Join students and faculty for a presentation by Daphne A. Brooks, associate professor of English at Princeton University and noted pop music scholar. Her topic: "Staring at the Sun: Remixing the Diasporic Drone on TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain." Description:  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. Lunch will be served.

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