As I mentioned this week, my great-great-grandfather moved his family from the Ukraine to Minnesota in the 1870s to escape Russian persecution. He was part of the first wave of Mennonites to leave. It got worse for the ones who stayed when the Bolsheviks and Anarchists came through with their assaults on a peaceful people who refused to fight back (though some of them finally did—you can only push people so far).
The day before President’s Day, I went to church for the first time since last summer. I’ve been watching online, well, religiously, since then, but it was a rare treat to go in and see friends and hear music being played live. Vivaldi on violin with our new sound system (which was desperately needed) alone was worth the trip. We had a congregational meeting afterward, so my stomach was starting to get into growling mode by the time I got home.
Torn Open (feat. Yvette Young) by Brothertiger
I know, I know, I just wrote about Brothertiger covers of 80s tunes last week in the newsletter. I have to tell you, though, that when I saw Brothertiger had covered brother/sister duo Sophie and Peter Johnston’s “Torn Open,” one of my favorite songs, I was more than pleasantly surprised. While going through my New Music playlist from Apple Music on Friday, like I usually do, I spotted the familiar song title.
I did watch some of the Super Bowl, despite my aversion to sports where people regularly get brain injuries. How about those crypto commercials? I had literally just pulled out my phone to click on the QR code bouncing around the screen when that one commercial ended in some crypto plea. It feels like a lot of people own too much crypto and want to sell it to the easily manipulated.
It turns out that not everything I learned in college en route to getting my psychology degree has held up under the weight of time and scrutiny. Take, for instance, Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs," which was featured prominently in my education and still holds a large percentage of mind share among the general population in the US. Alex R. Wendel, writing for Mere Orthodoxy, reveals that Maslow's pyramid focuses too heavily on physiological needs.
Spin magazine posted some rants from musicians and industry insiders who think we need to talk about Spotify. One of the most striking essays came from Kay Hanley, Letters to Cleo songwriter and co-executive director of Songwriters Of North America. She has some bones to pick with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.
When recording artists complained about the absurdity of having to get millions of streams just to make minimum wage, Daniel Ek told us to work harder and release more music.
The clip of Stephen Colbert expressing some basics about his faith is making the rounds (especially on Twitter). Tim Keller is an evangelical pastor who saw in the clip a potent witness on a popular talk show.
This is a brilliant example of how to be a Christian in the public square. Notice the witness, but in a form the culture can handle. We should desire to have more Christians in these spaces and give them grace as they operate.
FEEL GOOD ABOUT FEELING BAD by J U L I A • K W A M Y A
I met Julia Kwamya at a Radio Dept. show a few years ago. At the time, she went by the band name Germans. She had only released a few songs. I was already a fan because I had heard about her through Kurt Feldman, who produced some of her tracks. However, I had no idea she would be the opening act that night.
Welcome to the eighth issue of Week on the Web. I hope your week has gone well. After just under a year of not being able to work, I went back to my job this week, albeit at a fraction of the hours I was working previously. While I started off with a lot of energy, as the week went on, that began to wane. It's tough working with chronic illness that threatens to pull you under.
If you aren't up-to-date on why artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are upset with Spotify's bankrolling of Joe Rogan and the potentially harmful content on his podcast, Robert Wright has a balanced take that's worth reading. Wright goes into the episode with Dr. Robert Malone, and the claims that were made by the doctor don't hold up well under scrutiny. Artists want to avoid being associated with a music service that also subsidizes content that could be detrimental to those who take it to heart.
⚠️Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Book Of Boba Fett. Matt Poppe typically reviews the new Star Wars and Marvel shows for Christ and Pop Culture. He's now onto The Book of Boba Fett, though not reviewing every episode, as he has done with previous shows. So far, he hasn't been impressed.
And that’s because any guy who comes into town and thinks he’ll get it right where everyone else got it wrong tends to either fail miserably or become a weird, psycho cult leader.
The big news in the world of American Christianity this week seems to be the Vanity Fair profile of Jerry Falwell Jr. in which he admits to not being religious. What I found most interesting about this revelation is that it's not really one at all. I remember an interview with him on NPR in 2016 where he talked about then head of the ERLC for the Southern Baptist Convention, Russell Moore.
Sometimes, I feel like I need to stop ruminating on the "deep cleavages in American society," as this piece from the Bush Institute refers to them. I wonder if it would be helpful to remember the turbulence of the sixties, just to have some frame of reference for comparison, but it doesn't seem to be doing much good for my mom's outlook. She's just as exasperated with our current climate as the rest of us.
This week, I gave in to the hype and started playing Wordle and quickly became addicted to my daily fix of puzzling through scrambled letters. Matt Birchler has a list of the things that make Wordle great.
This is a play on some very old word game, I'm sure, but that doesn't diminish it. Wordle is great because of how its executed and all the little things it does right that add up to something many can't stop playing.
Barrie is another band that was recommended to me by the Apple Music algorithm. I immediately checked out their back catalog and noticed that they had a video for the song that I had discovered, "Darjeeling." I was particularly drawn to the video because it is set mostly at The Crane Estate. The Crane Estate is a sprawling piece of property in Ipswich, MA, where a young Cornelius Crane (AKA, Chevy Chase) spent his childhood summers.
Professor at a Christian college, Chad Ragsdale, has a blog post in which he embeds an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that featured Dr. Robert Malone. He writes about the episode in the first paragraph of his post.
This morning I finished listening to what is undoubtedly one of the most listened to podcast episodes in the history of podcasting. You can listen to it here. In fact, I would encourage you to listen to it not because I’m convinced that everything said is absolutely true, but because being exposed to ideas that run contrary to conventional narratives is helpful and even necessary for clarifying our own thinking.
In our county, mask mandates in schools continue to be a hot button issue. There are parents who blame the enforcement of mask rules for deteriorating mental health amongst students. These parents are frustrated and seeing their kids struggling encourages them to want to do something.
“The dehumanization, isolation and fear mongering caused by all these mandates and COVID hysteria is literally killing our children,” Colleen Fleming, a parent, told the school board on Tuesday.
Andy Nicolaides over at the Dent urges us to take it easy on ourselves when it comes to social media. Look around the interwebs and you will find no shortage of people berating themselves up for their time spent on social media or trying to concoct ways to curb their use of those platforms.
A big one is the use of Twitter. A huge amount of people are using this service multiple times a day, for various reasons.
Last week, I wrote about some musical favorites from 2021. This week, I'm posting the video from one of my favorite songs that isn't from last year, but that I discovered last year. I think this one surfaced due to the Apple Music recommendation algorithm, which has gotten really good. I ask Siri to play a song on the diminutive but fairly powerful HomePod Mini, then, once the song is done, the device magically plays other music that I like.
Image source: Artturi Jalli/UnsplashMy favorite Christmas piece this season was How Christmas Changed Everything by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren in the NYT. She goes back to the early days of Christianity to observe how the life and death of Christ impacted believers in such a profound way that they defied deeply embedded cultural norms. Warren explains that our familiarity with Christianity in the West tends to make us forget how much it changed the rules for people, who were, in every ancient society, involved in some sort of caste system.
For this Friday Night Video, Spectres comes your way with some powerful, muscular post-punk. At first, I thought this was a fan-made video with the traditional fuzzy retro found footage. It wasn’t until the band was shown in the same style that I realized it was a legit official video for the song. This one has been in heavy rotation as part of my The Noise That I Loved Best 2021 playlist.
Matt Birchler writes in Photography Needs to be Fun about how the new Glass photography network feels a bit too stilted and more like Unsplash than Instagram.
Meanwhile, Twitter and instagram are teeming with pros, amateurs, and everyone else, and they’re just more rich photography experiences for me. Social networks have cultures that form around them, and my feeling is that the culture in Glass is way too buttoned up and monolithic.
This is definitely the most playful music video I've seen in some time. You have Hazel English, mostly dressed like a school girl from a private prep school, goofing around in fountains, reading in the grass, and well, attending school. The song exudes a twee charm with a suitable theme about crushing on someone and following them around like a puppy dog. I love the urgency in the guitar solo that closes out the song.
Austin Kleon quotes Bill O’Hanlon when he talks about the four energies for writing. The first two (the upper quadrants) being positive, the second two (the lower quadrants) are the negative energies.
BlissedBlessedPissedDissedI’d rather be writing from the upper two quadrants, but I have to admit to be expressing myself from the “pissed” category today.
Much has been written about how the call to get vaccinated against Covid-19, the urge (or mandate) to wear masks, etc.
Amazon employees yet again have reason to complain about their treatment from the company as it proposes reinstating a ban on worker’s cell phones in its warehouses. The employee perspective is that their phones can alert them to dangerous conditions, such as the tornado activity that ended up ripping apart an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, something that they don’t trust Amazon to do.
The concerns about phone access highlight the deep distrust between executives who make rules focused on productivity and efficiency to gain a competitive advantage, and hourly front-line workers who often fear their safety is secondary to moving packages.
