The Sacred and Profane

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Unbound Book Festival, Columbia, Mo.

on August 04, 2019

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Fellow Panelists: Joan Morgan. Wesley Brown and Shane Bauer

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Night Rally: Youth and Fascism Today

In June 1986, I published my very first music essay, "Night Rally: Youth and Fascism Today" in Vol. 37 of Maximum Rock & Roll , a seminal punk scene zine out of the SF Bay area founded by Tim Yohanan. The late editor and founder of the famed Gilman Street venue was concerned about the rising violence at the Gilman shows between encroaching neo-fascist skinheads and anti-fascist left-leaning punks aka anti-racists skins. Slamming hard, the pit was turning red with the blood of angry youth. Scene schisms are turf wars, ideological and cultural conflicts, contested terrain, typical of oppositional youth music subcultures where politics, race, class, and tastes converge, collide and sometimes and explode. Often, these political and cultural convictions are foundational--the underpinnings of a particular scene. At the time, I was completing my Ph.D., and has been very involved in the early NYC punk scene. By the late '80' punk had morphed into an edgier, more

Joey Ramone Cranks Deviance Theory

In 2017, in the 3rd edition of McGraw Hill Education’s textbook Experience Sociology edited by David Croteau and William Hoynes , I was invited to contribute an essay profiling my own engagement in deviant music subcultures that celebrate alienation and marginality, especially punk. The Ramones openly celebrated the Wart Hog , the Cretin , Pinhead, Outsider , and the Time Bomb promoting an ethic of inclusion they practiced in song, deed and spirit. Their music lamented the permanent psychic damage sustained from systematic social rejection and humiliation and made us laugh. So it was my great joy to put Joey Ramone in a college textbook, honoring him as a hero of generations of outcasts worldwide. I imagined him chuckling, “Yeah Donna, a real textbook case.” The study of deviance is a great way to teach students fundamental sociological concepts—norms, mores, sanctions. But for me it’s been sweet revenge. Early on, labeling theorists such as Howard Becker ar

Superflumina Babylonis: The Career of a Song in History

In the 16th Century Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music . Motet Superflumina Babylonis was part of his early church liturgy project. A random discovery, mesmerized, I've been rotating it almost daily since 2003. Ethereal, celestial, the song transports me to higher ground. But I don’t speak Latin, so I traced it through history, back to its origin, Psalm 137. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=N__s5SLd3B0 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.   May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you,   if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy… Psalm 137 The rivers of Bab

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