Columbus, Ohio punk band Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments recorded a song years ago called “RnR Hall of Fame.” Actually, it’s not so much a song as a furious rant over equally furious musical noise. The “song” includes the lyrics:

Bombs away on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame / I don’t want to see Eric Clapton’s stuffed baby / I don’t want to see the shotgun of Kurt Cobain / I don’t want to see the liver of David Crosby / Blow it up / Blow it up before Johnny Rotten gets in / Blow it up before Paul Westerberg gets in / Blow it up before Steve Albini makes a speech / Blow it up!

(Listen to it here if you think you can take it.)

Such would have been my own opinion of the rock museum, say, ten years ago when my listening habits lay for the most part squarely within anti-rock musical circles that reveled in their obscurity and inaccessibility. Ohio art-punk bands in particular, such as Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Harriet the Spy, and Guided by Voices, took cues from the mainstream rock playbook but ran them through the wash with cases of PBR and spit them back in the face of the rock establishment: Blow it up!

(more…)

Do you know what riggers do for rock? I just watched an engrossing documentary that anyone who enjoys learning more about rock culture will savor. I apologize in advance for yet another post that references Rush, but this topic goes beyond my well-rehearsed unironic ironic deironizing of one great Canadian band. I want to talk a little about roadies, about road professionals on rock tours.

The documentary is titled Backstage Secrets, and is more a 5-part television-type documentary than a full film, but those five parts are fascinating. When I used to pore over rock tour books, and in the days when the album credits were part of the art to be absorbed along with listening to the 33-rpm inside, I noticed that bands used to thank so-and-so for “rigging.” I figured it had something to do with pulling ropes. But from Backstage Secrets, I learned that it has to do with hanging chains from the ceiling of arenas! Setting the “points” from ceiling to floor is one task of the advance crew for a rock show, wherein they must correlate the hardware that they need to “fly” (raise off the floor) with the potential places to hang it up on the ceiling of the arena (or outdoor “shed”). The throngs of speakers have to fly, as do the video screens, as do the lights. And that all has to be set first thing on the morning of the show (or the day before, if schedules allow), so the audio, light, and video professionals can get their hundreds of pieces off the truck and assembled and flown, and the instrument techs who handle the well-being of the individual instruments (for Rush, this means guitar, bass, keyboards, drums) can get their stuff set up, and it is all overseen by a tour manager. I have been a rock fan for 30 years, but had only the faintest idea of all this.

A handful of times, I have snuck into Rush soundchecks. The first time was probably Kemper Arena in Kansas City, when I showed up around 2:00, walked around the arena for an hour, and then walked in with the beer man through a side door around 3:00 and sat there until the soundcheck started a little after 4:00. Seeing a major band in the informal setting of a soundcheck, playing intently but without flash, checking out sounds and settings, each in their own preoccupied headspace, hearing them talk to their techs, I loved seeing that part of the rock world. It gave me the briefest taste of how much pre-production goes into making an evening of rock go off so enjoyably. My last time was probably the Fleet Center (formerly Boston Garden) in Boston about seven or eight years ago. I walked around to the back of the arena through an open gate, and to the backstage door. There were the tour buses, there was (drummer) Neil Peart’s motorcycle trailer. I walked in and found my way to the arena and sat down. The sound of loud static came out of the speakers as the audio checks were underway, and the lights were flash-glittering all wondrous-like, then there was a pause, and then the band came out and started the soundcheck. I probably did this five or six times total. Each time, I was eventually escorted out by security. And I have noticed that in the past decade, pre-concert outdoor security at arenas has definitely ramped up. I doubt I could get in now, and now there are so many fans who are trying to do so that it is almost impossible. When I first tried around 1988, I was one of just a few fans hanging out around Kemper Arena, and the others were by the backstage door hoping for autographs. The pre-concert fan scene has grown more intense since then, probably for better and for worse. Any primer I could have once written on getting into soundchecks would now be mostly obsolete — although still fun to write.

(more…)

File this under “rock’s Christian unconscious.” There is currently a dramatic production here in New York City called “Get Mad at Sin!”, in which the actor Andrew Dinwiddie apparently reprises a stormy 1970s sermon from evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Being a fan of Reverend Billy and other virtual preachers — whose Christian simulacra provide the tidy irony that many contemporaries, myself included, need to gain fresh and critical vantage on both Christianity and contemporary culture — this is the kind of show I would like to see.

But I doubt I can get there before it closes this weekend at the Chocolate Factory in Queens. So I have to settle for Jason Zinoman’s helpful review yesterday in the New York Times. Therein I found an R&T-worthy paragraph:

“When inveighing against the evils of pop music, Mr. Swaggart (a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis) seems to be aping Mick Jagger, providing a reminder that great public performances of all kinds often share certain qualities.”

But it is also a reminder, I think, of something more specific: that the Rolling Stones do what they do under the historical pressure of the Christian forms of experience that are ingredient to the birth, power, and longevity of rock and roll. As a constitutive dimension of rock culture’s unconscious, it is no surprise that Swaggart would be Jagger’s avatar, or rather, Jagger as Swaggart’s offspring.

Even the lusciously assonant surnames “Swaggart” and “Jagger” — put them together in different sonic combinations in your imagination — sound like they belong to the prayerful-pelvic gospel-rock tradition symbolized by Elvis Presley. In addition to being “public performances,” and given rock’s history, these practices are also theurgic exercises.

Tom Beaudoin
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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, if 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

If you think it’s hard to make a living in music while keeping your integrity, you should try the academy. If you think it’s hard to make a living in the academy while keeping your integrity, you should try the church. And if you think it’s hard to make a living in the church while keeping your integrity, you should try music.

Getting on and off and on these rides over the past couple decades has taught me, above all, to try to take care with the uses of musical, academic, and ecclesial power, as these powers will always be trying to take their own care, for better and for worse. One way I practice taking this care is working shorter and longer spaces of silence into my day, in aid of an empty and open availability to what I need to learn about these powers in my and others’ lives. One practice I have is sitting in the Blue Chapel near my office in Keating Hall at Fordham. (I last wrote about this chapel at Rock and Theology a year ago, as it played a role in U2’s visit to campus.) I try to begin each work day on campus with time there in quiet. I know academic life might strike some readers as a breeze and not morally demanding, but as I see it, each time on campus I am aware that, in at least small ways, decisions I make, or to which I consent actively or passively, have repercussions for students’, colleagues’, and my own (self-) evaluations, academic well-being, career discernments, at-home-ness at Fordham, and ability to relate to the theological domains in which I stake some share. All this can be said while still admitting that much that will happen in any one day — in my own research and writing, in teaching, or in service to the university or the world — will be beyond my control. But I still need a place in which these realities can make a mildly peaceful sense. So I start each workday at Blue Chapel.

And it happens that on Friday morning, I was there around 7am, getting an early start on my work day. The chapel was just rising out of the nighttime darkness, the morning sun just starting to light the stained glass. The sanctuary candle lolled almost imperceptibly in its red glass. But the heavy dark setting, the stone surround, the light spare but colored, for the first time struck me as the feeling of place I have at many rock concerts, which are also begun in (and frequently return to) strong darkness punctuated by small washes of colored light in a surround meant to evoke a cavern.

Here is a picture I took, to try to capture the moment. The sanctuary candle is the little reddish dot lower left.

During an interview last fall with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I surprised myself by saying that I first responded to rock music as a liturgical spectacle that somehow clicked into what I had known as a Catholic about how to put together a deeply engaging space. I now see a little more what I might have meant by that. And I hope that these reflections might help readers, too, to think about whether and how secular music connects back to spiritual atmospheres from your own past. And of course, what it all might mean.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Tonight while scouring the web for information on the fascinating “transcendental black metal” band Liturgy, I found a brief interview with the band’s front man Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in which he mentions his recent viewing of a 1984 documentary by contemporary artist and critic Dan Graham called Rock My Religion (viewable at the link in its entirety). Hunt-Hendrix sums up the thesis of the documentary as the idea “that punk is part of an American tradition of ecstatic communal activity that began with the Shakers,” in other words that rock itself constitutes religious practice in continuity with American forms of “radical” Christianity.

The notion of rock as religion probably would not strike readers of Rock and Theology as a terribly deep insight. The documentary does make a few interesting connections between countercultural forms of Christianity and rock music, especially punk rock — connections I have been attempting to explore in my own work. But what is most fascinating about the film is its “lo-fi” visuals and production, its heavy use of footage of Patti Smith discussing the religious character of rock music and culture, and what one blogger refers to as its “mash up” juxtapositions of footage of 1950s religious revivals and music from Smith, Sonic Youth, Minor Threat, and Black Flag. If anything, the film is an interesting artifact, reflection and reference point for those inhabiting the worlds of rock and theology.

(more…)

For those who submit to habitation at the nexus of “secular” rock and “sacred” theology, one of the capacities that can be developed is a richer everyday appreciation for the words we use to talk about what rock and theology do for and to us. In Bernie Becker and Ashley Southall’s report, in the New York Times, on the recent Kennedy Center Honors, we read of violinist (and 2003 honoree) Itzhak Perlman’s comments about (2009 honoree) Bruce Springsteen. Perlman, in a simple sentence of remarkable insight, said that Springsteen “gives his audience what it wants, but he also lets them know what they want and helps teach them to want more.”

If you listen closely to the rafter-echoes of Perlman’s remark, you will hear the voice of theologian Timothy Gorringe, telling us of theology’s task of witnessing to, and being a form of, the education of desire.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Tonight at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, I saw Entrance Band in concert. They are a psychedelic/rock/blues outfit from Los Angeles, specializing in bluesy grooves, fantastical psychedelic washes of guitar and spacey drums, and gut-crunching rock bombast all at once. They bear huge energy live, and having seen this band a few times now, I’m starting to get a sense for the atmosphere they generate.

Entrance Band seems to press this combination of influences into recurrent incantatory gestures: vocal lines that mirror guitar lines; oscillating and husky bass lines that bounce you like a basketball in the bottom of a swamp (and from a bassist, Paz Lenchantin, who indulges a very old-school taste for snarly bass tone with the help of her custom Luna bass, Mesa Boogie amp, and some magic pedal I couldn’t quite make out tonight); drum parts by Derek James that mark time with a dolorous grandiosity like the countdown to liftoff; and stage movements by bassist Lenchantin and guitarist-vocalist Guy Blakeslee that suggest what an earlier age might have called possession.

(more…)

During the 1980s in North America there developed a kind of theology called “public theology,” in which public concerns (as in: civil society, often through sociological or political-science type lenses) were made central foci for theological analysis. Sometimes this meant having a social “problem” or “issue” occasion a theological reflection that was to arc back toward deeper reflection or reflective action in public… and sometimes this meant seeing the theological process itself as a public process, in which whatever the terms of the theological argument (God, church, justice), those terms needed to be publicly explainable if not justifiable. There were several rationales for this approach: Christianity is a social phenomenon, its spirit lends it to public interventions, and its claims to truth are in principle public claims in the sense that they involve assertions about phenomena (God, church, justice) that are by definition not private. There was also a third way of defining public theology: that theology which was written for a general educated audience. For myself and many others, publicness in theology was quite strongly and persuasively associated with the work of the Catholic theologian David Tracy (although less so in the third “generally accessible” sense, although Tracy has effectively used the genre of the interview for these purposes, a genre oddly underused in theology as compared with contemporary philosophy).

These ideas about a public theology are still to be found with a certain influence on the contemporary theological scene, especially among those who were trained in the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. The postmodernisms that questioned the privileging of the rational dynamics of theological discourse, and the postcolonialisms that foregrounded the cultural specificity and political history of theological discourse, have hit public theology pretty hard. The term seems much less in use now than it was, say, fifteen years ago. If anything, the new political theologies have arisen to take up the spaces public theologies wanted to occupy.

But just when you wondered if public theology was running out of gas, here’s U2, who have developed perhaps the most influential, long-running, and global public theology — ever. This occurred to me when reading of an upcoming academic conference on U2, and when reading a review of U2’s recent concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. The conference, coming up this weekend, is called “U2: The Hype and the Feedback,” and is happening in Durham, North Carolina, at North Carolina Central University. A look through the program reveals an impressive diversity of religious engagements with the band, its music, its fans, its culture. It is impossible to find another rock band whose culture inspires such a panoply of religious interrogation. It is worth appreciating how much theological research rock culture can inspire. (And, if it needs to be said, this research does not only leave itself in the deep but narrow well of fandom, but often rises back up to carry its results into other more mainstream theological conversations.) The review, by Jon Pareles in the New York Times, should give any theologian pause. In just a few hundred words, with no jargon, and with reference to a public event in public terms, Pareles well describes how this concert held together rollicking festivity and spiritual seriousness in a way not only unsurpassed but almost eerily, even liturgically, consistent for this band.

I write this knowing that U2 has become an almost too-convenient reference for those who want to show their worldly spirituality, and that many of the early fans are no longer on board with the new directions, and that some theologians cannot stomach what they learn of the band’s lyrics, politics, or concerts. Still, I find U2’s power as public theologians to be utterly undeniable, and lately sense the real privilege of having been able to have their music as a traveling companion for the last quarter century. Public theology in the academy may be on the wane, but in concert, it is stronger than ever.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

One of the themes we keep coming back to at Rock and Theology is the way the categories “sacred” and “secular” become blurred when musical experience is taken seriously as a source for theology. An instance of this blurriness struck me when I met one of my rock heroes about a week and half ago and reflected a bit on the “spiritual” encounter that took place. Peter Buck of R.E.M. was in town playing in one of his side projects — actually three of his side projects rolled into one — at a small rock club called the Horseshoe Tavern.

R.E.M. was the first band I got into obsessively. I learned probably 97% of their catalog on the guitar, scrutinized their obscure lyrics like fragments of papyri, and devoured any bios, news articles and bootlegs I could get my hands on. Even among one of my R.E.M. obsessed circles of friends, I was probably the biggest “di-Stipe-le” in the group. Needless to say, seeing Peter Buck play in a small venue was “a must.”

(more…)

Newer Posts »