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.)

Sir Dubdob, in his new blog, cites Adorno quoting his dead friend Benjamin to the effect that philosophy is a process which permits the "configuration of an idea as a totality" to emerge from opposing extremes. Dubdob then chides Adorno for picking only Stravinsky and Schoenberg as his extremes of modern music.


I commented:

Strange (or not strange) that Adorno apparently thought there were only two extremes. Why not 23 extremes? Or at least we could draw a three-dimensional graph, which only gives us three axes, hence six extremes to work with, but we could come up with an infinity of extremes from those six simply by deciding that anything that's an extreme on one axis is extreme no matter where else it is on the others; for, if we have something that's on the extremely chicken-screaming end of the chicken-scream/chicken-blasé axis, on the one hand, but is dead in the middle on the piccolo/tuba axis, on the other, we've created an extreme of a different flavor than something that's at the chicken-scream extreme but is heavily piccoloed, yet different also from that which is full chicken-scream but heavily tuba'd. (Haven't yet chosen my third axis. Night-Train/Jiyeon is a possibility, though someone could argue that that is too similar in spirit to chicken-scream/chicken-blasé.)

So I would urge you all to suggest some other extremes, beyond the four or six I've mentioned.



( Blogger dissatisfied with current vocabulary )

Dave wrote in a comment back here:

I feel like I can slip in the door and really contribute important ideas that, e.g., you (and your friends and our mutual friends, etc.) have internalized but haven't made their way into broader understanding yet. That is, your articulation of the hallway/school split, and its significance, hasn't quite exploded in actual schools, or academic theory about actual schools.

Well, what I was trying to do in my attack on the hallway-classroom split (originally back in '90-'91 in WMS,* then in that '01 essay for the Xgau festschrift) was to make sense of the rock-critic psyche and the behavior of a lot of contributers to my fanzine ("why doesn't Frank Kogan shut up and play his guitar?" and "I think visceral response is the most important" were two comments that I especially treasure). So to a big extent my subject was writing. Also, I was trying to come up with a better - more relevant - dichotomy to target than the ones that Christgau had chosen: his tendency would be to draw the line between intellectualizing versus partying or significance versus pleasure or some such, and then question those dichotomies without altogether abandoning them. (E.g., he thought that in P&J voters' were voting for significance when voting for albums but for pleasure when voting for singles, and then he'd say but we have to do right by the significance of singles etc.) I was talking about the psyche but I wanted to speak in social terms, about behavioral conventions and where and how they arose. The social spaces became my metaphorical categorization for a tension that I think underlies a lot of clichés (thinking versus feeling, intellectualizing versus living) and a lot of acting out.

But I wasn't in particular thinking about "What is going on in schools, and how they can be made better." The progressive education movement of the first half of the last century embraced John Dewey's attacks on the theory-practice split and on what he derided as the spectator theory of knowledge, but he never had much of an explanation for the hold that such a split continued to have on us a hundred years ago or now. His dime-store psychologizing laid the blame on the ancients' having little technological control over a dangerous and unpredictable physical world; my dime-store psychologizing puts the focus on fear of personal and social conflict, and I think I've got a better dime store. Such conflicts really can rip up a classroom and paralyze teaching, and people do need a rational response to that threat.

( Meltzer and Dewey choking on their contradictions )

Been meaning to post these notes I made in regard to a Daniel Davies post and comments that Mark linked when we were discussing "What do philosophers talk about these days?" Was holding off until I got a chance to read the Crispin Wright piece that Davies' cited, but decided to go ahead anyway, Wright unread, so that Mark can see this before going on holiday:

This interchange among Davies and crew does indeed point at a lot of what philosophers are or are not discussing. Also, I'll note rather irrelevantly that either Davies mistyped or he thinks the Tractatus was published forty years later than it actually was. In any event, here are three other points, possibly related:

(1) Following blog and comment-thread etiquette,* neither Davies nor any of his commenters states any of the ideas they are discussing; rather, they just refer to the ideas, by naming a broad field of endeavor or by naming a person who holds the idea. There are only a few exceptions, which are:

(a) several sentences about Clive Granger.** ("These people are fully aware of Granger. They take it as a principle that making inferences from data to claims about causal relationships can't be done on the basis of purely statistical assumptions; one needs non-statistical premises about the possible structure of causal dependencies. The analysis of causality that Granger offered can be seen as acknowledging that point, but only to a limited extent: the non-statistical assumption on which Granger causality depends in [is?] just the (true) assumption that effects can't temporally precede their causes. That's fine as a structural constraint on causal inference, but it's a very weak one, and one can only get so far without additional causal premises.")

(b) the example given by Davies from a paper by Crispin Wright ("t1 Sue: 'Bill could be in Boston' Ted: 'Actually, I just saw him board a flight to Houston' t2 Sue: 'Oh. Then I was wrong.' Apparently it is very difficult to fit this sort of thing into a consistent logical framework"); but Davies doesn't then detail Wright's idea, though he does provide a download link.

(c) Davies' main complaint, which is that, while this formal highly abstract work has the most prestige and gets the most attention in high-end [Anglo-American?] philosophy departments, it doesn't address any substantive issue. Davies draws an analogy to the situation in modern economics, where, he believes, the highly abstract work doesn't address the problems it says it addresses. Not quite sure if he's also saying exactly that about Wright's paper and its ilk, though that may well be what he intends. But there's a difference between saying on the one hand that Wright is working on an unimportant problem and, on the other, that Wright isn't addressing the issue he thinks he's addressing - the latter can result in the former; still, it's a different argument.

My problem here is that Davies doesn't say, "This is Wright's idea X, it doesn't seem to apply to situation Y or anything like it, so just what's the point of working on X?" And then in the comments, although Brian from Rutgers does say, wait, Wright's work can potentially be applied, Brian doesn't go on to say, "Wright's idea X can potentially be applied to situations X₁, X₂, and X₃, and here's how." So even if I do get around to reading Wright's piece, I won't know how Davies and Brian interpret it, much less why or where they think it can or can't be applied. Fortunately, I also don't know that Davies and Brian won't follow through, whereas the vagueness that afflicts my 'hood exists so that people can avoid following through.

( The frequent dependence of exemplars on disciplinary matrices )

*Yes, I am being sarcastic. It's not etiquette but cluelessness, and not necessarily on Davies and crew's part, since they all seem to assume that they and the people they're addressing know the ideas and don't need them re-explained, and unlike in my neighborhood of the 'Net, their assumption may be correct.

**Whom I'd never heard of, but that's not his fault.

( footnote 3 )

B. Michael's response to yesterday's question includes this statement:

Professional philosophy is pretty balkanized. It's like any other professional academics: There are fifteen people on the planet who can talk intelligently about any given thing. Everyone else argues about the validity of that thing and questions whether that thing is a thing. None of it has anything to do with day-to-day life.

In the meantime, yesterday's thread continues to roll, or unroll, as the case may be.

Int: In Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a relativist?

Rorty: Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.

. . .

Int: Do you disagree with any of Davidson's views?

Rorty: I can't think of anything we really disagree about that doesn't seem to me a verbal issue, but Davidson may have a different view of the matter. Well, one thing is that he keeps saying truth is an absolutely central concept, and I can't see what makes it central or basic. I take Davidson to be saying that truth, belief, meaning, intention, rationality, cognitivity - all these notions are parts of a seamless web, and that seems to me a useful point to make, that you can't have any of these notions without all the others. It's just that he then wants to say, "And truth is in the middle." I can't see why you have to have a middle.

Int: Putnam has also criticized you for deemphasizing truth.

Rorty: Putnam keeps saying that you have to have what he calls "substantive truth." I take Davidson to be saying: there's not much pointing in saying truth is substantive. I don't think Davidson has any better idea than I do what Putnam means by that. Nonetheless, he somehow attaches a weight to the notion that I can't seem to attach to it.
--Interview with Richard Rorty in January 1995 by Joshua Knobe

( It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone )

What I posted on girlboymusic's tumblr thread after she'd claimed that "PUMPKIN IS NOT A VEGETABLE. IT'S A FRUIT. SCIENCE." Relevant to Kuhn's idea of incommensurability; the point I always make with the botany-cookery distinction is that one can easily hold both nomenclatures in mind simultaneously, despite their being incommensurable; so knowing one paradigm doesn't make a competing paradigm incomprehensible:

Well, there are different nomenclatures here for different purposes. E.g., in cuisine - and in grocery stores - tomatoes are vegetables not fruits, while in botany tomatoes are fruits, but "vegetable" is not a relevant botanical category (or "vegetable" is a synonym for "plant," but "fruit-vegetable" isn't the relevant division). And in cooking, mushrooms are vegetables, despite not even being a plant in biology; and peanuts are nuts, not peas; and nuts are nuts, not fruits or seeds.

Of course, pumpkins are weird in relation to cooking anyway, since they mainly sell as decoration, and I'd bet the vast majority of their ingestion is when they're sugared up and in pies. But as for pumpkin's basic taste, it's categorized as a squash (as is its plant in botany, Cucurbita pepo), and the part of the squash you eat is a fruit in botany, but it's a vegetable when you eat it. American Heritage Dictionary's def'n of squash: "1. Any of various plants of the genus Cucurbita, having fleshy edible fruit with a hard rind. 2. The fruit of such a plant, used as a vegetable."

I like this response I just made to Nate on the several-days-old pain thread, so I'm reposting here so it doesn't get lost:

One of my favorite papers I wrote in college argued that - despite what philosophers claim - in standard usage intensity of pain is not strictly personal and ineffable but is a social value judgment that we can and do argue about, just as we argue about beauty, etc. - well, not "just as," since "beauty" is sometimes said to inhere in a sunset or sculpture or other inanimate object (despite the eye-of-the-beholder bromide), but we most certainly don't leave it up to an individual's self-report to decide how hurt he's feeling, whether his pain-statements are valid, whether or not he's malingering or whining, etc.

[And I'll add here that in instances where pain confers legitimacy - e.g., you are accorded personal or political validity on the basis of your suffering - pain is something of a Superword. E.g., "Hero Of Fear": "Terry says he's more real than me 'cause he's sick all the time/Not like I get sick/Or you get sick/But real sick." (For meaning of "Superword," click link on sidebar.)]

The term "paradigm shift" has made it into the common language as "a fundamental change in the way of seeing or doing something." Of course, many people's threshold for what counts as "fundamental" or "change" is really low, and "paradigm shift" is usually what people want the other guy to undergo so that his ideas will come to match the ones we've already got. But that's not the term's fault, that a lot of people become posturing dumbasses when they employ abstract intellectual terminology. A more damaging problem is that people are interested in paradigm shifts but not in paradigms; that is, the idea of breaking through restrictions is appealing, whereas the idea of creating new restrictions and being supported and nurtured by those restrictions is less appealing. But Kuhn came up with the idea of shifts back in the 1940s, along with the idea that the shifts were between incompatible modes of thought. It wasn't until the late '50s, however, that he developed the notion "paradigm," and he did so not only to understand how shifts occurred, but to understand how it was that the hard sciences were so much better at asking and answering questions and at creating fundamental shifts in thought than were the social sciences, which seemed to continually be reverting to square one.

If Kuhn is right, this is what paradigms do for the sciences:

1. Paradigms organize and focus a science's activity by telling the scientist what questions to ask and how to go about answering them. Which is to say that paradigms restrict and specialize the scientist's attention. And as a science develops and undergoes scientific revolutions it breaks into more and more subsciences that are ever more specialized.

2. Paradigms create expectations that are sufficient enough in their precision that anomalies can occur. And when anomalies can't be explained away as equipment failure or scientist error and can't be worked into the paradigm, then they become impetuses for a scientific revolution, i.e., a paradigm shift, and for the ultimate creation of new restrictions and new specialization.

(I recommend that you look back at Kuhn 8½, which contains excerpts from "The Essential Tension," the 1959 article in which Kuhn first uses the word "paradigm.")

Working away on the question of the distinction that Kuhn draws between rules and paradigms, and why he thinks it's important to draw such a distinction:

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions p. viii: I was struck by the number and extent of overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among, say, psychologists and sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of "paradigms." These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.

pp 3-4: Instructed to examine electrical or chemical phenomena, the man who is ignorant of these fields but who knows what it is to be scientific may legitimately reach any one of a number of incompatible conclusions.

So, the success of the natural sciences as opposed to the social sciences lies not in the natural scientists' knowing better than the social scientists what it is to be a scientist, or their having a better grasp of something called "scientific method," but in the members of a particular field or subfield sharing a set of model problems and solutions (i.e., paradigms). This isn't yet telling us the difference between paradigms and rules (as opposed to a paradigm being a type of rule, say, or a collection of rules), or why Kuhn thinks it's important that we notice such a difference. But it tells us what he thinks is at stake: a paradigm is what allows a particularly scientific community - a scientific field or subfield - to proceed with effect, without constantly having to ask itself what it's doing.