Earhole 2023
Happy new year!
For this post I thought I'd do something a little different. I'm really into music, both playing and listening, but I rarely get a chance to talk about it. During the day when I'm sitting at my computer, including when I write this newsletter, I listen to WPRB 103.3, a Princeton independent station that always has amazing stuff. When I hear something I like I find the song's album and listen back to the artists' work. I come across a ton of interesting music.
Last year I decided to make a playlist of my favorite songs from the year and it was nice to share what I'd been listening to with others. I had a radio show in college with some friends and it took me back to those days, finding new music and seeing what others think about it.
I called the playlist "earhole," after the famous book Learning to Labor by Paul Willis. He did an ethnography of working class high school boys in England and found that their youthful misbehavior--the breaking of school rules, not doing homework, being a bad student--actually reproduced divisions between working class and ruling class kids, complicating the notion that schools simply reproduce that class structure when everything's going according to plan. The boys who broke all the rules (who Willis called the "lads") made fun of the "earholes," or the students that followed the rules.