Latest news with #NewAge
New Statesman
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Lorde's Brat moment
After four years of not-quite-wilderness, Lorde has returned to the charts. It's music, recession style. At the end of April she released a breakup song called 'What Was That'. The song's anthemic structure, metallic production and handheld music video all lead away from the New Age setup of her last album and into the tail end of the do-it-yourself 'indie sleaze' era from which she originally emerged. She followed it up this week with 'Man of the Year', a genderbending ballad about becoming your ex. Like 'What Was That', its video evokes several things that all come from 2013: there's a bit of the original 'Royals' video, a gasp of Lars von Trier's dimly-lit Nymphomaniac films, and, thanks to some symbolic breast tape, a vague visual idea of the Free the Nipple movement. Perhaps this nostalgic tendency is a way to draw fans back into the original Lorde project. But the rest of the album rollout feels darker and edgier. It's called Virgin and a press release claims it will be '100% WRITTEN IN BLOOD;' the album cover features an ultrasound image of a female pelvis with an IUD in it. An all-caps mission statement sounds slightly too much like the one written for Charli XCX's Brat, the album of last summer; where Charli wrote 'THE ARTWORK WILL BE… OBNOXIOUS, ARROGANT AND BOLD… WE MUST CULTIVATE DESIRE, CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION', Lorde responds 'THE COLOUR OF THE ALBUM IS CLEAR… FULL TRANSPARENCY…MY FEMININITY…RAW, PRIMAL, INNOCENT, ELEGANT.' Brat shot Charli XCX into the mainstream and simultaneously gave Lorde a route back to indie-pop acclaim. The Brat track track 'Girl, So Confusing' covered the emotional fallout of a decade-long not-quite feud between the two singers, who had emerged at about the same time as doppelgangers and alt-pop competitors. The track's cultural afterlife seemed planned out from the beginning: 'One day we might make some music / The Internet would go crazy'. The internet went crazy, but it was always going to – the merging of confessional songwriting and pop culture in-jokes meant everyone could feel like part of the story. Any mortal artist can be forgiven for wanting to create their own Brat moment; to define the soundscape of the year; to bathe in such acute commercial success. And it is possible that Lorde in 2025 has even more to prove than Charli in 2024. Lorde was a smart teenager – she dropped an era-defining alt-pop album, largely disappeared from the public eye and then dropped another one. Her whole brand was based on distance, both from her fanbase and her real-life attachments. She was only 16 on the release of Royals, and the child-prodigy veneer created a lasting mystique (conspiracy theorists claimed she was actually 45). She was known for dodging the usual trappings of pop stardom, like tight choreography and sexualised photoshoots. Moral ambiguity ruled her lyrics, But the aura was shattered on the 2021 release of her third album, Solar Power. The music videos were her first to incorporate bright daylight, back-up dancers and full-body bikini shots; the music was languid and folky and boring. She managed genuine sexual provocation for about a second on the album cover, which placed a camera under her bare legs. With Solar Power she negated her core persona. With Virgin she is trying to claw it back. And with that, the attention and critical acclaim lacking from her most recent era. It will not be so simple. Lorde's nipple-taping and multitude-containing femininity is clearly supposed to shock, but now we have left the 2010s (when Lorde was last pop star supreme) it barely lands. Provocation means nothing when there is no constant audience to provoke, and when you have to rely on an unstable algorithm instead of the overarching narratives of the mainstream press. All of her vacillating and re-referencing is bad news for a modern musician: the death of the monoculture also means the death of the celebrity rebrand. Pop music must have a constant visual identity, because it now arrives without a face; catchy parts of songs get big in the background of short videos and are quickly forgotten afterwards. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Instead we have had Lorde, the histrionic adolescent with Melodrama and Pure Heroine. Then Lorde the sun-god, under Solar Power's visual language. Now she is reverting to her teenage self, with extra gender-bending addition. There are still certain pop personae who genuinely come from the Soundcloud wilds; who are supposed to be above it all. They're ruined if they behave too self-consciously, reference too much or show any sign of deliberate self-marketing. Lorde is one of them. Her existing mythos forbids her from deliberately stepping forwards or backwards in time; she 'played against type' just by appearing on Brat, which broke with past convention by placing her for the first time in a distinct universe of other leftfield pop singers. It feels wrong to see her building on recent internet hype, or on her past career, or even on the postmodern assortment of references underpinning Solar Power. She is supposed to be a soothsayer, and she needs to be able to see the future. [See more: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
Perth Now
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Tragedy as Parks And Recreation actor shot dead after home destroyed by fire
Jonathan Joss, known for his role as Ken Hotate in Parks and Recreation and as the voice behind John Redcorn in King of the Hill, was killed in a San Antonio shooting on Sunday. A suspect, 56-year-old Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja, was taken into custody and booked on a murder charge, the San Antonio Police Department said. Officers were dispatched to Dorsey Drive around 7pm Sunday for a shooting and arrived to find the actor, whose legal name is Jonathan Joss Gonzales, near the roadway after he was shot, police said. Authorities attempted life-saving measures until EMS arrived and pronounced Joss, 59, dead. Joss's family home in San Antonio was destroyed in a fire in January. An online fundraiser stated three of his dogs had been killed in the fire and raised more than $10,000. Joss was shot while collecting mail with his husband, Tristan Kern De Gonzales, from their burnt-out home, according to an online statement. 'A man started yelling homophobic slurs at us, he then raised a gun from his lap and fired,' Kern De Gonzales said. 'When the man fired, Jonathan pushed me out of the way. He saved my life.' Jonathon Joss's husband, Tristan Kern De Gonzales, released a statement on social media. Credit: Instagram Joss's husband said he had allegedly been killed by someone who 'could not stand the sight of two men loving each other', and implied that the same targeted homophobia had earlier resulted in someone allegedly burning down their house. 'I was with him when he passed. I told him how much he was loved,' Kern De Gonzales said. 'To everyone who supported him, his fans, his friends, know that he valued you deeply. He saw you as family.' Joss was the voice of John Redcorn in the Fox animated series from seasons 2 through 13. John Redcorn was a 'New Age healer' and masseur, who was always addressed by his full name or Mr Redcorn. A new season of King of the Hill is set to debut on Hulu in August. In a credit sequence shared Friday, John Redcorn is seen driving by in his classic tan Jeep. Joss also played recurring character Ken Hotate in Parks and Recreation, and had roles in Tulsa King and the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven. His most recent acting credit was in 2023 for voicing a character in the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty video game. Joss told local reporters then that he did not have a job. Representatives and family of Joss could not immediately be reached for comment.
7NEWS
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- 7NEWS
Jonathan Joss, Parks And Recreation and King Of The Hill actor, shot dead
Jonathan Joss, known for his role as Ken Hotate in Parks and Recreation and as the voice behind John Redcorn in King of the Hill, was killed in a San Antonio shooting on Sunday. A suspect, 56-year-old Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja, was taken into custody and booked on a murder charge, the San Antonio Police Department said. Officers were dispatched to Dorsey Drive around 7pm Sunday for a shooting and arrived to find the actor, whose legal name is Jonathan Joss Gonzales, near the roadway after he was shot, police said. Authorities attempted life-saving measures until EMS arrived and pronounced Joss, 59, dead. Joss's family home in San Antonio was destroyed in a fire in January. An online fundraiser stated three of his dogs had been killed in the fire and raised more than $10,000. Joss was shot while collecting mail with his husband, Tristan Kern De Gonzales, from their burnt-out home, according to an online statement. 'A man started yelling homophobic slurs at us, he then raised a gun from his lap and fired,' Kern De Gonzales said. 'When the man fired, Jonathan pushed me out of the way. He saved my life.' Joss's husband said he had allegedly been killed by someone who 'could not stand the sight of two men loving each other', and implied that the same targeted homophobia had earlier resulted in someone allegedly burning down their house. 'I was with him when he passed. I told him how much he was loved,' Kern De Gonzales said. 'To everyone who supported him, his fans, his friends, know that he valued you deeply. He saw you as family.' Joss was the voice of John Redcorn in the Fox animated series from seasons 2 through 13. John Redcorn was a 'New Age healer' and masseur, who was always addressed by his full name or Mr Redcorn. A new season of King of the Hill is set to debut on Hulu in August. In a credit sequence shared Friday, John Redcorn is seen driving by in his classic tan Jeep. Joss also played recurring character Ken Hotate in Parks and Recreation, and had roles in Tulsa King and the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven. His most recent acting credit was in 2023 for voicing a character in the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty video game. Joss told local reporters then that he did not have a job.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jonathan Joss, 'King of the Hill' voice actor, killed in San Antonio shooting
Jonathan Joss, the voice actor best known as John Redcorn from "King of the Hill," was killed in a San Antonio shooting on Sunday, police said. A suspect, 56-year-old Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja, was taken into custody and booked on a murder charge, the San Antonio Police Department said. Officers were dispatched to Dorsey Drive around 7 p.m. Sunday for a shooting and arrived to find the actor, whose legal name is Jonathan Joss Gonzales, near the roadway after he was shot, police said. Authorities attempted life-saving measures until EMS arrived and pronounced Joss, 59, dead. Joss was the voice of John Redcorn in the Fox animated series from seasons 2 through 13. John Redcorn was a 'New Age healer' and masseur, who was always addressed by his full name or "Mr. Redcorn." A new season of "King of the Hill" revival is set to debut on Hulu in August. In a credit sequence shared Friday, John Redcorn is seen driving by in his classic tan Jeep. Joss also played Ken Hotate in "Parks and Recreation" and had roles in "Tulsa King" and the 2016 remake of "The Magnificent Seven." His most recent acting credit was in 2023 for voicing a character in the "Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty" video game. Joss' family home in San Antonio was destroyed in a fire in January. An online fundraiser stated three of his dogs had been killed in the fire and raised more than $10,000. Joss told local reporters then that he did not have a job. Representatives and family of Joss could not immediately be reached for comment. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
The Paradox of Our ‘Secular Age'
In Durham, North Carolina, just a few miles from major universities, teaching hospitals, and other temples of science, the Holy Spirit remains formidable. When I attended a gathering at Catch the Fire Church one Friday evening last year, a petite blond woman made her way down the aisle, laying her hand on heads and shoulders, calling on the Holy Spirit. Her magenta tunic glowed under the can lights. She breathed hard into her microphone. Here and there, the woman, a Toronto-based evangelist named Carol Arnott, paused to point a finger down a row of worshippers and shout, 'Fire on them, Lord!' Knees buckled; people collapsed back into their seats. As Arnott continued her circuit, a man in a hoodie—the 'catcher'—followed closely behind, ready to help any person 'slain in the Spirit.' One touch from her hand sent more supplicants falling to the floor. 'Don't get up too soon,' Arnott urged one dazed individual lying on the carpet. 'You're like a steak, marinating.' She preached as she walked, describing a vision in which Jesus gave her a bouquet of lilies of the valley and adorned her with a flowered crown and wedding veil. 'The bridegroom is coming. Are you ready?' Arnott asked. It was hard to hear her over the moans and guffaws, the bursts of holy laughter. Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest-growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy, just as Jesus's first apostles did 2,000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves 'born-again.' This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion's most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements. [Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival] Charismatic Christians aren't the only ones embracing a spirituality that might seem out of place in our modern, rationalist age. Eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy. During my time researching charismatic Christianity for my new book, Spellbound, I also interviewed podcast bros who hawk ayahuasca in Silicon Valley and self-described spiritual coaches who offer treatments ranging from Reiki to reviewing their clients' past lives. At a New Age congregation outside Denver, I attended a healing workshop on harnessing the invisible energies of the universe to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as a shamanic drum circle where a former software engineer named Greg led participants on a journey to the spirit world to meet their power animals. If this is a 'secular age,' then perhaps we need to rethink what secularization means. These thriving subcultures are, in part, proof that channeling the Holy Spirit or seeking an animal spirit guide doesn't carry the same stigma in America that such otherworldly adventuring once did. While I was visiting Catch the Fire, one pastor surveyed the auditorium full of chuckling, sprawling worshippers and declared that 'we choose to look silly.' But he no longer has to worry—as Christians who spoke in tongues did a century ago—about police shutting down the worship service or local doctors asking a judge to declare the worshippers legally insane. Nowadays, Americans are more inclined to shrug off other people's theological eccentricities and save their purity tests for politics. Charismatic Christians preach a message that is as much about letting go of inhibitions as submitting to the strictures of the Bible. Early in his ministry, Randy Clark, a pastor with long-standing connections to Catch the Fire Church, confessed to a friend that when he watched others get slain in the Spirit, he didn't feel anything special himself. The friend told him: 'You just resist it. Next time, don't fake it, but don't fight it either. Just become a sail in the wind.' Clark followed the instructions, and the next time someone prayed for him, 'I had a physical manifestation,' he told me. 'It started in my right thumb. I saw it moving, and thought, That is weird. I could stop that. But I made a decision. I'm going to use my will to be open, to not stop anything, not work up anything.' Openness to the Holy Spirit does not preclude adherence to orthodox religious teaching. Indeed, most charismatic churches subscribe to a traditional interpretation of the Bible, and plenty of Catholics—a distinctly doctrinal group—call themselves charismatic. Alpha, one of the most successful evangelistic enterprises in the world today, emphasizes the tangible experience of God's presence alongside classical arguments for the truth of Christianity. Founded in 1977 by a charismatic Anglican parish in London, Alpha evolved into an 11-week course on the basics of Christianity that is now available in 112 languages worldwide and culminates in a prayer-filled 'Holy Spirit weekend.' 'People who have been quite skeptical often experience something powerful, and then they try to figure out what happened,' Graham Tomlin, an Anglican priest who has been involved with Alpha for many years, told me. 'As a means of evangelism, this is not primarily a set of programs, or the explanation of doctrines—although it does that—but at its heart, an invitation to encounter God.' From a certain angle, these groups are merely taking mainstream aspirations to their supernatural conclusion. The rising popularity of Spirit-filled worship and emphasis on personal contact with God has paralleled secular society's exaltation of private experience over tradition or reasoned argument. Charismatic worship began surging across Protestant and Catholic churches in the 1960s, in tandem with pop psychology's increasing stress on 'self-actualization' and authenticity as the primary conditions of happiness. Growing interest in individualistic, experiential religion also dovetails with the erosion of Americans' trust in established institutions and expertise over the past half century. [From the February 2025 issue: The Army of God comes out of the shadows] Some religious leaders are wary of taking this subjective impulse too far. 'The emphasis on feelings and emotions is a good one, but the danger is that it starts to counter objective truth. It becomes: 'I feel it, therefore it's my truth,'' says Nicky Gumbel, an Anglican priest who led the global expansion of the Alpha course and remains involved with the program. 'Lived experience becomes the arbiter of everything.' Yet self-optimization is the riptide of American culture. It pulls hard against any traditional mandate to find and proclaim universal truth. At the New Age congregation I visited in Denver, the minister preached that all humans should claim their 'unique, authentic, God-expressed self.' On another occasion, a spiritual coach told me: 'I've done the new-moon and the full-moon ceremony. I've practiced with crystals quite a bit and sage, sweat lodges. I've done so many things, just trying to find my way, what feels right.' Understanding this cultural landscape requires resisting the temptation to reduce these groups to their voting patterns. Of course, many New Age spiritual experimenters would clash with charismatic Christians on a range of moral questions and policy issues. But the default culture-war rubric disguises the deeper, pre-political impulses that these varieties of American religion have in common: a desire for tangible contact with divine power, and trust in personal experience over so-called experts. Together, these attitudes explain the country's politics better than any theory resting on blue-versus-red narratives. This combination of spiritual hunger and distrust of elite authority invites a certain type of leader. Over the past decade, Donald Trump has drawn supporters into a story about America's breakdown and recovery that is more spiritual than political. He is the president of an anti-institutional, tradition-skeptical, experience-worshipping age, when fewer Americans go to church but plenty of them follow gurus on YouTube. The feelings of frustration and grievance that a candidate personifies are more important than his policy platform. His message that institutions are weak, corrupt, and deserve no loyalty; his tacit promise that you can imagine prosperity into existence regardless of what the economists say; his personal domination of the Republican Party: All of this has succeeded because public confidence in every institution, not just traditional churches, has collapsed. That cynicism extends to the workplace—the institution that makes the greatest stamp on most people's daily life. Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly affirm trust in their organization's leaders. Meanwhile, the social habits that we associate with a more devout, less tolerant age—policing boundaries, banishing heretics, expecting divine retribution to rain down on your enemies—have migrated from churches to politics. Many Americans are ready to put their faith in a political savior who says he was 'saved by God.' [From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump] Even as partisan politics have come to display the dynamics of fundamentalist sects, there are signs that the 60-year slide of organized religion in the West has slowed. And it might be starting a quiet recovery. After steadily rising for 20 years, the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation seems to have leveled off. More young men are going to church, and many of them are joining Catholic or Orthodox congregations. In England and Wales, Gen Z is leading a spike in church attendance, which has risen from 8 to 12 percent of the population in just six years. During my reporting, I kept meeting people who had grown tired of cynicism and DIY meaning-making and made their way into ancient institutions and supernatural faith—such as Christine Flynn, who lives with her family outside Milwaukee. She spent her young-adult years perusing the New Age sections at bookstores and seeking self-actualization through her own instincts. 'I figured I'd do the research, and wherever my thoughts landed, that was correct. I didn't need to talk to anyone,' she told me. But after becoming a mother, and watching her atheist husband explore Christianity, she 'got tired of being so cynical.' She began reading the books on Christianity that her husband left lying around. Now a mom of six who homeschools her kids, Flynn published a memoir last year about her path into the Catholic Church. Conversions such as Flynn's are part of a global story. Both Christianity and Islam are exploding outside the West. Worldwide, the proportion of people who identify as atheists—about 7 percent, according to some studies—will likely decrease in coming years. Nicky Gumbel, the Anglican priest who works with Alpha, told me that the program has found some of its greatest success in Chinese-speaking communities that are reckoning with a history of communism. 'Pure secularism doesn't satisfy,' he says. In a globalized society such as the United States, prophecies of the long-term collapse of religious faith and practice seem premature. Humans are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we yearn to impose order on the chaos of existence and worship some source of ultimate meaning. As the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his 1989 book, Sources of the Self, everyone aspires to a sense of fullness—a 'pattern of higher action' that connects their lives 'with some greater reality or story.' He warned that 'it would be a mistake to think that this kind of formulation has disappeared even for unbelievers in our world.' Secularization may reshape how we act on these instincts, but it has not eliminated them: Unbelievers will always have more in common with the Holy Rollers than they realize. Article originally published at The Atlantic
