“Add the guitar-centeredness of the rest of early rock, and you have a significant shift: away from an emotionally expressive vocalism and toward and athletically aggressive instrumentalism. With hindsight, we can see some rather striking sexual connotations in this shift. The controlled vocalism of genuine blues suggest power, intensity, and energy being harnessed—as opposed to …
Death in the Fine Print
“But when rules and procedures multipy, students of history should see it as the manufacture of rope for possible judicial lynchings. Complexity in law is a friend to lawyers, not a friend to the accused” (Mother Kirk, p. 160).
Not Urban Warfare, but Warfare Is Urban
“We could find many causes of war — ontological, ecnomic, technical — but the Scriptures affirm that the agent of war is the great city. There is no such thing as a great agricultural war. A rural people is never a ravenous people. They may make migrations, but not wars. War is an urban phenomenon, …
Blues Authenticity
“The irony, of course, is that the Stones wrapped themselves in the cloak of blues authenticity while rejecting the crowd-pleasing manner that is an essential part of every bluesman’s stock in trade” (Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 195).
Tough Love
“The most obvious result is that the one discipline is refused access to the Lord’s Supper, as well as the general communion which that Supper seals. But the offender is not being denied kindness, courtesy, opportunity to hear the Word preached, the duties owed to him by others, or anything else due him according to …
All Are Babylon
“And so we must state the problem as it concerns Babylon, for she, as we have already seen, is the figure of all other cities; she is The City in the Bible” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 48).
Roundabout Momentum
“Although America’s white rock ‘n’ rollers lacked the musical sophistication found in jazz, they had a pretty clear idea of where they stood in the cultural hierarchy. Carl Perkins put it best when he said: ‘Rockabilly’s simple music but it’s not that easy to play.’ By this light, the Beatles’s true significance is not that …
There is Never “No Discipline”
“When sin begins to work, the one in a position to discipline has a choice to make. Discipline is inescapable. At that point, we will either discipline the sin, or we will discipline the righteous” (Mother Kirk, p. 158).
More Intertwined Than Commonly Assumed
“In the end Marcus takes an oddly bifurcated view of Afro-American music—a view that is, unfortunately, quite prevalent today. On the one hand, he praised ‘black music’ as a source for rock ‘n’ roll, depicting Presley as the Prometheus who stole its spark, passing it to the white race as it languished in frigid Puritanism. …
Wonder Why They Do That?
“Both friends and foes pay lip service to the ‘gospel’ contribution to rock ‘n’ roll, but when it comes to appreciating the larger cultural significance of the music, they join forces in forgetting all about religion. Instead they focus almost exclusively on sex—a focus that distorts both the music and its meaning” (Martha Bayles, Hole …