The history of frum popular Jewish music and other misc.

I've got a ton of things to blog about tonight, but after painting my living room twice (don't ask) I'm beat. Instead of trying to be clever and interesting, I'll get by with pointing to recent cleverness and interestingness out there in weboland.

First, Chaim at Life of Rubin wrote an interesting piece on the recent history of frum popular music. (By frum, I'm mostly referring to Chassidim & Modern Orthodox.) It generated a lot of comments and a great followup piece by YK of 'YK's Jewish Music Form' speculating on the impact of Chassidim in general and Chabad in particular on frum popular music.

The Forward applauds as Conservative "Synagogues become rock concerts" and laments the death (or at least dearth) of Jewish parody music.

Haaretz writes about the rock concert thing also.

You can go vote in JVibe's third annual JVibe Music Awards competition. I'm always interested in who makes the cut in competitions like this one. This year has lots of interesting choices and lots of missed opportunities, go check it out.