Recently I was interviewed for our local community paper's book column about my 2017 book, Nothing Has Been Done Before. Read it here! I enjoyed chatting with Mandy Shunnarah about the continuing relevance of "the new" in music culture, and we even took a related detour into musical genres. If you want to learn more… Continue reading Revisiting Nothing Has Been Done Before
My band's first full-length has been available for some time over on Bandcamp in digital and CD formats. We're also on the Spotify and other streaming sites. We also have a kick-ass t-shirt for your consumption! Pic follows the embed.
Recently I was thrilled to present at another Prince symposium organized by the incredible De Angela Duff and her team of Arthur Turnbull and Krysta Battersby. This was the second year that the symposium was virtual, and despite a few hiccups with the hosting platform, it was a smooth experience. The topics? Controversy at 40… Continue reading 1plus1plus1is3
I moved from Cleveland to Columbus in 2002 for grad school...and to play music. I'd always felt more kinship to the musicians I knew down here, many of them transplants from nearby Delaware, than the folks I knew up north. The Cleveland "scene," for bands at least, was dominated by industrial and metal; down here,… Continue reading The Columbus Anthology
The majority of this site is in place, finally. I'll be redirecting my Nothing Has Been Done Before site here; it doesn't make any sense to keep two websites going with so many overlapping purposes and resources. All of the book resources have been transferred here. I hope to get more photos and music uploaded… Continue reading Getting There
My new new column is up at PopMatters: "Kanye West: The Iconoclast Gives In." Go there now! So, yeah, the essay is about exactly what you think it's about: how newness has led Kanye astray. (That's what you were expecting, right?) Unfortunately it's not exactly an artistic newness, which is why it's taken him into… Continue reading PopMatters Updates
Um, been a while. That means I've been busy.Updates are best found at the website for my book, Nothing Has Been Done Before.Here are a couple of direct links, though:Review of Nothing Has Been Done Before at PopMatters.An expanded version of the talk I gave this past week at the Prince from Minneapolis conference.
Net neutrality protects the true democratic potential of the internet: that anyone, regardless of wealth or social status, may produce new thought, knowledge, forms of expression, goods, and services, and contribute to the creation of new communities. While it's true that the internet is by no means perfect, eliminating net neutrality would remove a critical… Continue reading Statement on Net Neutrality
I created a website full of resources for my new book, Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21st Century American Literature. Go here and bookmark:http://nothinghasbeendonebefore.comThe site includes audio and visual, a complete discography, outtakes, and more. Those resources won't update much--though I'm still building the annotations for the discography--but I'll update it… Continue reading Nothing Has Been Done Before Has a Website
My latest column at PopMatters concerns the great band Protomartyr, from its first album to its latest, Relatives in Descent. Here's an excerpt:Relatives in Descent is, musically, a more contemplative and less full-throttle Protomartyr album than the three which precede it. I almost wrote "intellectual", which in some circles -- (some) punk, pop country, the… Continue reading Protomartyr at PopMatters
Robert Loss 