A friend sent me this provocative article from the Telegraph (United Kingdom), about an Anglican priest who is recommending that Christians consider what metal music has to offer spiritually. The Rev. Rachel Mann has some interesting things to say in this story. Unfortunately, in this kind of a venue, it’s going to be difficult for them to get a fair hearing. Why? Because the bent toward the expirational and the momentary on the web, and especially on news sites, and more especially when reporting on such an unusual convergence as the “secular” world of metal and the “sacred” world of the church, is nearly overdetermined to give itself for consideration with a less-than-sober patina.

Yet despite the discursive tilt toward reading this as something of a “lifestyle” piece, or simply as further evidence of the decline of the Church of England and its clergy, it sounds like Rev. Mann has got some deeper ideas at work.

She speaks of a “liberative theology of darkness” in metal, and the value of confronting nihilism, as well as “death, violence, and destruction.” This very thematic is part of what makes the metal scene, she says, so accepting of others. This is not cheap stuff being put forward. Paul Tillich, among other modern theologians, famously urged theology to take seriously the destructive and disturbing as rendered in art, testifying to the complex depths of human alienation and searching, which (as I read him, especially in the works on theology and culture) are propaedeutic for any meaningful theological talk of salvation or healing in modernity. Marcella Althaus-Reid argued that the desire to fence off “obscenities” from being given theological attention was the effect of a more truly obscene theology, one that wanted people to divide their lives up into acceptable and shameful behaviors before they could take their own spiritual inventories of their own “queerness.” Rev. Mann seems to be moving theologically in these waters.

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I finally am going to bring my stretched-out (16-month!) “series” on Winger and theology to a conclusion with this post. For those keeping score at home, part one is here, which hiccuped into part one and a half, and here is part two, followed by three, then comes four, only to give way to five, and here we are presently at six.

In case you lost track, this series has come to the point of thinking out loud about how bodies in the rock culture of Winger open up matters of theological interest, and how theology finds things interesting in these hard rock embodiments. To quote myself (with permission) from my last post on this topic: “One of the theologically significant ways of rock culture is training in bodily habitation. As religion scholar Talal Asad among many others have argued, the training of sense was intrinsic to the working of classic Catholic sacramental theology and is part of what Christianity and Islam share. With regard to how rock does it, I have called this the performance of a bodily wherewithal, wherein instruments like electric guitars or basses become something like natural appendages for the musician, in a way that speaks to fans (including other musicians) of bodily integration and excellence or deep congruence in inhabiting the world.”

In part five, I was discussing lead singer/bassist Kip Winger as “trainer of sense” and object of imitative desire on the part of fans. His ballet training and classical music interests were mentioned, and I took those to signal an uncommon interest on Kip Winger’s part in refined bodily presentation in musical performance.

Steve Almond’s recent book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House, 2010), has some fun with this aspect of Winger’s persona. In fact, Almond’s book is the only work in print that I know of that dedicates a special section to a Winger roast of sorts. That (very brief) part is promisingly titled “Interlude: The Kip Winger Canon” (pp. 144-147).

Almond, in a section definitely not suitable for kids, talks with his wife Erin about Kip Winger’s unique power of bodily symbolizing the rock aesthetic, in the context of a real or imagined (and leading to further-imagined) encounter(s) that Erin may or may not have had with Kip Winger. While the actual narrative here may not be more than a forgettable snicker for the Winger in-crowd…

(NOTE: for what it’s worth (and I aim to write a review of the book eventually at R&T), I found the whole discussion too clever by half, and similar to Howard Hampton’s recent review, wanted more from Almond. A discussion of Winger that tried harder wouldn’t have to be boring, un-arch, or lacking cultural insight, if that is what Almond was worried about. (Of course, smart writing about pop music always risks uncoolness, and cleverness will never fully patch that constitutive leak.))

…it does help me transition to the point I want to make in this post: that whatever one might laud about what Kip Winger’s rock persona, it sometimes manifests within the old masculine/heterosexual codes that dance with patriarchalism — one of rock’s oldest and tiredest songs.

Where are female bodies in this real-symbolic metal world?

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Twenty-five years ago, in the middle of my teenage years, I went to a poundingly loud concert in Kansas City, Missouri, featuring lasers, smoke, explosions, and some of the best musicianship that contemporary rock had to offer. Last night, at Jones Beach on Long Island just outside New York City, I had that Kansas City concert in mind as, a quarter-century later, I was attending another concert by the same band, Rush, now as someone entering what is often called “mid-life.”

I have seen this band at least a dozen times, and having discovered their music around age 11, have been listening intently for 30 years now. They are an acquired taste, and often hated by critics, but last night I was feeling more than a little vindicated in sticking with them. Having won major industry awards for bass, guitar, and drums; having received multiple top awards in Canada (their home country) for performance and songwriting; having been the musical inspiration for a recent Hollywood movie and new video games; having been embraced by the Colbert Report, Rolling Stone magazine, and given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; having been the subject of an award-winning documentary; and having more consecutive gold and platinum albums than any band but the Rolling Stones and the Beatles…. This band has never stopped pushing forward. Few bands last this long, and do so with such vibrancy and continually deepened skill into the later stages of their career. Even though two band members are 56, and one is 57, they are currently preparing a new album for release next summer. They remind us that we are still inventing what the rock life can be.

Herein lies one interesting part of the show last night. Jones Beach, like many dates on their current tour, was sold out, and the fact that these rock legends are pushing 60 does not seem to matter to these fans. When seen against the backdrop of the expense of modern concerts and overall decline in the concertgoing business, the fact that Rush is still able to sell out 5,000-10,000 (and in Brazil, 50,000-60,000) seat venues consistently, after nearly forty years as a band, as well as make albums that continue to go gold and platinum, suggests to me that more than fan nostalgia is going on.

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As I have been sketching in a brief blog series (the most recent one is here), one of the theologically significant ways of rock culture is training in bodily habitation. As religion scholar Talal Asad among many others have argued, the training of sense was intrinsic to the working of classic Catholic sacramental theology and is part of what Christianity and Islam share. With regard to how rock does it, I have called this the performance of a bodily wherewithal, wherein instruments like electric guitars or basses become something like natural appendages for the musician, in a way that speaks to fans (including other musicians) of bodily integration and excellence or deep congruence in inhabiting the world. (I realize I have had too little to say about drums, keyboards, or other instruments; I hope our commenters or R&T bloggers will over time correct what I’ve written about guitars or fill out these other underrepresented instruments.)

Recently I took lead guitarist Reb Beach as my example. In this post, I present to you Kip Winger, lead singer and bassist for the band Winger. Kip Winger’s bodily wherewithal in performance exhibits as strong a gathered congruence as Reb Beach.  In fact, he is somewhat renowned for this among both Winger fans and detractors. I speak here of his pirouettes, his near-sashays, his rockish plies, all of which were on display early on in Winger videos. The most famous is “Seventeen” (full disclosure: not for kids). But there are many other examples, like “Madalaine”:

What I did not know until recently was that apparently Kip Winger had training in ballet as an adolescent. Even more, his ballet background is coming to play more and more of an influence over his musical interests. This recent interview discusses his rising interest in composing classical music for ballet (a new composition of his, “Ghosts,” recently premiered at the San Francisco Ballet). And he’s been going back to school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville (see the interesting feature here) to refine his classical chops. This is a much more “distinguished” way of holding oneself than one typically assumes in rock.
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This post furthers my recent sketches relating theology to Winger (Part One is here, One and a Half here, and Two is here).

One of the most recognizable images of Winger’s live shows — which they share with larger rock culture — is the utter importance of the musicians’ bodily wherewithal to the sound, look, and feel of the rock experience. Last weekend, I saw Winger at BB King’s in New York City,

and before the show, I was talking with other fans gathered in front of the stage. One woman said to me that she was trying to get as close as possible to lead guitarist Reb Beach’s side of the stage because, as she put it, Beach “totally melds with his guitar,” he is “so into it, like he’s in a trance.” I could not disagree, and kept her observation with me through the performance and my later reflection on the band.

Beach is among a coterie of lead guitarists who display an uncanny familiar and lavish sympathy with their guitar, making it into a same and separate entity at once: both dance partner and electric extension of Beach’s own body. For those whose tastes run to rock, it is compelling to be in the presence of this style of musicianship. I think the fan who said that to me is pointing to the way that bodily wherewithals or dispositions among rock musicians can symbolize and refocus fans’ desires. I have felt the same way in seeing the relationship of Geddy Lee to his bass guitar, Michelle Malone to her guitar, and many fans say something similar of Hendrix’s relationship to his guitar. Rock musicians, and probably all musicians, can develop intimate relationships with their instruments, and this in itself is spiritually interesting and important, but it takes another kind of psychology and musical identity to allow the abandon tucked into that intimate relationship to show itself in that peculiar combination of a studied and unstudied showing so characteristic of rock, especially hard rock, shows. There is also something interesting here in the way that this musical surrender allows body postures for men in particular that are forsworn in larger society. In the logic of “normal” North American everyday life, these postures would be weird or, importantly, “queer,” but here the queer becomes revelatory, a “total meld.” Whatever this is speaking to in fans’ desires, it seems to be related to some kind of freedom that is an excellence, a relationship to a beyond, and the beauty of a sacred singularity.

Here is a clip of the band from last weekend’s NYC show. Beach is the guitarist with the very long hair on the right side of the screen. In addition to lead guitar, you can see he also takes a harmonica solo!

And another show I attended in Los Angeles in 2007 had Beach channeling this guitar solo:

To be continued…

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Burning Fight: The Nineties Hardcore Revolution in Ethics, Politics, Spirit and Sound
by Brian Peterson
Revelation Records Publishing / $18.00 US (list)
[Amazon] [Revelation Records]

The terms “punk rock” and “hardcore punk” bring to mind a variety of images and stereotypes for “insiders” and “outsiders” alike. Cliches abound when the question of “what punk rock is” or “was” is raised, even in accounts written by those who have been key actors in punk rock. This is problematic because the movement has included countless offshoots and submovements, many of which were and continue to be contradictory and in conflict with one another.

An especially troubling viewpoint parroted in histories of punk and hardcore is the pinpointing of an early, and often arbitrary, “demise” for the genre, usually the early- or mid-1980s. The documentary American Hardcore, is a good example of this tendency. Most of the hardcore “heroes” interviewed in the film place the supposed “death” of punk in the mid-1980s, only to be followed by “pop” punk bands like Green Day and flavor-of-the-month emo bands.

These features of the dominant “punk narrative” obscure the fact that hardcore punk never stopped and in fact became arguably much more interesting, diverse, and contested, especially throughout the 1990s. Brian Peterson’s mammoth book Burning Fight: The Nineties Hardcore Revolution in Ethics, Politics, Spirit, and Sound is the first account of this decade in hardcore punk, a decade overlooked or deliberately ignored in most previous accounts.

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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!

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While in Cleveland a few days ago, I went with B to see the new Rush documentary, “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage.” I have at least two biases to report that will influence what I have to say: [1] I have seen a lot of rockumentaries; [2] I am an irrationally exuberant fan of Rush. That said, this was perhaps the best rock documentary I’ve ever watched, and it was certainly the most enjoyable.

The film takes you from the humble beginnings of Rush, in the Toronto suburbs, through their cultural coolpoint circa 1981, forward into their continued musical evolution in the 1980s and 90s, their several-year hiatus, and their 21st century resurgence into perhaps greater critical and popular appreciation than ever (judging from South Park, the Colbert Report, Rolling Stone, movies, musical awards, and much pop-culturish more — and, lest we forget, those staggering album sales, too (around 40 million sold, from some 38 total gold and platinum records)).  (For a good overview, see their Wikipedia entry here.)

It was a thrill to see this substantial (close to two hours) documentary in the midst of a very appreciative Cleveland crowd, for whom rock and roll has long been a hometown passion. The crowd was as I would have expected: mostly white men, with some women scattered about, and almost all between the ages of 25 and 55. Rush listeners have been drawn from the ranks of creative types, scientific types, romantic loners, and musicians for several decades, and as guitarist Alex Lifeson jokes in the film, the audience’s makeup has stayed remarkably similar over that time. (But I can only make that observation based on U.S. culture; it would be interesting to do a comparative study of their fans across continents.)

I have written on this blog and elsewhere about the importance of Rush music for my own happiness and at-home-ness in the world. Many others derive similar consolation and motivation from other rock bands or genres of music. What I noticed most about watching this documentary was how immediately the eras of the band — whether measured in distinctive sounds, songs, albums, or outfits — brought out an emotional recapitulation of turning points in my own life. (I have written earlier on this blog about their song “Subdivisions.”) The salvific placement and healing meaning of these sounds are inseparable from the swampy pacing of my own life. This ever common, but always particular, experience of popular music fans is one of the most important reasons that theology must better understand secular music.

There were a few lineup changes at the teenage beginning of Rush, and their original drummer John Rutsey left after the first album, making way for Neil Peart. But once that trio of Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson was in place by the mid-70s, they have stayed together for 35 years, and are preparing a new album and tour for this summer. Such permanence of creative and committed adult relationship is unusual in both rock and life, and as I sat drunk with delight in the dark theater, I was aware what a strange gift it was to have had my emotional, psychological, musical and spiritual life so interwoven with their music for over 30 of those 35 years. It’s a peculiar thing to have happened in a life and in a culture, but for hundreds of thousands of us, even millions, in North America and around the world, this is indeed what has happened. And it happens daily for millions in their own way. Thank the-artist(s)-formerly-known-as-God for that!

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

I know that not everyone is Rush fan. But I am, oh how I am. I first heard of the band while playing the video game Wizard of Wor in the supermarket around 1980, when someone leaned over and said something about their new album called Permanent Waves. Then not long after that, around age 12, I spent the night at a friend’s house and was transported when he played their first live album, All the World’s a Stage, on cassette in his “boombox.” So it’s been three decades of Rush for me, my longest relationship outside of my family.

I’ve tried to restrain myself on this blog from indulging too Rushishly too much. But for the moment, I will submit to what Kierkegaard called the “teleological suspension of the ethical” and say yes and amen to a rockish antinomianism. Because there is a new documentary out about Rush, called “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage,” that just this weekend debuted here in NYC at the Tribeca Film Festival. (I was being a responsible parent and so did not attend; oh, the pains of the tradeoffs of middle class existence!)

Anyhow, one review of the documentary, by Hank Shteamer of Time Out New York, fascinatingly characterizes Rush’s career as a series of productive utterances of the word “no.” Here we approach the obligatory theological content: “saying yes and saying no” is a venerable theological practice in the Christian tradition, typically identified as a way of “discerning” how to live. There are any number of “spiritual exercises” in the theological tradition that provide one with techniques of learning to consent or defer, and the Jesuit/Ignatian spiritual tradition, of special interest to the place where I teach, Fordham University, is one of those. And in the influential practical theological book Practicing Our Faith, edited by Dorothy Bass (new 2010 edition just out), one of the basic Christian practices is “saying yes and saying no” (by theologian M. Shawn Copeland).

I would argue that “saying yes and saying no” is a problem of Christian significance, but also that the problem of saying yes and no predates, supersedes, and transcends Christianity. And at any rate, as the sociologist of religion Nancy Ammerman has shown, Christians put their spiritual lives together out of all sorts of “non-Christian” materials. This has been hard for many — but far from all — Christian theologians to let through and figure. For myself and many others, a “yes” to rock is a yes to life. What makes it weird for many in rock culture is that there is also in there an equal and equally strong “yes” to theology. Yes to Rush, yes to theology, no to Christian rock, no to living in the religious past. From these discernments is my own, and perhaps others’, spiritual life confected.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, New York, 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.

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