I recently completed a small case study concerning the Beatles in the charts, and I found some really interesting things about the top records of the '60s. It has been quite educational about the uses and pitfalls of using chart rankings, especially journalistic summaries. Today I'm going to tell you about a few of my... Continue Reading →
Recently I started reading Into the Mystic, by Christopher Hill, which is fairly new (2017). I'm only a few chapters in, but so far it's fantastic. It's a look at how the '60s became a "detonator" to "explode visionary music into the mainstream" (from the back cover). It's a nice counterpart to Rob Young's comprehensive... Continue Reading →
We left off before the holidays with some background on how medieval fantasy suddenly became mainstream in the '60s. There were also some other semi unintentional mirrorings of the values of the Victorian medieval revivals, where a previously fringe elements advocating for pre-industrial communal lifestyles also became more mainstream. With these cultural threads established, let's... Continue Reading →
In my last post, I tried to begin answering why medieval fantasy suddenly begins to flourish in the midst of the Space Age (which encompasses the end of WWII to about the mid-60s), in terms of some of the basic facts—namely, a bunch of medievalist fantasy sagas came out in the '50s, which were written... Continue Reading →
If you lived through the '90s, you probably remember that strange-upon-reflection moment where everyone was into Gregorian Chant. It's pretty strange that a religious tradition that is more than 1000 years old, and not even that common in actual Roman catholic practice these days, was suddenly a hot topic. The album Chant, recorded by Benedictine monks,... Continue Reading →
Katarina von Sporken
Violent Brain Fever 