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David Altheide has provided a sociological story that may not resemble the fabled bed time stories of your youth, or even the moral parables that guide our commonsensical understanding of the everyday world. However, the story has some resemblance to Hans Christian Anderson's “The Emperor's Clothes,” especially with regard to his observation that we Americans have accepted and complied with policies, directives, and rationalizations that seemed problematic in the first place and downright odious in retrospect (see Cetola, Willer, & Macy, 2005, pp. 1010–1011). Just as Denzin (2007, pp. 449–451) noted with regard to the “one percent doctrine” (if something can happen once it will therefore happen again), Altheide points out the simple fact that our fears, lacking logical premise, have instead become dressed up in vivid colors on television screens. We as citizens seem mesmerized by an apparently inevitable concept that if we fear it, it will indeed come. A few years ago Glassner (2000) discussed how fear mongers create a false logic of inevitability. Currently, Altheide extends this argument to show how such logic has become clothed in the regalia of patriotism, news void of context, and incessant anger.

In this brief essay, I will describe the compatibility of a postmodern turn in sociology and the symbolic interactionist approach to the study of music in everyday life. This compatibility is reflected in the work and career of musical artist Matisyahu, as illustrated by the concept of pastiche. The interaction among the three dimensions of image, music, and religious ideology in Matisyahu’s work operationalizes this concept. The primary resources for this analysis include Matisyahu’s recorded music; an interview conducted with him by The Times of Israel in which he explains his personal transition from the Labuvitch movement to the Modern Orthodox Movement and how this transition affected his music; and my attendance at four of his concerts in Central Texas. Pastiche refers to “a free-floating, crazy quilt, collage, hodgepodge patchwork of ideas or views. It includes elements of opposites such as the old and new. It denies regularity, logic or symmetry; it glories in contradiction and confusion” (Rosenau, 1991, xiii). I conclude with a brief pedagogical argument on how to expand the use of music to explain complex sociological theory and social phenomena. By highlighting theoretical concepts through music, we can ground new and complex ideas in lived experiences and engage students with a topic that is grounded in their daily life experience.

The death of John F. Kennedy (JFK) was one of the most remarkable facts of the second half of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, it was reflected numerous times in popular culture, including in popular music. In this chapter, I discuss songs published in the 1963–1968 period in which the image of JFK was represented as an idea, a cultural motif or a political myth created, transformed and maintained by artistic means. In song lyrics, a real person (who was a genuinely influential politician) was portrayed as a person who acquired a certain mythical status, stemming from JFK's charismatic features and augmented by his tragic death. Thus, separate from the real political career as the president, JFK serves as a kind of mythological structure used by several artists to generate meanings and mirror cultural iconography present in American culture.