Open Decks DJ Set, Sept. 2022
I DJ’ed a 30-min set on vinyl at Open Decks on Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. Click through to the full post for my setlist.
Jesus on the Charts, 1957–1970
Pop songs with religious themes were not uncommon on the (secular) airwaves in the 1950s and 1960s. In this post I consider why that was the case, and provide a list of many such songs, some by very famous artists.
“As For Me and My House”: Christian Music Executives Roundtable
Journal of Popular Music Studies (2020). At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. This was a unique opportunity to hear Christian music executives discussing the unique challenges and issues they face in a popular music market for which religious identity is necessarily a core component. Roundtable participants have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, music super- vision, production, publishing, radio promotions, and recording, among other roles, and represent more than 100 years of cumulative experience as music industry professionals.
Archival Research Methods and Music Industry Pedagogy
Proceedings of the 2018 MEIEA International Summit (2018). In this article, I discuss the value of archival research and primary document sources to pedagogy in music industry education. I describe the archival methods I have employed in a research project documenting contemporaneous discourse about the corporate consolidation of Christian record labels within (secular) major record labels in the early 1990s.
Tuning in to Locality: Participatory Musicking at a Community Radio Station
The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking, Routledge (2018). This chapter examines how marketplace factors affect programming decisions made within radio stations at the macro level, and illustrates their local impacts through a case study of the Chicago Independent Radio Project (or CHIRP). I argue that stations like CHIRP facilitate public intimacy and personal relationships in local spaces and places via imagined communities that are more social than they are imaginary. Through participatory musicking, their staff, volunteers, and listeners help construct musical locality together.
“As for me and my house”: Nashville, the Home of Christian Music
IASPM-US roundtable (2018). For this roundtable, current and former Christian music professionals who have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, publishing, and radio promotions, among other roles, address the unique challenges that face Christian music. With many combined decades of experience in organizations large and small, our panelists are well-attuned to the city’s centeredness to the Christian music industries. We consider how Christian music has impacted Nashville, address the difficulties of maintaining a profitable business while conducting a ministry, and consider the boundaries of Christian music—increasingly porous as they are—in the broader contexts of globalized entertainment.
Steady Diet of Nothing: Affinities, Sacrifices, and Change at Record Fairs
SEM conference presentation (2006). Building on Will Straw’s confluence of cosmopolitanism (“attentiveness to change occurring elsewhere”) and connoisseurship in his study of communities within popular music, this paper explores issues of everyday practice and changing identity through an ethnography of record dealers—individuals who act both as mediators and audience members within popular music exchange—using record fair events as the primary public cultural space.
“Tell Everyone We’re Dead”: Underground Rock and Its Canon
MIDSEM conference presentation (2006). The rock canon, comprised of music that is surrounded by extensive critical discourse, transcends the temporal specificities inherent in popular music. What do critics find transcendent about canonical rock music? How does the emergence of a canon function for underground rock (music distributed primarily through non-commercial radio stations and independent record stores)? This paper approaches these questions through the context of ethnographic work at a non-commercial radio station in Chicago.
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