio and how this marvelously original band re-centers the ideas of trans-Atlantic black nationhood in the unfixed location of space, in the rapturous intervals of (re)mixed time." This event is part of the Annenberg Research Seminar Series.