E31 - Take This Refusal and Dance To It

This episode is a conversation with Paul Rekret, centered around his book Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (2024). In this discussion we 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.

This episode is accompanied by an installment of the Saint Monday Mixtapes, which can be accessed here. 

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.

For more on the book. 

Intro music: Guitar Welch, Hogman Maxey, Andy Mosely, and Huddie Ledbetter -  Take This Hammer

The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org