Off and on over the past several months, I’ve been listening to (and watching performances of) Wilco’s song “Theologians,” from their 2004 album A Ghost is Born. I come to the song more as someone presumably addressed by the title than as a Wilco devotee.

I cannot help but hear this song as a rebuke to the great mass of academic and churchy theologizing that fails not only to “reach” contemporary Christians and those curious about Christianities, but that fails to risk inhabiting the “lifeworlds” of such people, ostensibly a crucial source for theologians (insofar as faith is practiced by humans) and audience for theologians (insofar as theology is meant to be taken in by humans). “Theologians don’t know nothing about my soul.” And toward the end of the tune, we learn that maybe it’s Jesus who is singing this taunting song: “Where I’m going you cannot come”; “I lay it down”; “A ghost is born.” It’s rare that we get the image of Jesus singing to theologians, whether in “secular” or “sacred” music.

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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

My colleague here at Fordham University, theologian Professor Bradford Hinze, recently asked the students in his undergraduate “Faith and Critical Reason” classes where they found talk of “sin” in their music. These first-year students came up with a very interesting list.

When he mentioned this to me, of course I wanted to share it here on Rock and Theology. He and his students have graciously granted permission to do so.  Professor Hinze tells me that the context for the list was that they had been discussing scriptural understandings of sin, and classical lists of sins, and that he invited the students, in his words, to “search for songs which they listened to when they considered how ‘I,’ ‘we,’ or the ‘world’ are messed up.”

He then posed some inventive theological questions:

“How do the sins named, described, and narrated in these song lyrics compare with the classic lists we have examined in Mark’s gospel, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Evagrius Ponticus, Pope Gregory I, and Dante Alighieri? Is there overlap? Same sins, new stories? Any new kinds of personal sin? Are there instances of communal sin depicted in contemporary lyrics? Are there instances of global dynamics of sin (social structures, institutional patterns) identified? Do these songs provide a more comprehensive portrayal of sin than the classic lists?”

Here is the list. You can find many of these on Youtube or other song-related sites if you’re interested in the words or performances.

“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” by Notorious B.I.G.

“Changes” by 2Pac

“Come on, come on” by Little Birdy

“Mother, mother” by Marvin Gaye

“Amsterdam” by Jacques Brel

“Where did my baby go?” by John Legend

“Dizzy” by Goo Goo Dolls

“House of the Rising Sun” sung recently by Tracy Chapman

“She’s not a girl who misses much” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

“The Freshman” by The Verve Pipe

“I love college” by Asher Roth

“One Song Glory” by Jonathan Larson in Rent

“Symbol in my driveway” by Jack Johnson

“Judas’ Death” by Andrew Lloyd Webber

“Stand Up” by Flobots

“1975 Ram’s Horn Music” by Bob Dylan

“Sic Transit Gloria. . . Glory Fades” by Jesse Lacey, Band: Brand New

“Can’t Tell Me Nothing” by Kanye West

“Man in the Mirror” by Michael Jackson

“Ghetto Gospel” by Tupac

“The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel

“Match Box Twenty” by Unwell

“Changes” by 2Pac

“Where is the Love? By Black Eyed Peas 11

“Waiting on the World to Change” by John Mayer 1

“Despair” by Envy [Zesubou—An Café

“What I’ve Done” by Linkin Parks

“Helpless” by Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young)

“Into the Ocean” by Blue October

“Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

“Simple Plan” by Crazy Lyrics

“Heartless Bastard Motherfucker” by Frank Turner

“Call Me When You’re Sober” by Evanescence

“I Love College” by Asher Roth

“Who are You?” by The Who

“ABC” by Knaan

“The Dark I know Well” from Spring Awakening

“The Things That Hate Us” by Strictly Leakage

“Killing in the Name Of” by Rage Against the Machine

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Are there any other songs that you would add, R&T readers?

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, New York, United States

Almost exactly ten years ago, I had just moved to Georgia, and I was sitting in Javamonkey cafe in Decatur, writing my PhD dissertation, and noticed that Amy Ray of the famous indie-folk group Indigo Girls had just walked in. She was obviously recognized by many of the locals, but was left alone. A few days earlier, I had been working at home and saw out the window a woman across the street hauling guitars to a small storage trailer hitched to a van. I soon found out that neighbor was none other than Michelle Malone, a rising star in the indie-rock-folk circuit.

Last night those neighborhood memories came back to me, when my wife and I saw Michelle Malone and the Indigo Girls live in a sold-out show at the elegant Music Hall in Tarrytown. Both bands write inordinately singable, memorizable, emotionally involving songs with a depth of heart, feminist punch, political savvy, and importantly, guitarish prowess. Not to mention vocal gifts that are among the most exquisite of their generation of women rock artists, or any rock-folk musicians whatsoever today. The result is beautiful, moving, rousing song after beautiful, moving, rousing song, whether the more earnest and socially conscious folk style of the Indigo Girls or the more gritty lost-and-foundness, and sometimes sexually provocative jammy blues rock of Michelle Malone. And both bands share out some exposed entrails of Christianity regularly in their music. Their songs seem to reflect and speak to those who find that they must deal with Christianity in their lives, for better and worse, and who cannot find institutional church life making sense in their lives. (As is well known, one of the Indigo Girls, Emily Saliers, is the daughter of Emory University theologian Don Saliers. The two wrote a book together a few years ago, A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice (Jossey-Bass, 2006).)

I have seen Michelle Malone in concert at least a dozen times, and am going to see her again this coming Wednesday in New York City. I had never seen the Indigo Girls live before. One of the remarkable things about seeing both of them is just how many verses, choruses, or entire songs the audience will enthusiastically sing along with them — and how distinctively female those gladsome and strong voices are. I had the feeling last night, as many hundreds of women, who were easily the majority in the audience, belted out song after song with the Indigo Girls, especially from their first several albums, that this is music that is genuinely a part of many women’s salvation — in the various ways that salvation might be defined.

While in Atlanta, and in the years since, I have met many women for whom the music of Michelle Malone, Amy Ray, and Emily Saliers has been an essential traveling companion. The advocacy of all three women for lesbian and gay political (and spiritual) equality is also an essential part of their musical and theological importance, and of their meaning for many fans. The Christianity one often finds “in” their music, is of the “secular Christian” sort that I have tried to discuss at various points on this blog. I have embedded one video from each that give some sense of the kinds of Christian themes that circulate through their music. I have also put in one of them performing together the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” It is not too much to posit that between them and their fans, new secular theologies get fostered.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

To visit Cambridge, Massachusetts this week was to come back to a certain kind of home. I spent eight years in Boston, the longest sojourn thus far of my adult life. Much of that time was spent in cafes, reading, writing, pondering, daydreaming.

Thus my first stop on arriving in Cambridge was back to a café I began frequenting in the mid-1990s, and where I wrote a good portion of my first book. And there happened, in that place, an example of how rock lyrics can both give and serve a kairotic stance, can allow a moment its point and necessity: I put on my headphones and cued up the song “Faithless” (from the album Snakes and Arrows, 2007) by the Canadian rock group Rush. Here is the chorus:

I don’t have faith in faith

I don’t believe in belief

You can call me faithless

But I still cling to hope

And I believe in love

And that’s faith enough for me

This song created the meditative space for me to imagine what has changed in my life between now and fourteen years ago, between the more pious liberal grid I used to occupy and whatever it is that I now channel theologically. (In my most recent book, I name it “dispossession.”) In other words, one way to inhabit this passage of years theologically is letting these lyrics interpret one dimension of the deep process going on as I checked in with this café again and again, and to recognize that being the same person in this place this many years later means sensing how lyrics that I could not have lived fourteen years ago have become lyrics that make a kind of existential, space-setting claim on me. Those fourteen years, those changes rung in this café, have been years of getting ready for this song, of becoming available to what it might mean for this song to be true.

(I trust readers will understand that I am referring to a phenomenon beyond merely ‘agreeing’ or ‘disagreeing’ with these lyrics.)

In this way may secular music hold something of our theological life for us.

Tom Beaudoin

On the train between Boston and New York City

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

After a quiet August sustained by Andy Edwards on Barthian “curation” and Mike Iafrate’s censing of Talking Heads, Rock and Theology now returns to concert mode with Edwards, Iafrate, Robinette, Ashton, Hartley, and myself.

There is much to report, dramatize, haloically encircle, and needlework, theologically and rockishly, and I am eager to stand as fan alongside the contributors and readers of R&T, and to play here in the house band, as well.

Look for more news this fall about new developments in the project, and please continue to send us your ideas, wonderments, enthusiasms, criticisms.

This morning, I’ve been feeling and thinking about AC/DC and their classic “For Those About to Rock,” which not only invigorated my adolescence and continues to be a welcome musical visitor, but can be heard cranking out of open dorm windows here at Fordham and finds its way onto personal playlists of many a young rock musician.

When I first heard this song in the 1980s (owned the cassette, of course, and the tune was blasted at junior high and high school dances, which tells you that at that time dances were as much for air-guitaring and related rock-posturing as for dancing), I think that my friends and I heard it as a benediction (”we salute you”) on anyone who was willing to participate with abandon in rock culture. But isn’t it interesting that the actual lyric is a “salute” directed to “those about to rock”? It is as if the song recognizes the importance of the disposition to rock, the greatness of the “studied” part of studied abandonment. “We” are not hailing those who rock, it counsels, but those who avail themselves of the proper propensity, those who ready for this departure. It is just here that we have an opening in which to pile all the example from philosophies and religions, including (given my own background and training) from Christianity in its exercises of attention, in its two millennia of mastering the “about to”. It is this “about to” that I have found so interesting in the first eight months of this blog: how do rock and theology continually work on the “about to”? This is a way to imagine how rock and theology play in the same band.

Welcome to a new season of R&T — for those about to rock.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City

I have been interested in what we can learn from two theologically significant faces of rock — how it can be with Christianity, and without it — in the transition from one version to another of the song “Up Above My Head.” More specifically, from a 1960s soul version of this song, where Christianity rehearses an appropriation of rock culture, into the 21^st century where secular rock rehearses a dispossession of Christianity.

On YouTube, one can view Sister Rosetta Tharp in the 1960s, playing a version of her 1940s gospel tune, but now wearing a Gibson SG (thanks to Michael Iafrate for the heads-up) and soloing in front of a gospel choir.

The lyrics proclaim “Up above my head, I hear music in the air,” that suggests, in a less committal stance than one might at first expect, “There must be a God somewhere.” In this version, however, Tharp sings the slightly more denominative, “I really do believe there’s a heaven somewhere.” The scene shows rock’s gospel atmosphere. The gospel choir declaims and sways, Tharp is front and center with alternating solos of voice and guitar, playing with what are already becoming defined rock guitar gestures. Rock culture seems to be an outflow of church culture, and black performances help define that relationship. Tharpe is performing on a gospel music television show.

Fast forward to 2009 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and the rock band “King’s X” is playing a live show. They are a hard rock trio with an African-American singer-bassist and white drummer and white guitarist, that when first formed in the 1980s were commonly thought of as a Christian rock band. Now the singer, Dug Pinnick’s public coming out over the last decade, and his gradual disillusionment with Christianity, put the band in a situation that makes a certain sense in rock culture: a gay African-American lead singer who is going through a long and public decompression chamber in regard to his Christianity. The band has lost almost all aura as hard-edged defenders of the faith. At this 2009 show, they performed their version of “Up Above My Head,” “Over My Head,” referencing the religiousness of Pinnick’s family.

When this song was first recorded and performed in the late 1980s, it was easy to hear it as a scrapbookish tribute to the steadfastness of his grandmother’s faith, even simply as a harder rocking iteration of Tharpe’s own rocking version. The years since became pivotal for Pinnick in digging into the failures of the rock industry, racist and capitalist limits on music and more, and in coming to terms with his sexual identity, and in finding his own voice about his spiritual life.

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In the spring of 2003, when I was teaching at Boston College, I was meeting with a group of undergraduate theology majors whom we called the “Young Theologians.” They asked if we could make a retreat together around the theology and spirituality of Easter, and we ended up spending a few days together at the Campion Retreat Center in Weston, Massachusetts, dealing with these mysteries.

For one of our sessions, I asked the students to bring in examples of music that helped them make sense of resurrection. One pair of guys brought along a Coldplay song, “Clocks.” We listened and talked about it, and I still remember the fantasy about Jesus’ own awareness that arose from the conversation, that whatever resurrection may mean, there is value in having its meaning come in sitting with Jesus declaiming the words of the song’s refrain and bridge: “You are. Nothing else compares.” At the time, we wondered if this was the risen Jesus’ cry of wonderment to God. Now I see it more as the way we were able to be with the task before us. And now I allow the more ambiguous verses themselves, and not just the consolational Johannine awe of the refrain, to come out of Jesus’ mouth. This makes it no less an invitation to Easter learning.

Six Easter seasons later, I still carry in my wallet the purple construction paper “holy card” made by the students: “Young Theologians Retreat, April 4-5, 2003” on one side, and John 11:25-26 on the other. I now hear my students’ voices and Coldplay’s refrain within those Bible verses, adding up to the kabbalistic cocktail so characteristic of the everyday theology we each carry.

“I am the resurrection and the life.” “You are. Nothing else compares.” And so the scriptures live, and life scriptures us. And it’s a good season in which to remember that.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

When I read rock reviews I often feel as if I am overhearing (the report of) a theological conversation, without amplification, from 20 feet away, catching suggestive phrases, alluring intonations, gestures that may be — if they were only seen and heard from the right vantage — sacred. It is difficult to read most any review of a rock show and not want to enlist a fragment for the modern scripture that the great 18th-19th century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher thought that all truly religious persons could write on their own.

And as theologians we may want to ask, with Luke chapter 1 verse 43: “Why has this happened, that” (what we may psychoanalytically and theologically call) “the mother of my Lord comes to me” in this way?

Does it have to do with Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire? That desire is learned, that learned desire is imitation, and that what is imitated is the desire of others?

The ahagiographical power of rock’s live bounty works remarkably in the elicitation of desires, and thus one finds in reviews of live shows, again and again, snapshots of manifestation that may be mistaken for a pitch into holiness. Like this line from today’s review by Jon Caramanica, in the New York Times, of the recent show in Brooklyn by the band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: “It’s not that [singer Kip] Berman isn’t capable of seeing the bright side, or celebrating how it arrives in brief flashes. ‘I can’t see into the sunset,’ he sang on ‘Come Saturday,’ which was the loudest the band got all night. ‘All I know is that you’re perfect / Right now.’”

As if on cue, theologian Risto Saarinen whispers a coda from God and the Gift: An Ecumenical Theology of Giving, page 111: doctors of rock, he seems to admonish us, do not forget that “theological imitation has its counterparts in various other forms of human culture.”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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