[Minorcompositions] 16/6 Take This Refusal and Dance To It

[Minor Compositions]

*Take This Refusal and Dance To It*
June 16th @ 7PM UK Time, online 
<https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/95693363180>
Facebook event page <https://www.facebook.com/events/1934417497374853>

Join us for an online conversation and music listening session with Paul 
Rekret, centered around his book /Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis/ 
(2024). In this session, we’ll explore the book’s key themes through 
both discussion and curated music selections that speak to the 
intersections of labor, leisure, and sound.

/Take This Hammer/ examines how shifts in work and the economy – from 
the fragmentation of the working day to the rise of precarious labor – 
have shaped and been reflected in the forms and experiences of popular 
music. Rekret traces how the separation of work and leisure, once 
central to industrial society, has become increasingly blurred in the 
age of streaming, automation, and remote labor, and considers how music 
both registers these changes and imagines alternatives. Together, we’ll 
listen to tracks connected to themes from the book, and discuss how 
musical forms – across genres like trap rap, dance music, and field 
recordings – respond to crises of work, economic instability, 
gentrification, and ecological breakdown. This session is an invitation 
to think with music: not just as entertainment, but as a way of sensing 
and sounding out life under capitalism and beyond.

*Bio:* Paul Rekret is the author of three books: /Down With Childhood: 
Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence/ (2017); /Derrida and Foucault: 
Philosophy, Politics, Polemics/ (2018); /Monopolated Light and Power/ 
(with Edward George, Louis Moreno, Ashwani Sharma (2024)), and editor of 
George Caffentzis's Clipped Coins, Abused Words & Civil Government 
(2021). He has published on political and cultural theory in journals 
such as /Theory, Culture & Society/, /Constellations/, /South Atlantic 
Quarterly/ and his writing has appeared in /Frieze/, /The Wire/, /Art 
Monthly/, /The New Inquiry/, and elsewhere. He is a member of Le Mardi 
Gras Listening Collective and works on sound and ecological crisis as 
part of Amplification/Annihilation. He is a Lecturer in the School of 
Media and Communications at the University of Westminster.

Organized by Minor Compositions & COVER

This event will be edited into an episode of the Minor Compositions podcast.

To register for this event: 
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/take-this-refusal-and-dance-to-it-tickets-1402470620379
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