NPR has a pretty cool piece up about Neutral Milk Hotel genius Jeff Mangum. He’s playing at Coachella this year along with acts like James, Mazzy Star, and Noel Gallagher (and little indie bands like Radiohead and some hip-hop up-and-comers called Dre and Snoop).
I am, however, going to a Beach Boys 50th Reunion Tour show in May and am beyond stoked. Brian Wilson will be there. That’s all that matters.
Jonathan Fitzgerald and David Session still do many things, but I don’t believe Patrol is one of them. I don’t believe the site has been updated since 2015, which is perhaps around the time David started working at The Daily Beast and Jonathan began a PhD program, though I’m not exactly sure. The piece linked below is tied up with my having become around the same time a contributor to The Huffington Post. Those days were like the wild west. No one knew how online publishing was going to work out, and we were all doing lots of things for free. Prospecting, really.
I have a new article at Patrol Magazine today. It’s about indie music and faith.
Thank you, Jonathan Fitzgerald and David Sessions, for working with the piece and publishing it.
From 2009.
I am fascinated by the idea, put forward in the lit seminar I’m taking, that in the middle of the 20th century it was fashionable for artists and writers to convert to Catholicism. I’d never heard that before.
I was reading about Robert Lowell’s transformation from Boston-bred Puritan/Congregationalist heir to Catholic, and found a consensus (among half a dozen online sources, anyway) that his conversion was an explicit rejection of the WASPy, industrial mores of his upbringing and native Northeastern context. Max Weber might concur. There’s also at least some religious longing here, though, says A.O. Scott:
The poems are populated by figures from New England’s past, including some of Lowell’s own ancestors. But Lowell, descended on both sides from prominent Yankee families, had undertaken a twofold rebellion against his inheritance, rejecting Harvard for Kenyon College and the bleached-out Puritanism of the Congregational Church for a notably sanguinary, “fire-breathing” Catholicism.
Scott’s full article here.
Because I’m a soft little soul, I know a few things about indie music. We’ve talked about Sufjan/Flannery before, but the more I think about the number of good, working indie bands out there that also happen to be plaintively Christian, the more I wonder if their influx since the mid-late 90s has something to do with secular suburban kids rebelling against the norms and expectations of their settings. I won’t bore you with tales of my own Tenth-Grade Nothingness or an uninformed discourse on how the straightedge movement corroborates this idea. More on “Christian” art that’s still…good…in this article on emusic.com.
Chris Cocca 