Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? PDF Author: Gregory Thornbury
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 110190707X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The riveting, untold story of the “Father of Christian Rock” and the conflicts that launched a billion-dollar industry at the dawn of America’s culture wars. In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like the Who, Janis Joplin, and the Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus. Billboard called Norman “the most important songwriter since Paul Simon,” and his music would go on to inspire members of bands as diverse as U2, The Pixies, Guns ‘N Roses, and more. To a young generation of Christians who wanted a way to be different in the American cultural scene, Larry was a godsend—spinning songs about one’s eternal soul as deftly as he did ones critiquing consumerism, middle-class values, and the Vietnam War. To the religious establishment, however, he was a thorn in the side; and to secular music fans, he was an enigma, constantly offering up Jesus to problems they didn’t think were problems. Paul McCartney himself once told Larry, “You could be famous if you’d just drop the God stuff,” a statement that would foreshadow Norman’s ultimate demise. In Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music?, Gregory Alan Thornbury draws on unparalleled access to Norman’s personal papers and archives to narrate the conflicts that defined the singer’s life, as he crisscrossed the developing fault lines between Evangelicals and mainstream American culture—friction that continues to this day. What emerges is a twisting, engrossing story about ambition, art, friendship, betrayal, and the turns one’s life can take when you believe God is on your side.

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? PDF Author: Gregory Thornbury
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 110190707X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The riveting, untold story of the “Father of Christian Rock” and the conflicts that launched a billion-dollar industry at the dawn of America’s culture wars. In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like the Who, Janis Joplin, and the Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus. Billboard called Norman “the most important songwriter since Paul Simon,” and his music would go on to inspire members of bands as diverse as U2, The Pixies, Guns ‘N Roses, and more. To a young generation of Christians who wanted a way to be different in the American cultural scene, Larry was a godsend—spinning songs about one’s eternal soul as deftly as he did ones critiquing consumerism, middle-class values, and the Vietnam War. To the religious establishment, however, he was a thorn in the side; and to secular music fans, he was an enigma, constantly offering up Jesus to problems they didn’t think were problems. Paul McCartney himself once told Larry, “You could be famous if you’d just drop the God stuff,” a statement that would foreshadow Norman’s ultimate demise. In Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music?, Gregory Alan Thornbury draws on unparalleled access to Norman’s personal papers and archives to narrate the conflicts that defined the singer’s life, as he crisscrossed the developing fault lines between Evangelicals and mainstream American culture—friction that continues to this day. What emerges is a twisting, engrossing story about ambition, art, friendship, betrayal, and the turns one’s life can take when you believe God is on your side.

Where the Devil Don't Stay

Where the Devil Don't Stay PDF Author: Stephen Deusner
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477323937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

God Rock, Inc.

God Rock, Inc. PDF Author: Andrew Mall
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520343425
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets’ boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

No Sympathy for the Devil

No Sympathy for the Devil PDF Author: David Ware Stowe
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834580
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier

God's Forever Family

God's Forever Family PDF Author: Larry Eskridge
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195326458
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The Jesus People were an unlikely combination of evangelical Christianity and the hippie counterculture. God's Forever Family is the first major examination of this phenomenon in over thirty years.

Beyond the Crossroads

Beyond the Crossroads PDF Author: Adam Gussow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469633671
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as "the crossroads" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.

Recovering Classic Evangelicalism

Recovering Classic Evangelicalism PDF Author: Gregory Alan Thornbury
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433530651
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Once upon a time, evangelicalism was a countercultural upstart movement. Positioned in between mainline denominational liberalism and reactionary fundamentalism, evangelicals saw themselves as evangelists to all of culture. Billy Graham was reaching the masses with his Crusades, Francis Schaeffer was reaching artists and university students at L’Abri, Larry Norman was recording Jesus music on secular record labels and touring with Janis Joplin and the Doors, and Carl F. H. Henry was reaching the intellectuals through Christianity Today. It was the dawn of “classic evangelicalism.” Surveying the current evangelical landscape, however, one gets the feeling that we’re backpedaling quickly. We are more theologically diffuse, culturally gun-shy, and fragmented than ever before. What has happened? And how do we find our way back? Using the life and work of Carl F. H. Henry as a key to evangelicalism’s past and a cipher for its future, this book provides crucial insights for a renewed vision of the church’s place in modern society and charts a refreshing course toward unity under the banner of “classic evangelicalism.”

Running with the Devil

Running with the Devil PDF Author: Robert Walser
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819575151
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
“A solid, scholarly analysis of the power, meaning, musical structure, and sociopolitical contexts of the most popular examples of heavy metal.” —Library Journal Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, and fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music continues to attract and embody cultural conflicts that are central to society. In Running with the Devil, Robert Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power. This edition includes a new foreword by Harris M. Berger contextualizing the work and a new afterword by the author. Ebook Edition Note: all photographs (sixteen) have been redacted. “Walser belongs to a small but influential group of academics trying to reconcile ‘high theory’ with a streetwise sense of culture . . . an excellent book.” —Rolling Stone “Takes musicology where it has never gone before; I once saw the chapter on metal guitarists and the classical tradition performed live in a lecture hall, but even on paper it smokes.” —SF Weekly “Walser is truly gifted at doing what few critics before him have done: analyzing the music . . . In virtuoso readings of metal music that forge persuasive links between metal and particular classical music traditions, Walser reveals the ways that musical structures themselves are social texts.” —The Nation “Making surprising connections to classical forms and debunking stereotypes of metal’s musical crudity, Walser delves enthusiastically into guitar conventions and rituals.” —The Washington Post

Cold-Case Christianity

Cold-Case Christianity PDF Author: J. Warner Wallace
Publisher: David C Cook
ISBN: 1434705463
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.

Prophetically Incorrect

Prophetically Incorrect PDF Author: Robert H. Jr. Woods
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 1441212396
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Bible includes prophetic speech and at times the church and its representatives are called to speak prophetically. But in our media-saturated age when many claim to speak for God, how can we evaluate the avalanche of supposedly prophetic speech? What does it mean to truly be prophetic? And when Christians should speak prophetically, how can they do so in a biblical and effective way? Using vivid examples, this book offers clear guidelines for creating, critiquing, and consuming popular media, as well as practical suggestions for faithful communication. It also helps readers think critically about communication technology. The book includes a foreword by Quentin Schultze and a preface by Clifford Christians.