CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and directs the station’s music film festival. Morgan also interviews authors of music and pop culture books for the New Books Network podcast.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Frank Zappa's America, with the following results:
Today is Independence Day as I write this. Here in Chicago, summer is in full swing, with the city having recently gone through a heatwave and the holiday weekend promising temperatures approaching triple digits. A small storm passed through this morning, transforming the heat into the kind of mugginess that makes clothes uncomfortable, rising humidity mixing with sweat in a way that crosses the threshold of being oppressive. It is something everyone has to deal with, albeit in different ways. Some are forced to endure the weather in ways that push the limits of their own health and safety, finding reprieve where they can under the shade of a tree or through the straw of an iced beverage. While others have the means to escape into a manufactured oasis, with air conditioning creating the illusion they are removed from the realities of their environment outside. Like the waves that crash on the shores of Lake Michigan, some bigger than others, these stifling summer days retreat and return, providing a whiplashed form of respite. One unbearable day giving way to another that is less so before an even worse day announces its arrival.Visit Bradley Morgan's website.
As we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial next year to mark its 250th birthday, the first 4th of July of Donald Trump’s second presidential term not only hints at the climatological challenges to come, but also serves as an allegory as to the impact his administration will have on the growing existential threat toward democratic and constitutional values. As a harbinger of what comes next, with heat indices rising in tandem with seething existential dread, the extreme temperatures and our own respective ways of managing its effects on each of us speaks to the challenges that the New Normal will demand from all Americans in the coming years.
Published in June by LSU Press, my book Frank Zappa’s America examines the musician’s messaging through song, tracing the means by which Zappa created passionate, at times troubling, art that combats conservatism in its many forms, including the threat posed by white Christian nationalism. More than examining Zappa’s music as a document of its time, my book speaks to the relevancy of his lyrics and public statements as evergreen sociopolitical commentary that borders on the prescient as fundamentalist evangelical forces that ascended Reagan to the White House have now completely dominated a major political party’s platform nearly a half century later.
Page 99 of my book, as well as many other pages, makes this connection very clear. On this page, I cite the work of Lerone A. Martin, associate professor of religion and politics at Washington University, on how Trump’s rhetoric courts and is influenced by white supremacist values that shape the larger evangelical movement’s support of his presidency. By the end of the page, I reinforce this idea by citing the work of Anthea Butler, the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, who says that evangelicals’ grievances and fears in the wake of 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama pushed this faction further into an “open, belligerent racism that culminated in their wholesale embrace of the man they would call ‘King Cyrus’: Donald Trump. The journey to Trump is a story of how whiteness and racism combined to make evangelicals a potent voting bloc awash in racism and racial animus.”
I wrote the first draft of Frank Zappa’s America in 2023, and it was copyedited in 2024, months before the election. During Trump’s second inauguration, I was busy proofreading and indexing the manuscript, relieved that the end of the project was coming because, based on what his term would bring, and has brought so far in the months since, I could have kept adding to this book. Like the heat as a sign of worsening climate change, the growing effect of Trump’s administration surrounds us all no matter how much we may try to shield ourselves from it. The evidence of his devil’s bargain with white Christian nationalism is directly in front of us, on our televisions and social media feeds. Many have already felt that impact, and for those who feel like they are separate from it, resting calm and cool, they’ll soon feel the heat that threatens to burn everything down.
Why, and for what reason, do they believe that? Because Trump sold them a false reality, one that promised to bring a purported greatness back to America. A greatness that, for many who helped bring Trump to power, meant a life where only white men could wield power. A longing for a time that was never real as a means of wishful thinking for a future that resembles only themselves. As Frank Zappa said, “It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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