Alex Ross, “Listen to This,” New Yorker (February 16, 2004): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/02/16/listen-to-this (excerpt: from “I am a thirty-six-year-old white American mall” to paragraph on Missy Elliott)

Tom Vanderbilt, “How Predictable Is Our Taste? What Your Playlist Says About You (And What You Say About Your Playlist),” ch. 3 in You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice (2016), pp. 89-111.

Reading: Jonathan Sterne, “Sounds like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space,” Ethnomusicology 41 (1997): 23-26, 29-45

1) John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro, “The High Stakes of Singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,” The Atlantic (4 July 2015): http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/whats-the-right-way-to-sing-the-national-anthem/397526/?utm_source=SFTwitter;

2) Cinque Henderson, “Anthem of Freedom: How Whitney Houston Remade ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,'” The New Yorker (27 Jan 2016): http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/anthem-of-freedom-how-whitney-houston-remade-the-star-spangled-banner;

3) Will Robin, “Colin Kaepernick and the Radical Uses of ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’” The New Yorker (29 Aug 2016): http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/colin-kaepernick-and-the-radical-uses-of-the-star-spangled-banner