Books
Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl
In the past decade, a distinctive resurgence of indie music has seen young, queer, and feminist artists reformulating the genre with strategic reappropriations of 90s grunge and 2000s-era pop. Big Feelings offers a nuanced analysis of these musicians and the socio-political crises informing their sounds. Dan DiPiero situates this new wave of indie music within the context of the emotional sensibilities and social orientations of a young generation flattened by an endless stream of everyday traumas. Listening closely to Soccer Mommy, Indigo De Souza, Jay Som, SASAMI, The Ophelias, Vagabon, boygenius, and more, Big Feelings traces points of resonance and connection that help fans perceive politics where it might first appear absent.
By bringing listeners’ experiences into the analysis, DiPiero shows how indie rock feminisms have shifted since the 1990s, rejecting overt political messages in favor of sonic catharsis, and reflecting the complex, ambivalent feeling of being young while the world burns. In reprising the sounds of an alt-rock associated in public consciousness with white male pain, Big Feelings doubles down on the stereotypical association between femininity and emotionality to perform whole spectrums of feeling in varied states of overwhelm. In doing so, these artists draw attention to overlooked histories of women and queer musicians who have been forging indie rock all along, while also remaking how the music matters in the present.
Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life
—Finalist, 2023 International Association for the Study of Popular Music Book Prize.
Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns longstanding assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.
“In this bold and lucid book, Dan DiPiero writes, ‘There is improvisation anywhere there is contingency, and there is never not contingency.’ DiPiero has tackled head-on a central problem in improvisation studies, the field’s tendency to ‘defer defining improvisation directly,’ yet to often assume an ‘ideal’ version or ‘improvisation at its best.’ DiPiero supports his broad claim step by step, demonstrating why it is important we recognize improvisation as ubiquitous. When we acknowledge that improvisation occurs for nefarious as well as positive ends, in spaces of relative freedom and of crushing constraint, and is practiced by bond traders, contingent laborers, warriors, artists, indeed by everyone, all the time, in different, yet ultimately the same ways—as the play of contingency—we can move away from using improvisation in the service of our own theoretical projects and gain clarity on the very nature of being human.”
—Tracy McMullen, Associate Professor of Music, Bowdoin College
“Dan DiPiero deviates from the familiar tune that improvisation is necessarily rare, unpredictable, liberatory, and free. Instead, he locates improvisation where few ever think to look: ‘in the habitual, the pre-given, the mundane, or the ordinary.’ In other words, he finds it in the unrepeatable singularity that is each moment of life. Writing with the authority of both a musical improvisor and a theorist, DiPiero argues that improvisation is not special, but rather the very condition of humanity.”
—Mack Hagood, Robert H. and Nancy J. Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies, Miami University
“Dan DiPiero molds a convincing narrative and provides the theoretical groundwork for future studies of improvisation. This is a bold undertaking that melds two worlds (the musical and the social) often segregated in scholarship.”
—David Arditi, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at Arlington
Articles and Essays
“Race, Gender, and Jazz School: Chord-Scale Theory as White Masculine Technology,” Jazz and Culture vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 2023)
“‘I Wanna Be That Cool’: Soccer Mommy’s Big Feelings,” Journal of Popular Music Studies vol. 35, no. 2 (2023): 39–65
Special Issue of American Music Perspectives, “Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis.” Edited and introduced with Christine Capetola (2023)
“Improvisation as Contingent Encounter, Or: The Song of My Toothbrush,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation vol. 12, no. 2 (2018)
“Rancière and Improvisation: Reading Contingency in Music and Politics,” in Rancière and Music, edited by João Pedro Cachopo, Patrick Nickleson, Chris Stover (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
“Voice, Freedom, Anachronism: On Moten/López/Cleaver,” Cleveland Review of Books (January 13, 2023)
"Nuances de vintage," Audimat 17 (2022)
Q&A with Dan DiPiero, author of Contingent Encounters,” University of Michigan Press Blog (August 24, 2022)
“Reparation as Damage: Review of Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair,” boundary 2 online (February 10, 2022)
“The Impossibility of Critique: On The French Dispatch & May ’68,” Cleveland Review of Books (December 28, 2021)
“Big Feelings: Feminist Affect in Indie Rock After 2000,”Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 4 (December): 16-22
“Review: Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke University Press), Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 4 (December): 219-222.
"Danser jusqu’à l’effondrement. La pop festive de l’après-crise." Audimat 13 (2021)
“Feeling Spaces and Spatial Feelings: On The Ophelias’ Crocus,” Blog/Los Angeles Review of Books (October 19, 2021).
“Climate Changing: Playlist for a changing planet,” Wexner Center for the Arts Blog, “Read, Watch, Listen” (February 1 2021).
“Bracing for Impact: Music, Millennials, and What Comes After COVID-19,” Blog/Los Angeles Review of Books (May 11, 2020).
“This and The Coming Crisis: Reid Anderson, Dave King, and Craig Taborn’s Golden Valley Is Now”, Blog/Los Angeles Review of Books (February 3, 2020).
“Tik Tok: Post-Crash Party Pop, Compulsory Presentism, and the 2008 Financial Collapse,” Sounding Out! (October 21, 2019).
“Improvising What?”: A Review of Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw’s Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, boundary 2 online (October 11, 2017).