It’s been many years since I checked in with the music of Steve Vai, certifiably divine god of guitar. But recently I’ve been watching this video of him playing a tune called “Building the Church,” and in between the multiple breath-catchings after each divebombing technical gesture, I’m thinking to myself, it this is building a church, make mine a cathedral. I don’t know anything about Vai’s background, but a quick scan on the web shows that he has a lot of religious-sounding titles for his songs: “For the Love of God,” “Whispering a Prayer,” “Sex and Religion,” and so on. Is there any theological work out there on Vai’s music? (And not, for readers new to this blog, to claim Vai for any religion but to try to critically calibrate what might be theologically significant about his music.)

He reminds me of the emphasis you find in the Catholic monastic tradition on exemplarity, delight in technique, even separation from oneself in practicing (at various points you can tell he is aware that he is wowing everyone and becomes a little mannered in his seduction, but that too is the privilege of those few like Vai who command rock’s Athos-Olympus).

It’s like watching a spiritual master; he is sonically painting so many feeling-scapes and inventing new ones, too, for himself and his audience. He conjures the spiritual power of the guitar, evident in the planned and unplanned squatting, stretching, turning of the trunk of his body and the way his hands sometimes try to pull sound out from the guitar even though they are not touching it. Who first invented the knowledge of this power, “religious” people who lay hands over bodies, bread, or wine… or musicians who acknowledge that and what their instruments conduct — without the need for the formalities of words?

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

For those who take an interest in the teaching and learning of theology, I just put this post up at the “In All Things” blog of the Jesuit magazine America, about my undergraduate course at Fordham this term.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

While it’s not directly to do with rock and theology, my latest post at the (Jesuit magazine) America blog does have to do with the changing character of the structures shaping theological work. And as soon as that question is raised, the question of the point of theological labor is not far behind, and that’s a question raised often enough on this blog.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, United States

Two recent accounts of “older” rock artists has me thinking about the pushing of rock’s older narrowly defined presumptions about age.

There was a time when it was a truism that rock culture was only for the “young,” defined as those in adolescence and young adulthood. Many theologians today, in academic and pastoral work, still make that presumption based on the codes of their own upbringing and the moral strictures of their job descriptions (that is, to peel people away from “childish things” and into “real faith”).

The trouble is that rock as a youngster’s (or even “young man’s”) game does not adequately describe what is happening in the multiple scenes of secular music in general or of rock in particular today. The two accounts I mention above focus on Yoko Ono and Peter Gabriel, both of whom are reinventing their earlier music (what the industry calls “back catalogue” or simply “catalogue”) and writing fresh music past age sixty. (And in Ono’s case, well past 70.)

The music journalist Jon Pareles has both stories: he reports on Ono in concert recently here, and on Gabriel here. “Desperate and exposed”  and “deliberately exposed” is how Pareles describes Gabriel’s and Ono’s performances now. There are new collaborators, lyrics old and new, and voices sanded by time but wisely fuller in giving still what they used to promise: Gabriel’s wayfaring introspection, Ono’s proffered ingenuousness.

(more…)

I just posted this entry at America magazine about what has deeply troubled me about how my profession is and is not responding to the financial crisis as it affects many of our fellow academic laborers, and in principle all workers in higher education.

Tom Beaudoin, New York City

Here is a problem for most of us who study theology and culture: in what do you “ground” your work theologically? Or is “grounding” now impossible, once theologians take seriously the postmodern turns? The turn to practice does not solve this dilemma, as far as I am concerned, but it helpfully resituates it, and it can learn from cognate conversations about practice in philosophy of religion. One prime example of this is literature as a textual practice, and the ways in which such practice contends with, and receives, religion. Thus it is that I found reading Victor E. Taylor’s new book, Religion After Postmodernism: Retheorizing Myth and Literature (University of Virginia, 2008) an intense journey of moment.

And not just for those of us who specialize in theology and culture. A most unsettling abyss faces the theologically educated class who have undergone the severities of the historical and linguistic turns: whether anything stable is left in which to ground Christianity, its scripture, its faith. The preoccupation, even anxiety, about origins is a hallmark of most serious theology in the last several decades. In reply, the development of postmodern theologies in the 1980s were ways of arguing that one did not need the presumed certainties of origin in order to theologize rigorously—and even faithfully.

Taylor’s Religion After Postmodernism brings the state of this postmodern theological art to a highly refined, tightly argued, continually illuminating place. Taylor’s major concern is to show the intricate and unrelievable intercourse between religious-theological and mythological-literary thinking, or between “religion” and “literature.” With a theoretical frame built intensively and discerningly on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Winquist, this book persuasively instructs readers about the tendency toward hegemonic readings of religious texts, in which the theological language is made theologically meaningful by tying it back, without remainder, to a purported transcendent extra-linguistic reality. The slide between religious language and what it represents is the space continually examined for the incomplete or arbitrary connectors religious thought constantly erects that function to domesticate the mythical-scriptural text, and therefore ironically to limit the religious character of its possibilities.

(more…)

Several days ago, Dr. Chris McDonald, in reply to my “Ruminatio” post about Jacob Moon’s interplanetarily good cover of Rush’s “Subdivisions,” wrote: “I was intrigued by your comment that ‘he’s even doing the whole song himself, reducing a rock trio to a solo act with cool electronics, as if that too somehow speaks to the climate the tune gives for adulthood.’ Could you expand on that?”

What I think I meant there was that to understand the song “Subdivisions” has always been, for me and many others, to hear it as set to the famous music video that accompanied it.

While one might get a strong sense for the advocacy of an unrelenting individuality from that song alone, and certainly if one hears that song in the context of Rush’s larger catalogue, one also gets that sense from the video. There, the young-man-against-the-masses struggles to make his way through indifferent or hostile worlds of conformity. In the end is the famous scene of him playing the Tempest video game, alone with technology, greasy hair, and oversize glasses. And Rush not only understands, it celebrates this singularity.

(more…)

A couple of decades ago, scholarly commentary on music video was gaining commonplace status in popular culture studies, and a few theologians even got into the act. But with the waning influence of music video in popular culture, an effect of the changes in music culture (such as MTV showing fewer videos and losing its once strong hold on the musical consciousness of the broad, and especially youthful, public), that scholarly engagement has dropped off considerably in the last several years.

But now music video is making a comeback through YouTube and other video-sharing sites. No doubt it is a different kind of cultural practice this time around, through the Internet and not television, and theologians will benefit from learning how this intense relationship to video positions people to believe, feel, or do certain things in and with their lives. I look forward to learning from such research.

But in the spirit of the old (not-so-distant) days of commentary on video, I wanted to provide a few brief thoughts on this one by Sevendust for their song “Licking Cream.”

What I notice most of all is what looks like blood coursing from the instruments, through the patch cords, which become intravenous-style tubes, and end up being ingested and enjoyed by the people walking around the house. The “blood” ends up flooding the floor, and people are celebrating.

(more…)

Newer Posts »