Can Jack White Change His Stripes?

By Brian Hiatt

Jack White believes in making things difficult for himself. The artistic reasons behind this ethos are clear (“You have to have a problem/ If you want to invent a contraption,” he once sang), the psychological origins of it less so. Catholicism? There is a picture, somewhere, of a little Jack White, at that point still Jack Gillis, meeting Pope John Paul II. White certainly has a self-flagellatory bent: “I’m bleeding before the Lord,” he sings on “Seven Nation Army.” Is it related to being the seventh of seven sons, and 10th child overall, with parents who were a little too worn out from parenting to set too many restrictions for their youngest kid? Probably. He considered, as a teenager, both the military and the priesthood, and ended up starting a company where employees wear uniforms – which no one seems to mind much, other than dry-cleaning fees.
***
Last year, White purchased a musical manuscript written by Al Capone in Alcatraz (in the 1920s, even gangsters could read and write music) for a song called “Humoresque”: “You thrill and fill this heart of mine/With gladness like a soothing symphony.” Capone, it seems, played tenor banjo in a prison band with Machine Gun Kelly on drums. The song, a take on a Dvorák work, turns out to have been recollected, not composed, by Capone, but White still ended up recording it as the closing track on his new album. He’s moved by the idea that a famous murderer had a weakness for such “a gentle, beautiful song.” “It shows you, like, what we were talking about earlier,” he adds. “Human beings are complicated creatures with lots of emotions going on.”
***
White is hardly the first successful white bluesman, and his thoughts on the idea of cultural appropriation are careful and nuanced. “There’s definitely a family of musicians,” he says, “and when you play with people of different cultures, nobody cares what anyone’s skin is. Are there people who have taken advantage of other people’s culture and made money off it? Oh, yeah. Black people invented everything. They invented jazz, blues, rock & roll, hip-hop, on and on and on. Every cool thing in music comes from them. And from the American South, their spread went global, which is absolutely one of the most incredible Cinderella stories of all time – this music being played on front porches in the Delta went global. Incredible. It makes you want to cry, it’s so beautiful. And were there portions of people who wouldn’t buy a Little Richard record but would buy the Pat Boone version? Of course.” What really bugs him, though, is fake Jamaican patois. “The rhythm I’ll let you get away with,” he says, “but the fake accent? I can’t stomach it.”
***
He recently saw a Bruno Mars live clip that made him think. “He said something a lot of artists say: ‘I hope you guys are having fun tonight.’ It’s the simplest thing in the world! I’ve never said that and I don’t know how to say that and I don’t know what that would mean.” He blinks. “Is that really why we’re here?”

Instead, White thinks it’s all about “the truth . . . trying to get somewhere real,” he says, stretching in his chair. “Your ideas were pure and you were trying to sculpt sound, trying to make something beautiful.”

Read the entire Rolling Stone article HERE

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Alice Cooper on playing King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar

“I get the villain part again. I’m always the villain. Nobody’s ever going to cast me as the hero. I’m always going to be the villain — which is fine, I like that.” First-rate interview with Alice Cooper conducted by BroadwayWorld’s Richard Ridge regarding his upcoming role as the flamboyant King Herod in NBC’s staged rock concert of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR LIVE! to be aired Easter Sunday, April 1. Check it out HERE.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Tag-teaming Bob Dylan and Thomas Merton

Eerdmans: What led you to write The Monk’s Record Player?

Robert Hudson: As a Dylan fan since my teens and a Merton fan since my twenties, I was astounded to learn in my forties that Merton himself had been a huge Dylan fan. Once I started investigating, this fascinating story nearly wrote itself. Merton viewed Dylan as one of the most important and prophetic voices in American poetry, and not only that, but Dylan’s music helped Merton recover from one of the most serious crises in his adult life. Curiously, at the same time, Dylan’s life paralleled Merton’s in many unexpected ways even though the two never met. Since no other book about Merton has explored this soul-to-soul connection, I knew I had to write about it.

Looking forward to this book HERE

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Life is mystery, not black comedy

Frederick Buechner was asked by his mother whether he believes in life after death. This is his response: “I said that if the victims and the victimizers, the wise and the foolish, the good-hearted and the heartless all end up alike in the grave and that is the end of it, then life would be a black comedy, and to me, even at its worst, life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we experience all the horrors that go on both around us and within as horrors rather than as just the way the cookie crumbles because, in our own innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from. And lastly, I wrote her, I believe that what happens to us after we die is that we aren’t dead forever because Jesus said so.”

To order his book, A Crazy, Holy Grace, click HERE.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Watchful Dragons: Neil Gaiman’s Brush with Narnia Lingers

By Russell Moore, Touchstone

Last year, Neil Gaiman published his long-awaited work, Norse Mythology, a collection of the ancient stories of the Nordic gods. This is not a translation, but a retelling. As Eugene Peterson’s The Message is to the Bible, Gaiman’s Norse Mythology is to Norse mythology. The book was widely anticipated not so much because it collects mythic tales as because of the author himself. For many of his readers, Gaiman awakened an interest in the old gods in the first place. And for Gaiman himself, something of this longing for Valhalla started in the wardrobe of a spare room.

At first glance, Gaiman would seem to be of little interest to those Christians who are unfamiliar with his work. Why should they pay attention to him any more than they would to the latest young adult werewolf romance? Gaiman is important, though, because he is not just a bubble on the surface of popular culture but a tidal current within it. We also should give him some attention because he is raising the sorts of questions we will want raised if we are to bear witness to Christian orthodoxy in a “post-Christian” Western culture.
***
The connection between C. S. Lewis and Neil Gaiman isn’t as obvious as Gaiman’s imaginative debt to, say, Ray Bradbury. After all, Lewis is best remembered as a committed Christian apologist, while Gaiman is decidedly, well, not. But Gaiman is not anti-Lewis, like, say, Phillip Pullman, whose Golden Compass books set out to dethrone Aslan with a bleak, atheistic universe. Gaiman’s relationship to Lewis is more complicated. Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Songs of Experience: A Liturgy for Existentialists

By Timothy Neufeld (ATU2.Com)

Existentialists ask the kind of big questions about our existence that are addressed on U2’s latest. Questions such as, “Why am I here?” “What is the meaning of life?” and “What is my place in the universe?” The architects of existentialism, including Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Nietzsche, were dissatisfied with rationalism and reacted against a “science will save us” attitude that dominated the Age of Enlightenment. Rationalists ask, “How does this work?” In contrast, existentialists ask, “Why do we exist?”

Bono has quoted Nietzsche numerous times over the years. On the Vertigo tour we heard a paraphrase of the philosopher’s famous aphorism, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” Nietzsche also said, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” and “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
***
Songs Of Experience could have easily been titled Songs Of Existence. The search for purpose is seen throughout. Undoubtedly, Bono’s “brush with mortality” colored his own experience. In the liner notes for SOE, he says it left him “clinging on to my own life like a raft.” He continues, “…it would feel dishonest not to admit the turbulence I was feeling at the time of writing.” This kind of here-and-now honesty about mortality is paramount for existentialists.

The flow of U2’s latest album is rhythmic chaos, like a liturgy exploring existence, moving through experiences of doubt, anger, confession and ultimately resolving in hope.

Read entire article HERE.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

John Legend and Jesus Christ Superstar

R&B superstar John Legend will be playing the role of Jesus in the Easter night NBC musical Jesus Christ Superstar written by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Raised in the church, Legend is no longer involved in the Church, he told Relevant Magazine, and doesn’t consider himself “religious,” but insists, “All of that is still with me.”

“Gospel music, particularly – and the black church – have been a part of black music culture for so long,” Legend said. “If you just go back and look at Aretha Franklin, she grew up in a church and made gospel albums. If you look at Marvin Gaye, he grew up in the Church and made songs that talked about his faith and Jesus and his views on spirituality. Stevie Wonder has done it. I think all the great artists we grew up listening to, they grew up in the black Church and that tradition doesn’t just go away even though you’re making secular music.”

“Jesus was kind of revolutionary in his own way,” Legend said. “He was fighting the power and speaking out for the underdog almost all the time throughout His life. That’s why He was so dangerous, and that’s why the powers that be wanted Him to not be around anymore. I think there’s been more of a conversation about that lately too. I think that’s a good thing.”

Legend goes on to say, “I think it’s important that we continue to examine [Jesus’] words and not to project what our own political motivations are onto Him, but to actually pay attention too what he actually said,” he says. “What He said about the poor, what he said about loving one another and all the things He preached, I think sometimes we lost sight of that.”

(Relevant Magazine, Mar-Apr 20018)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

When Muhammad Ali visited the Grahams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When I arrived at the airport, Mr. Graham himself was waiting for me. I expected to be chauffeured in a Rolls Royce or at least a Mercedes, but we got in his Oldsmobile and he drove it himself. I couldn’t believe he came to the airport driving his own car. When we approached his home I thought he would live on a thousand acre farm and we drove up to his house of made of logs. No mansion with crystal chandeliers and gold carpets, it was the kind of house a man of God would live in. I look up to him.” (Billy Graham: God’s Ambassador)

MONTREAT, NC (Associated Press, 9-17-79). Muhammad went to the mountain and apparently he liked what he saw.

Muhammad Ali, three-time world heavyweight boxing champion, spent several hours Sunday with Billy Graham in the evangelist’s home atop a mountain in Montreat.  Ali said his visit was one of “looking and searching” in an effort to “learn more about other people.”

Sitting on the porch of Graham’s home, Ali looked at the evangelist and said, “He comes before me, I’m just a boxer–famous and all that…but he leads people to God. I look up to him.”

“I’ve always admired Mr. Graham, I’m a Muslim and he’s a Christian, but there is so much truth in the message he gives, Americanism, repentance, things about government and country–and truth.  I always said if I was a Christian, I’d want to be a Christian like him.”

Ali spent the afternoon talking with Graham, then left for Louisville, KY, to address the National Conference of Christians and Jews on Monday. Ali retired from the ring recently and said he was “trying to figure out what to do now.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Black churches host screenings of ‘Black Panther’

Actor Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther/T’Challa in the new “Black Panther” movie. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios

By Adele M. Banks, Religion News Service

(RNS) — Xavier Cooper went straight from his shift as a cook at a fast-food restaurant to an early showing of the “Black Panther” movie — sponsored by his church.

As his elders at Jonahville African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Huntersville, N.C., had hoped, the film had a profound effect on the young man, a leader in the church’s youth group.

Cooper exited the theater with a buoyed confidence about his dreams after spending two hours watching the futuristic kingdom of powerful black people in Wakanda.

“Being an African-American, it shows you that you can do anything you want to,” said Cooper, 17, who wants to own his own record label and production studio.

Across the country — from California to Chicago to Virginia — members of black churches have bought out theaters for screenings and dressed in their favorite African attire to see a superhero who looks like them. And others, from a New York multicultural congregation to a Detroit Muslim professor, are also tapping into the movie’s messages they hope will be particularly affirming to young people of a range of races and religions.

To read entire column, click HERE.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Billy Graham, hippies, and the rock concert

The 1969 Miami Rock Music Festival featured the Grateful Dead, Santana, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, Vanilla Fudge and, interestingly enough, Billy Graham.

What follows is Billy Graham’s description of his countercultural gospel message at the Miami Rock Music Festival found in his autobiography Just As I Am.

It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, but I was most definitely not in church. Instead, to the horror of some, I was attending the 1969 Miami Rock Music Festival.

America in 1969 was in the midst of cataclysmic social upheaval. Stories of violent student protests against the Vietnam War filled the media. Images from the huge Woodstock music festival that took place just six months before the Miami event near Bethel, New York – for many a striking symbol of the anti-establishment feelings of a whole generation of rebellious youth – were still firmly etched in the public’s memory.

Concert promoter Norman Johnson perhaps hoped my presence would neutralize at least some of the fierce opposition he had encountered from Miami officials. Whatever his reasons, I was delighted for the opportunity to speak from the concert stage to young people who probably would have felt uncomfortable in the average church, and yet whose searching questions about life and sharp protests against society’s values echoed from almost every song. Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment