Frank Kogan

Here courtesy me are two new YouTube playlists:

Chuck Eddy's 11 Best Singles Of 2020

Chuck Eddy's Best Singles 2020 Numbers 12 To 33 alphabetical by artist

And Chuck's writeup of same.



And here's a provisional list of my Top 8 Nonsingles for 2020:

Top nonsingles tracks
1. Semi Tee "Reverse"
2. Die Antwoord ft Bukhulubakhe, Gqwa! "Zonke Bonke"
3. AZ "Hustla"
4. AZ "True"
5. Kabza De Small ft. Kelvin Momo & Mhaw Keys "Lala Ngoxolo"
6. Ashley McBryde "Shut Up Sheila"
7. MC Dricka "Empurra Empurra 2"
8. Arre! Arre! "Last Night

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) January 2, 2021

And here's a revised provisional list of my Top 8 Nonsingles for 2020 as of 1/1/21 that wedges in some baile funk:

Well, not anymore. As of 1/1/21:

1. DJ Guuga "Aquele Momento"
2. AZ "Hustla"
3. MC Daninho & MC Teteu "Batendo O Bundão No Chão Dim Dim Dom"
4. DJ Guuga & MC Pierre "Japão"
5. Arre! Arre! "Last Night"
6. AZ "True"
7. Semi Tee "Reverse"
8. Ashley McBryde "Shut Up Sheila"

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) January 2, 2021

Watch on YouTube

As you can see, I still distinguish between singles and nonsingles, the latter being album tracks and other tracks that I decide are not singles, and someday I'm going to create a philosophical admin post where I explain what a single is. Okay, here it is: a single is something that acts like a single in some way, say the artist or record company says "here's the new single" or creates an actual video for it as opposed to a mere live video, lyric video, or audio video except those can also be considered "singles" by me if they get enough streams or if the artist etc. has already said "this is my new single" or if it's a talent show performance that a lot of people got excited about; also if an act just creates a knockoff that he/she/they posts somewhere themselves, that IS nonetheless a single because it's singular enough no matter if it only gets a few streams, but if the artist is taking the same basic track and redoing it every week for twenty-one weeks with a different singer or different mix and title (I'm thinking of you, DJ Will DF) those are not singles though one could become a single by getting a lot of streams; but a track is a single if it's a radio hit or streaming hit no matter what the artist or label intended, also is a hit if some big enough communities act like it's a hit or make it a big subject of attention, so Sault's "Wildfires" is a single, as back in the day were Jay-Z's "Takeover" and the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil"** and Led Zeppelin's full-length "Stairway To Heaven" even though there'd been no physical single or official designation as a "single." For what it's worth, I've got Semi Tee's "Scooter" on my Nonsingles list (so far), though Chuck's got it on his singles list.* And my favorite of Hyuna's live TV versions of "Just Follow" featuring Zico (as opposed to the EP track which featured Dok2 who wrote it) made my singles list for 2011 (iirc) but is on my Top 5 Nonsingles Of The 2010s 'cause that's where there was room for it (I've not gotten around to posting here about that list but here's the playlist). Btw Qri, the member of T-ara I never paid attention to, managed to get two solo shots on that list!

*[UPDATE: Chuck tells me that "Scooter" is on neither of Semi Tee's albums and was uploaded as a stand-alone single on Rhapsody/Napster in May of 2020. That does seem definitive, though there’s no vid and not a lot of streams; approx 50,000 on Spotify and fewer on YouTube. But several people have posted videos of themselves dancing to it, PLUS there’s a Chipmunks version, which are both single-y type behavior on the song’s behalf; so I guess I'll move it over to my singles list. I mean, a Chipmunks version would seem to decide the question once and for all in favor of its being a single! (Interestingly, it was uploaded all the way back last January.)]

**[CORRECTION: Damn, I should've checked this. There actually was a physical single for "Sympathy For The Devil," though I can't tell from Wikip if it was ever released in America: the song got no AM airplay or chart action; it was played to death on FM back when FM still had few listeners. I wouldn't be surprised if all the sales went to the album. But anyway, there was no physical single for "Gimme Shelter" and I'd sure count that as a single.]



Oh, and I haven't decided what to do about TikTok which I haven't paid much attention to though if something's a hit there it's surely a single but then you have to figure out which version to link as the "single," but anyway I've got on my 2020 singles list someone's YouTube compilation of a bunch of TikTok kids lipsyncing the same fragment from Life Without Buildings, because linking them all together creates an amazing repetitive track in itself, sorta like Baauer's great "Harlem Shake." (Also, check out the latest version of my Ongoing Singles list for 2020; new additions towards the bottom which I'll eventually distribute upward.)

Take a very simple Wittgensteinian language-game, e.g., a bricklayer says "BRICK" and the bricklayer's assistant brings her the brick.* All of this is part of the language-game: not just the utterance "BRICK," but also the assistant bringing the brick — so the actions as well as the sound. You don't have one part being language and another part not. It's all language, and if you leave out the actions it's not complete.**

Of course, at times the assistant could understand that he's to bring a brick, yet he chooses not to, in defiance or as a joke; or he may be prevented from doing so, say by an injury; and that doesn't mean the language-game is incomplete in these instances. As long as the practice is there, the established practice of "BRICK" and an assistant bringing the brick, the language-game is in effect. And defiance and humor are expressible in this language, too, even though the language only contains one word, the command "BRICK." (Suppose, somehow, there's miscommunication in the game. Or some misunderstanding, the assistant incorrectly thinking that it's only when the bricklayer has her arm raised as she's uttering "BRICK" that he's to bring the brick. Or maybe sometimes the bricklayer doesn't mean it, and the assistant has to figure out when. A game doesn't have to be conducted with absolutely certainty to be a game; a language doesn't have to have absolute certainty and consistency to be a language.)

We can define "language-games" as being, more or less, "human social practices." The terms "language-game" and "social practice" are near synonyms, language being so ubiquitous. But let's see what happens if we go further. Let's get rid of "more or less." Let's say that all human social practices are language-games, whether or not any word is actually spoken in the practice, and whether or not all the parties even know a language. Yes, at least one of them — the parent of a baby, for instance — will have to know a language; but the other(s) won't have to. So parental action and baby wails and goos and parental response are all in the category "language-game." A baby being initiated into parent-child social behavior is a baby being initiated into language.***

By this definition, all musical events, including the "nonverbal," are nonetheless in some language-game or other. This doesn't mean "can be made part of a language-game by translating musical sounds into words or by describing the music in words." It means that the language-game includes musical sounds as they are, and we can take the sounds and see their role in particular games — particular social practices — just as we can take the utterances and actions in the "BRICK" language and see their roles in that particular practice. In any event, we refuse to give the social practices we call "music" the special status of being "nonverbal." They aren't.

( Motive here is to tease out what might be usable in Mark's glimmer of an idea )

( Footnotes (as opposed to musical notes?) )

I asked this of B. Michael over on Tumblr, so I thought I ought to ask it of you all as well:

What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.

EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.

Now—judged by the usual criteria—the pupil has mastered the series of natural numbers. Next we teach him to write down other series of cardinal numbers and get him to the point of writing down series of the form

0, n, 2n, 3n, etc.
at an order of the form "+n"; so at the order "+1" he writes down the series of natural numbers. —Let us suppose we have done exercises and given him tests up to 1000.

Now we get the pupil to continue a series (say +2) beyond 1000—and he writes 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012.

We say to him: "Look what you've done!"—He doesn't understand. We say: "You were meant to add two: look how you began the series!"—He answers: "Yes, isn't it right? I thought that was how I was meant to do it."——Or suppose he pointed to the series and said: "But I went on in the same way."—It would now be no use to say: "But can't you see....?"—and repeat the old examples and explanations.—In such a case we might say, perhaps: It comes natural to this person to understand our order with our explanations as we should understand the order: "Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000 and so on."

Such a case would present similarities with one in which a person naturally reacted to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction of the line from finger-tip to wrist, not from wrist to finger-tip.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, passage 185.

In my pragmatism writeup last month I deliberately buried the following paragraph for reasons that the paragraph itself makes plain.

I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy.

And I refer back to my Rorty post from last year (which I quite like and recommend you read in its entirety), a particularly relevant portion of it being:

( What's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths? )

I'm posting several passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations today not only because they are immediately relevant to Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" (in the sense of "exemplar") but because Kuhn himself cites them in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions when he talks about scientists using paradigms rather than rules. And I'll say it's a pleasure to read these Wittgenstein passages again, compared to the vagueness and babble that makes up most philosophy. Not only is Wittgenstein a great writer, he's probably the author of the clearest, easiest, sanest prose ever written by a philosopher. (Not that all of his writings are easy, since you often have to have a sense of what ideas he's reacting against to understand why he makes the points he does; but these passages are clear on that count as well.)

I've added some commentary of my own, some of which - the stuff about "essentialism" not being a force in the world much beyond philosophy, so deconstruction and philosophical anti-essentialism miss the mark, are aimed at men of straw - wanders away from today's topic, but eventually we'll make our way to those other topics as well, and I simply felt like adding my thoughts on them here. And I've included what Kuhn wrote about the Wittgenstein passages, and I added a bit more of my own commentary.

( To repeat: don't think, but look! )

( Philosophy keeps trying to change the conversation back to what it knows how to talk about rather than what really is at issue )

( Scientists work from models, and because they do so, they need no full set of rules )