The Blogs of Others

Apologies for the lack of Rock Songbook posts lately . . . I’ve been in vacation and family mode, now replaced with beginning of semester mode.

So here’s a link to the other great conservative commentator on popular music, Scott Johnson of Powerline, talking today about Joan Baez . Johnson sometimes tags his music posts as Sunday Morning Coming Down, and his music posts are far more straightforward than my egg-heady Songbook ones, and much more about what’s good in music, particularly in live music today. What’s good to Johnson’s ears is usually in the rootsy, country-and-soul grounded traditions of American music. He’ll find no disagreement from me on that—my focus on rock is more for its cultural significance than for its musical quality.

More Songbook soon, and for newcomers, you can check out my posts by entering Rock Songbook into the First Things search bar—my “Blowin’ in the Wind” post on non-pacifistic pacifism serves as a nice expansion of Johnson’s comments on Baez’s sometimes un-peaceful “pacifism.”

Politics-wise, the post of the day seems to be Erick Erickson’s case that Santorum is a social-con statist , a big-government conservative. Sobering, yet as Erickson admits, not necessarily a case for Romney over Santorum. Also hard to judge, especially now, many of the votes listed, but do check out the list he provides.