Big Feelings

I’m investigating Big Feelings using three interdisciplinary frameworks: affect theory, cultural studies, and musicology. I also aim to supplement these views with some interviews, so I can see if my ideas about Big Feelings resonate or not with fans of the music. Affect theory is a weird, capacious body of scholarship that tries to think…

To me, Big Feelings is not just about a sound, but also a style, a vibe, or an orientation. This can make it tricky to pin down—and actually, I’m less interested in being super clear about the concept than I am about tracing certain tendencies in the music. This all to say that not all…

The idea behind Big Feelings grew out of my love of a certain sound that I heard in some rock bands and not in others. The earliest inkling of this interest started when I was in middle-school and listening obsessively to the Smashing Pumpkins. When I went to college, I learned that the magic sound…