“The real break came in the late 1960s, when the counterculture went sour, and popular music began attracting people who were less interested in music than in using such a powerful medium for culturally radical purposes. The harbingers of this break were the Rolling Stones, who relished the blues but did not hesitate to make …
Vain Repetitions
“I grew up in evangelical circles and knew the public prayer ropes. I could pray readily in public settings, particularly in church, and did so in accordance with the accepted canons for many years. When I finally began to write my prayers out before the service, I noticed something funny. I had stopped repeating myself. …
Foundational Murder
“We know that it was common practice, not only among the Semites, to lay the first stone of a new town on the body of a human sacrifice offered to the power of the city in order that his spirit protect the city” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 28).
Not That Simple
“Bloom implies that all popular music ‘has the beat of sexual intercourse.’ Taking exactly the same view, Steven Tyler of the hard rock band Aerosmith boasts: ‘It’s rhythm and blues, its twos and fours, it’s f***ing.’ In general, neither friend nor foe acknowledges that the monotonous beat of hard rock (and, indeed, of much rap) …
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Keep It Short
“For example, the Bible requires that public prayer be kept as brief as possible, given the duties and needs we have in prayer. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive, but it only seems this way because our carnal flesh is very religious. The Bible says that God is in heaven, and that we are on …
Intervening Grace
“Thus the Lord himself is going to substitute his work for man’s, and he will build lasting cities, different cities, the true cities of Judah, cities which will be under another sign and controlled by a power other than Cain’s” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 27).
And Why Not?
“I do not use the word popular as the opposite of high, serious, or good. It cannot be stated too often, or too emphatically, that this usage is both illogical and ahistorical. In every period and place, it is possible to cite works that possess both popularity and artistic merit” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our …
Near Perfect Ignorance
“Now, some people believe that this topic was dispatched by the late political philosopher Allan Bloom, whose best-selling critique of higher education, The Closing of the American Mind, contains a chapter on the pernicious effects of rock. But as I shall show later, that celebrated chapter displays a near-perfect ignorance of American popular music (whose …
Not Deeply Rooted in the Blues
“It is still possible to find the tough, affirmative spirit of the blues in contemporary forms. But increasingly, that spirit is rejected in favor of antimusical, antisocial antics that would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 3).
Why Everything is So Mud Fence Ugly Now
“A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, …