The Slate excerpt of this article does its job well — it touches on several interesting topics but doesn’t fully develop them. I might need to find the print version to see if it says more about music and revolutions. At the very least, it needs to get to American Idiot.

Among the grab-bag of other points in the story is this roundup of how we perceive musical genres:

The rise of generic distinctions has lately reached a climax of absurdity, such that we can name off the top of our heads: house, witch house, dub, dubstep, hardstep, dancehall, dance-floor, punk, post-punk, noise, “Noise,” new wave, nu wave, No Wave, emo, post-emo, hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, alternative hip- hop, jazz hip-hop, hardcore hip-hop, nerd-core hip-hop, Christian hip-hop, crunk, crunkcore, metal, doom metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, Christian death metal, and, of course, shoe-gazing, among others. (Meanwhile, 1,000 years of European art music is filed under “classical.”)

I’d love to see a radio stream proclaim itself “ALL ATONAL, ALL THE TIME!”

via The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it. – By Nikil Saval – Slate Magazine.