Religious Listening

By: Joshua Kalin Busman (University of North Carolina, Pembroke) // A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 40 percent of religiously unaffiliated people identify as “spiritual, but not religious.” In 2010, USA Today reported that nearly 72 percent of millennials would describe themselves as “more spiritual than religious.” By all accounts, the “spiritual, but …

Autistic and Epileptic, In a Rock Concert

By: Amy Sequenzia (Rockledge, Florida) // Being in a loud rock concert—where there are blinking lights, no places to sit, and a lot of people very close to each other—can be very overwhelming for most Autistic people. Many will avoid such events. And loud noises and lights can trigger seizures in those with epilepsy.   …

Top 40: More Hits More Often

By: Ben Fong-Torres (San Francisco Chronicle) // From What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History, Fourth Edition, by John Covach and Andrew Flory (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time, not long ago, when radio was declared dead. In the early 1950s, television was …

Selma’s Music: The Politics of Commemorating Bloody Sunday

By: Felicia Miyakawa (Round Rock, TX) // In 1965, documentary filmmaker Stefan Sharff captured the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sharff’s style is sonically sparse: in the entire 17-minute film, we hear only the chopping of helicopter blades; the voice of Dr. King, taken from a recording of …

American Idol

By: Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario) // From What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History, Fourth Edition, by John Covach and Andrew Flory (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) Media scholar Henry Jenkins calls American Idol “the first killer app of media convergence.” It may also be the first killer app …

Hearing Gender in George Lucas’s Galaxy

By: Kendra Leonard (Loveland, OH) // George Lucas’s Star Wars IV: A New Hope was the movie hit of 1977. Its score, composed by John Williams, was equally popular, winning the Oscar for Best Film Score and three Grammy awards; the American Film Institute even declared it the greatest American movie score of all time. …