June 30, 2021
The mid-’90s to the early years of the 2000s were an interesting time in American music, when bands like Sum 41, Blink-182 and Green Day dominated the Top 40, and pop punk became an inescapable radio fixture. But along with the mainstreaming of punk rock, Christian bookstore shelves were stocked with dozens of albums from CCM’s own brand of pop punk music.
Here’s our look back at 15 of the Christian punk’s most memorable bands from the glory days of the genre. (Note: Even though there’s been a ton of punk-inspired bands since the movement’s heyday, our rankings which are, obviously, extremely official, and should not be questioned in the slightest focus on bands active in the late-’90s to early 2000s good old days. Also, like a lot of “Christian music” genres, some of the bands have disputed the label of being “Christian” bands. But, for the sake of our rankings, we’ve chosen artists who have put out music on Christian labels and are generally
Joan Crawford and Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce.
Kimberly Truhler s upcoming book includes anecdotes about iconic looks from Jean Louis black satin gown for Rita Hayworth in 1946 s Gilda to Lana Turner s look in The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Whether one is a hard-core fan of film noir or, as author Kimberly Truhler puts it, you re brand-spanking-new to the genre, it s hard not to be entranced by the fashions of those movies, from the legendary looks to the little-known.
Truhler s new book,
Film Noir Style: The Killer 1940s (GoodKnight Books, $45), gives viewers the backstories behind the costumes of the era. Anecdotes include the harness-like construction that went into Jean Louis black satin gown for Rita Hayworth in 1946 s
Once the U.S. entered the Second World War, it become necessary for Hollywood to address certain aspects of grim reality which post-Depression era cinema had specialized in ignoring. After the war had ended, reality seemed to become even grimmer, and filmmakers responded by showing audiences a version of the world in which Hollywood’s conservative, romantic values were turned against themselves in the form of bleak, unremitting fatalism.
Many of these films, retrospectively identified by European critics as noir, were unsentimental tragedies, in which even the smallest errors of judgement can lead to earthly damnation. Much of the time, the world in these films, heavily swathed in shadow, is revealed by the end to be much brighter than it appears, but in more than a few cases, the stories are even darker than the shadows.