Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall Interviews, Featured In Andrew Mall

Rock That Doesn’t roll, “Bookstore Guys”

Rock That Doesn’t Roll podcast (2023). Who could a 1990s Christian rock aficionado turn to in order to find the latest and greatest releases? For mainstream music fans, tastemakers included record store clerks of 1990s indie music stores, or retail juggernauts like Tower Records and Wherehouse - the kind of superfans depicted by Jack Black in High Fidelity. But for many evangelical teens of the 1990s, record stores were not the place to find kid-tested, parent-approved music. For that, Christian teens usually had to go to Christian bookstores.

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Author Meets Critics: Andrew Mall’s God rock, Inc.
Conferences, Presentations, God Rock Inc Andrew Mall Conferences, Presentations, God Rock Inc Andrew Mall

Author Meets Critics: Andrew Mall’s God rock, Inc.

AAR (2023) “author meets critics” panel on God Rock, Inc. Panelists will consider how Christian music as a niche business shapes religious communities in the United States (and beyond), as well as how its many genres and subgenres - pop, rock, metal, rap, hip hop, praise and worship, etc. - reflect and shape evangelical Christian politics, practice, and theology.

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Keith Green Vs. the Music Industry
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Keith Green Vs. the Music Industry

Keith Green was a Christian artist whose ethics came to contradict the commercial necessities of the Christian music industry. I glossed over this contradiction and its conflict in my earlier primer to Green’s career and discography, but here I go more detail and provide some primary sources that I have found to be very enlightening.

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Oral History Interviews as Primary Sources

While conducting the research for God Rock, Inc., I was fortunate to interview many current and former Christian music industry executives and musicians. I also used the archives at MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, and I was thrilled to find several relevant interview transcripts available through Baylor’s Institute for Oral History. In this post I discuss these components of my research methodology and approach to oral history interviews.

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An Origin Story
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An Origin Story

When I was growing up, my family attended a Southern Baptist church in New Jersey. I was first introduced to Christian rock in the 1990s but didn’t start researching it until 2009. In this piece — a longer version of the origin story to God Rock, Inc. found in the book’s introduction — I describe discovering and abandoning Christian music during my adolescence, ultimately rediscovering it (with more than a little help from my youngest sister).

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