"I come from a family of ministers. And my great-grandfather was what they used to call in Pennsylvania a "pow-wow man," which is basically a male witch. It goes back to the old Germanic and English things -it's like the evil eye, keeping the crops from getting the blight, and the cows from getting sick, and all that stuff. It's just old, old folky things. He was a healer, he used to heal people's warts and give them all kinds of potions and all that kind of stuff. He also had an evil side. And I heard some stories about him. [laughs] I never knew him, but I heard lots of stories about him ... I see what musicians do, especially singers, as a primal thing. It comes from howling around the campfire. Everybody was sitting around whatever, in the earliest of early times-- pre-literate times, how's that? Pre-conscious times. And pre-sentient times. And somebody would be the guy that would start the howling. And that's what I do."
"A lot of people go through that kind of thing. And I went through it, and I retained a lot of it, and I discarded a lot of it. My life was unbalanced at the time, when I was doing that."
Sadly the interviewer doesn't do much follow-up on Hall's current religious/philosophical beliefs. Considering his past interest in Crowley, and his family tree (not to mention his singing ability), I'm sure most Witchcraft traditions would recruit him in a heartbeat!
I never really paid attention to Britpop the first time around. I mean, I wasn't completely unaware of what was going on in England. I picked up a Charlatans single here or a Happy Mondays single there, but by the mid-ninties I was more into the holy trinity of PJ Harvey, Bjork, and Tori Amos to be perfectly honest. I eventually grew to appreciate Blur, Pulp, and Elastica, but it was certainly after the massive Britpop-boom of the time.
The book "Phonogram" follows the exploits of David Kohl, a magician who taps the power of music. A "Phonomancer".
"Music is Magic. You know this already. You've known this from the first time a record sent a divine shiver down your spine or when a band changed the way you dressed forever. How does something that's just noises arranged in sequence do that? No-one knows. It's just - magic. Everyone knows that. It's just that some realize that it's more than metaphor. The people in question are the Phonomancers, these urban-pop-obsessive magicians who channel and exploit this magic to achieve their desires."
It just so happens that David Kohl gained his awareness of magic during the rise of Britpop, and the entire series name-checks, rhapsodizes, and editorializes on that heady period in UK culture. I won't go in detail over the plot, but if you have any affinity for comics or pop-culture you'll be pleased with this book. The comic in turn lead me to an altogether different work, John Harris' "Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock" which lays out the rise of the English-centric attitude in the face of Grunge dominance.
The book doesn't have much of a happy ending. While some participants in Britpop (willing or not) have gone on to successful post-Britpop careers, it seemed to effectively cripple the English indie scene created during the rise of Punk. Even the Britpop-loving Phonogram references the time as a "cultural Chernobyl". But then the mid-90s seemed to be the last gasp of "movement" oriented music. As the Internet swelled everyone's music collections, the need for generation-defining unified scenes seems to fade more every year. We are now in the age where a scene might gain critical and fan attention for a year or two (see: Electroclash, Freak-folk, and Post-post-Punk), but then fade back into the mists where only the true believers can find them.
Perhaps Britpop signaled the final co-opting of the punk era. A bit of cultural leftovers that needed to be tossed before something truly new could happen. Then again maybe music journalists and obsessives like me tend to read far too much importance into bands. I'm just glad that I've gained a deeper enjoyment of some of the Britpop bands, and feel I have a better idea of their cultural importance. In any case I think the idea of a "phonomancer" is cool.
[This is a music entry cross-posted from The Wild Hunt blog, sorry if you end up reading this twice! More excerpts from my book will be posted this week.]
"Yet with her soon-to-be-released double album Theology, the Grammy Award-winning O'Connor will make a foray into the mainstream Christian music market by distributing the album in major Christian retail outlets, including Family Christian Stores and Lifeway Christian Stores ... The move, O'Connor says, is not as out of character as it may seem. "By blood and by birth I am a Catholic, and I am extremely inspired by that," she says in a telephone interview from Dublin. "I wanted to acknowledge music as a way of talking to God." But will the Christian market buy it?"
"I guess it's called gospel oak because the songs are hymns, really, hymns / lullabies which i dedicated to the idea of God which existed before 'religion', in inverted commas, came along. It was basically the idea of God being a feminine principal, God the mother, which was symbolized by the oak because it's such an ancient, ancient, tradition. Also the worship of God the mother used to take place in what they would call sacred oak groves - so that's basically why."
"Is it a good time to mention her ordination as Mother Bernadette Marie in 1999? 'That area is better for me not to talk about.' Her mouth is set. 'I shouldn't talk about it at all: it's a very private thing.'"
But lest anyone think the singer has truly repented from her theological roamings, recent comments seem to find her as heretical as ever (at least by the standards of the Christian audience she is trying to win over).
"I went to a convent, but I didn't imbibe any of the negative things about Catholicism. The fact there was badness about it didn't stop me from taking on board what was good about it so I'm equally inspired by Catholicism as I am by Hinduism and Sufism and all the other religions which inspire me."
