I saw these videos today (thank you, rushisaband.com), and though I am not a drummer, and more than a few of the beautiful nuances were lost on me, I still came away with a deeper appreciation of the specific ways in which rock music can be a training of the senses. This makes it directly relevant for Christian theology, which on many worthy accounts is either the theory of Christian sense-making or the very training of sense itself. Another reason that rock and theology need a more sustained and intentional interrelating.

Notice the ways in which touch, hearing, sight are called to refinement in the aural and visual recognition of drum shell grains, the awareness of tonal intervals amongst drums, the “benchmark” quality (as both felt and idealized) for the percussive compass that a 13-inch tom provides in a rock kit, the sustain and spackle of birch versus maple woods. We are, as Peart says, “talking about the character of individual drums.”

Is it too much to hope that living in these rock practices will allow the renewal dispossession of theology of which we are in such need?

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Recently, I posted a brief reflection on the ways in which the practice of “air drumming” can symbolize the spiritual discipline that rock culture can foster in its adherents. The key video there was the rock drummer Neil Peart drumming in tandem with air-drummer Ari Gold (known as “Power”). Recently, the Drum Channel posted a discussion (which can be viewed here) between Peart and Gold on the practice of learning to love drums in particular and music in general.

Their discussion really takes off after the 8:30 mark, focusing on the sort of person that participation in rock culture helps people become, through specific practices. Watching the conversation with that in mind highlights many crucial ideas: learning the art of  imitation, practicing cross-cultural dialogue through music, dealing with reviews of one’s playing, appreciating music as a kind of soul-craft. Paying attention to such discussions, whether from the viewpoint of amateurs or professionals, musicians or fans, is important not only because it is crucial for theologians to find ways of naming the spiritual significance of “secular” music practices, but because it is all too common in Christian ecclesial and academic circles to think that “our” practices are the only, best, or exclusive ones for creating mature and generous human beings.

The more, however, that theology helps show that it does not own the rights to practices that make for courageous or generous people, the greater a right theology has to make itself an active conversation partner with those secular music practices — for the sake of more life, more profound freedom, a deeper experience of being alive for oneself and others.

Tom Beaudoin

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The new English rock band Florence and the Machine recently played the Bowery Ballroom here in New York City, and critic Jon Pareles has a review of the show in the New York Times here. The show, as reported by Pareles, exemplified a point often made in rock research and which we have occasionally emphasized on this blog: rock’s ongoing relationship to its religious origins. Pareles writes that “After a set full of intimate strife, Florence and the Machine returned with a devout, gospel-tinged remake of ‘You’ve Got the Love,’ which insists, ‘My savior’s love is real.’ ”

Here is the band performing “You’ve Got the Love.”

And speaking of the continued working-through of rock’s religious origins, here are Florence and the Machine performing “The Drumming Song”:

Can the church bells clear out the drums? Which sounds, from the church or the kit, will be more responsive to the transvaluation of an extra-religious desire “sweeter than heaven, hotter than hell”?

Tom Beaudoin

New York City

I am here concluding a small three-part exploration that began here and continued here, on the topic of spiritual exercises in theological and rock cultures. I will presume what was said there, and pick up here with the rockish example of air instrumentation as a practice from rock culture that exemplifies and symbolizes the rehearsal for a new availability, that I am using as a figuration of the “spiritual exercises” that overlap rock and theology.

I was stunned recently to see the video below, featuring “Power,” the star of the movie Adventures of Power. The video features “Power” as an “air drummer”, in which he is playing in tandem with one of the most well-regarded and famous rock drummers ever, Neil Peart of the Canadian rock trio Rush. To watch this video is to get an exaggerated snapshot of the phenomenon of air instrumentation in general and air drumming in particular — but just so, it serves in its extravagance, like comedy, as a staging of some crucial and common qualities of this practice.

What was the claim to attention that this video made on me? Simply its vivid rendering of the power of imitative practice for the confecting of relationship in general, and for a new availability in particular. (And with such delightful precariousness of self-awareness/self-unawareness that the famously stone-faced Peart is seen smirking at several points during the exercise.) Notice how “Power” submits to a riot of physical pedagogy: being spatially stationed near the master, so he can see and be seen; showing off the well-rehearsed moves that mimic those the sage Peart makes but also find their own whimsy through unrepellable desire (”Power” keeps moving closer to Peart’s kit and wanting to show him how he is doing, maybe make him laugh, maybe even teach him a thing or two about his own “Power”?) and irreducible weirdness (symbolized in the white geek-boy presentation); submitting to the trial of mental-physical exhaustion that becomes a way of calibrating his proximity and distance from the philosopher Peart; learning how to find in sound and silence the punctuations that can orient the body even outside this specific exercise; studying ways to listen to the sound and body of another as a passage into one’s own corporeal sizing up; and finally, just when you think he can live with the discipline, and with thirty seconds to go, the collapse and acknowledgement that he is not the sage. (And as in ancient exercises, a deep spiritual exercise can also be rehearsal for death: You hear a voice off-camera say, “Somebody call an ambulance.”)

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My first band was a hardcore band. I was in high school. The band’s singer and I met in the sacristy of our Catholic parish, as we were both altar servers: altar servers into straightedge hardcore music. (We named the band Anamnesis. And we played shows with bands with names like Spam Jam. Can you believe it?)

One day (probably at band practice) the singer told me about a dream he had had the night before. He went to see a hardcore show and the headlining band was none other than the Holy Trinity. That’s right: a three-piece hardcore outfit, made up of Father, Son and Spirit. I don’t recall who played what instruments. But my friend insisted that it was the best hardcore rock he had ever heard, and that as difficult as it was to remember the riffs, he would try his best to get across to the rest of our band the sounds that the Triune God made for him and the ekklesia that had gathered to hear them.

Since that conversation, I have thought of the rock band as a sort of image of the Trinity, a koinonia of perichoretic relations among persons who are both truly one and truly differentiated. Of course, this is a familiar insight to anyone conversant with the field of theology and popular music.

I wonder what it means, then, to stumble upon the Akron, Ohio band Drummer, made up entirely of — you guessed it — rock drummers? Granted, they aren’t all playing the drums in this band. Patrick Carney, drummer of the Black Keys, plays bass. A buddy of mine and Teeth of the Hydra and Harriet the Spy drummer Jamie Stillman plays guitar along with former Party of Helicopters drummer Jon Finley who also sings. Steve Clements of Houseguest plays keyboards and sings. Finally, the late Ghostman & Sandman’s drummer Gregory Boyd is the drummer of Drummer.

Rock heresy? Perhaps not. Most of the members are in fact multi-instrumentalists and nothing about the band’s sound indicates that five drummers are behind the tunes. But perhaps this unique band-lineup idea is just heretical enough to make things a little interesting.

Drummer calls Akron’s Audio Eagle Records home, and they kick off a tour on October 14. Check out their new video here.

To which instruments would you assign the persons of the Trinity?

Michael Iafrate
Toronto, ON
Canada

It always amazes me in this age of instant obsolescence that one can rediscover a rock music video from 20 years ago and still find it startlingly fresh.  So it is with this Toni Childs song which, a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I used to wear out my Walkman batteries to.  Resurfacing in my life today it now exists with multiple meanings all interlayered, but the one that I offer here for consideration is that of a paradoxical Divine absence.  Childs has a way of singing with both her mouth and her hands at the same time, evoking a creative performance through mutual speaking and manipulation, much like the way that the two creation accounts in Genesis complement each other.  This visualization of creativity is held in tension with the lyrics and the gritty passion of Childs’s voice which painfully laments the loss of Love.  Read theologically as an expression of Divine abandonment and absence, the song generates a powerfully physical feeling of losing God.  Yet, and here is where I find it most paradoxical, the strong underlying groove of the bass and drums in the song provides an undeniable sense of the Spirit’s presence that still remains through the rhythm of life’s unwillingness to give up.

I find this section of the song especially haunting:

“Ripping love out by the roots
Though my ghost is still with you
It hurts to watch you turn away
So I’m tearing out the truth”

Loye Ashton

Jackson, Mississippi

Despite all the “dumb drummer” jokes and stereotypes, I often find that you can leave it to drummers to sound forth some architectonics of the spiritual-secular in musical performance. Today’s New York Times contains this lovely profile, by Ben Ratliff, of five drummers of moment in jazz. One of them, Kendrick Scott, has this to say of his drumming: “Now I’m always thinking, what is my contribution going to be to the music, not just to the drums? If I can give my soul to it, that’s going to fulfill my calling to play the music.”

Ratliff also reports that Scott “says the prayer on his drumstick helps him let go of playing like anyone else.” The prayer that he writes on the sticks is: “Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace.”

Tom Beaudoin

New York City

Out of musical experience can come rules for practicing and guides for experiencing - both for the theological and musical life. As Jeremy Begbie and many other scholars are now showing us, what is at stake in allowing musical practices a theological placement is the specification of new modes of theo-musical life. These were my thoughts this morning as I read two (very New York) stories in the New York Times: one, an obituary for the percussionist and Latin band leader Manny Oquendo, and the other a story about the rebirth of a reggae tradition in the Bronx under the direction of producer and studio owner Lloyd Barnes.

Both speak from within music as guides for experiencing. Of his education in percussion, Oquendo said, “It’s important to develop the ear and get a deeper knowledge of the music, and once you become good at the instrument, you must always remember to try to be original, be yourself. You can borrow, you can take, you can even steal, but you do not imitate.” Of the reggae he learned in Jamaica, Barnes said, “I found a certain peace in the music. It’s not always good times, but the music gives you that.”

Here’s to the musico-spiritual innovation that gives peace.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx offers a striking analogy in his now classic work, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Sheed & Ward, 1963):

Just when a drummer is playing he is extending himself through all his bodiliness into the instruments grouped about him, so that these instruments dynamically participate in the very expressiveness of his rhythmic movement, making but one total movement which, arising from within the drummer, flows through the rhythm of his body, of his beating hands and stamping feet, and produces a varied harmony of percussion—so too the heavenly saving will of Christ, through his glorified body, makes one dynamic unity with the ritual gesture and the sacramental words of the minister who intends to do what the Church does (p. 77).

As a Catholic theologian, who also happens to play drums in a rock n roll band, and who, incidentally, recently wrote a book on the resurrection, I find this comparison startling and suggestive. Christ’s “glorified body” and the drummer’s body? But of course!

Speaking from experience, playing drums is a visceral transcendence. The body becomes all rhythm and all sound, rapt in a unified sonic event with percussive pressures felt by others from deep within. Having become wholly expressive from the inside out, from the limb to limb, the drummer’s body “disappears” into the play; and thus it becomes more completely itself. How very Eucharistic. . . .

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