Conference Agenda

Specific online provocateurs of the alt-right, have developed loyal followings among the alums of the Trump administration. Unapologetically fascist, racist, and sexist, their writings, podcast, and social media draw on Nietzsche urging men to reject liberalism, political correctness, and the “feminization” of culture.

This paper plumbs one of these individual’s philosophical output paying particular attention to the entanglement of the ancient world, “classical” music, and the manosphere in his writings and podcast. I begin with an analysis of his use of ancient Greek culture and “classical music” to promote fascist ideology in publications from 2018 and 2022. This individual offers insights into the manosphere’s fears and fascinations with music through his misogynistic and racist critique of the consumption of classical music. I then pivot to show how some of these ideas are repackaged on his podcast where he mixes racist and misogynistic tirades with philosophy, humor, and music to appeal to a wider audience.

The paper concludes with an urgent appeal for musicologists to pay closer attention to music in the manosphere, and the ethics of engaging with alt-right readings of music. These individuals and their followers are not just arm-chair philosophers setting Vivaldi to their bad takes on Nietzsche on a podcast: their reach and influence extend far and wide. Lastly, I offer some thoughts on what a constructive musical and musicological response to alt-right musicology might look like.

“You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.” These words were uttered by a police officer as he pressed play on Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” while he was confronting a protester for hanging a Black Lives Matter banner in front of the Alameda Courthouse in Oakland, California in July 2021. Not only was the song partially drowning the sound of the conversation as a bystander was filming the altercation, the police officer was also well aware of YouTube’s copyright policies and their quick takedown notice turn around for copyrighted content. Since the Summer of 2021, the same practice has been reported in the media on separate occasions in Beverly Hills, Santa Ana, and a few other towns in California; officers covering police and civilian altercations with mainstream hits to prevent people from posting the recordings online.

In this paper, I investigate how instances of police officers playing copyrighted music while on duty to prevent civilians from exercising their First Amendment right functions as both a form of censorship and as a means to cover up police brutality under claims of safety and privacy. If police officers who employ this tactic cite privacy protections, residents and those who are the target of police brutality denounce the practice as loud, disrupting, threatening and marginalizing. While reported instances of police utilizing music as a coverup isn’t widespread, I situate the practice within the larger history and context of racialized and classed weaponization of the First Amendment and intellectual property laws. In this particular instance of weaponization of the law, officers are attempting to restrict citizens’ First Amendment right, established by numerous case law, to record audio and video of police officers in public spaces while on duty, not by preventing recording itself, but the distribution of the recording. Relying on automated and efficient systems, which are rooted in “piracy surveillance” (Katyal 2008) and forms of regulation of cultural material online, officers are participating in a larger history of indirect and insidious modalities of censorship.

I begin by investigating the legality of police officers using copyright filters to prevent recording; engaging with privacy laws, intellectual property laws, and the First Amendment, as well as the ethics and consequences of the practice on targeted populations. Building on sound studies and critical race theory, I further analyze the sonic encounters between police officers and civilians, examining which sounds are silenced and which are amplified, and the uncanny resonances of the sonic makeup of police and civilian encounters. I conclude by analyzing the rhetoric of endangerment in the age of surveillance and ubiquitous recording: when does recording constitute an act of resistance, and when is it an act of oppression? This paper seeks to contribute to a larger literature investigating the relationship between copyright law and racialized and classed oppression, and participates in the growing scholarship on the specificity of sound in contemporary surveillance.

The "death of the author" has taken shape on different terms than Roland Barthes (1977) anticipated. Contract law, not copyright, now reigns in online spaces: media platforms' terms of service have eroded vestiges of copyright-protected notions of authorship in traditional media. In 2023, AI-assisted vocal "deepfakes," circulated on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, further destabilized understandings of musical authorship and autonomy. Who should be recognized as the author of a musical deepfake—the forger, the engineers who developed the forger's filters, the musician being mimicked, or those whose music constitutes the AI's training datasets? Literary critic Sianne Ngai's (2020) theory of the "gimmick," as a capitalist form that invites but also thwarts aesthetic judgment, provides a useful framework for understanding the copyright implications of AI-assisted vocal deepfakes.

In this paper, I fuse Ngai's concept with Georgina Born's (2010) theory of the "distributed artwork," speculating about how impending copyright reforms will shape online media platforms' participatory cultures. Drawing on fieldwork with software developers, engineers, musicians, and users, I recount how the music information-retrieval (MIR) industry has pivoted toward calling public-domain music "clean data"—data ready for ethical extraction free of copyright constraints. Absent stable claims to authorship, producers of user-generated content in turn invoke the rhetorical figure of the content "creator," supplanting the notion of the author in online discourse: under platform capitalism, legally-protected authorship has thus been replaced by "creation" absent fair use, while the public domain has been reduced to the designation "clean."

Examining the ongoing moral panic over vocal deepfakes, I show how popular music is implicated in contemporary rhetorical strategies shaping the AI copyright debate. Generative AI now threatens to make the practices of attribution and conditions for authorship necessary for copyright impossible (Menand, 2024). Understanding it is more urgent than ever, since policymakers are poised to establish constraints on cultural production that may reign for decades to come. I thus offer this paper as a cautionary tale of unintended consequences, showing how law—and, today, code—have lagged behind musical and cultural changes, with deleterious effects for authors, musicians, and citizens—both "virtual" and "in real life."