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Beyond Words and Sounds
The latest single by the Black Eyed Peas—a hip-hop group I used to like, back when their rhymes were prophetic instead of puerile—came on the radio in the coffee shop. My friend Kevin—who was also a fan—and I instantly tensed up and began complaining. “Is this even a song?” he asked. “Or is it just words and sounds?” And while the minimal drum, bass, and inane speak-singing of a group like the Peas does raise this question, so does a lot of pop music. Music is, of course, formulaic—it has more in common with math than I will ever admit—but there’s formulaic and there’s formulaic. Too often, it feels that so little is at stake in the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus of even the great pop songs....
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The First Five Non-Christian Records I Ever Owned
For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading through the final pages (finally!) of my upcoming book Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a collection of essays about faith and popular music, mostly in the 1990s, and the musical twists and turns life (mine and others’) has taken since then. For the most part, I listened to Christian rock music in the early part of the 90’s, but eventually, I started exploring “secular” music with embarrassingly milquetoasty gateway albums. This was a struggle for me at first—I truly believed that, as a young evangelical Christian, there was something dangerous and worldly about pop music—but the five records listed below were albums that put me on the path to pop obsession....
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What is Christian Music Criticism For?
I have to admit it: I’m stumped. Having spent the better part of a year in a holding pattern at the crossroads between vocation and avocation (to borrow from Robert Frost), I am confronting a number of choices that would seem to need answers if I am to get on with the work I am here to do. To write for an academic or a popular audience? To keep writing music reviews and features or to focus wholly on sociolinguistic research? and commentary? To write for a particular religious audience or a general one? Sooner or later, the answers will come....
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A Fish Studying Water
During our recent trip to Minneapolis, I was asked, “So, since you’re an English professor, you must read a lot of books, right?” I had to correct my brother-in-law on two counts: first, I’m not a professor, and second, I am not really in “English” in the way that people who teach Shakespeare and Milton are. I study and teach English as a language, but I also study about English, if that makes sense—what it is or isn’t, who does or doesn’t speak and write it, where it has been, where it is going. I sometimes find it difficult to explain this to others, and to myself....
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Teaching by Hand
I am now teaching in a teacher education program. This frightens, humbles, and amuses me, because I have not been a teacher for very long and I am not sure I am very good at it—I have to keep printing out attendance sheets because I’m always losing them, and I do most of my grading in fits and starts beginning at 10 p.m. on Sunday nights....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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