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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On a recent chilly fall day in New York City, I left my office early for the kind of theological research to which I have become accustomed over the last decade, and especially since becoming involved with the Rock and Theology Project: an immersion in a secular music space armed only with my theological forms of attention. My destination was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex, located in SoHo.

The Annex is a small outpost of the official Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio (United States). My only visit to the Cleveland site was in 1999 when I gave a talk at an event there celebrating the 50th anniversary of the National Council of Churches. (My lecture was on — rock and theology.)

So it was with anticipation that I visited the Annex, a curiosity mixed a little bit with anticipatory revulsion at the turning of rock culture into a funhouse. A museum for rock, even if only an “annex,” is in some ways a quite unrockish prospect, as if to say: the history of the genre is established solidly now, the musical genealogies are solid enough to be etched in oak, the personalities and places queued up politely like setting the needle on a phonograph and rehearsing the same circular motion all the way to the center. And then doing it again and again.

On the other hand, a museum for rock, even if only an “annex,” is a way in our culture of establishing something of public moment, of curating an essential cultural knowledge, of saying simply that “this place of things will repay careful attention.” It symbolizes that rock music, and rock culture more generally, is also a phenomenon for thought, gives a way of being heard to make an intellectual case about ourselves and our culture. That is a spirit shared by the Rock and Theology Project.

Of my leisurely three-hour visit, I recount only two moments for now:

*Early in the exhibit, visitors go into a small theater to see a 20-minute or so multimedia presentation (film, slides, lights, music, but no fog machine) on the history of rock and roll. Despite how this might sound, it was very tastefully composed to the point of being pretty well engrossing. As various artists were shown live and the music pumped loudly out of the high-end speakers (where were my prescription earphones?), people in the audience (an evident mix of generations and races) frequently clapped, cheered, sang along, mused. I sacrifice everything in my scholarly objectivity by reporting to you that I was fairly taken away by it. Here is why: beginning with the first images and sounds of Robert Johnson, seeing in front of me a audio-visual rehearsal of a coherent history of rock from blues, country, bluegrass, gospel forward right up to today was a moment of startling recognition. Even were one to quibble with the history presented, even were one to rewrite the whole thing, I realized I belonged to this tradition, that this history was effective, even then, in my blood.

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Brian Robinette and I have written a short essay that has just been published in the Jesuit magazine America, and can be found online here. In it, we propose some basic ways that Catholics might adopt a stance of theological curiosity about not only rock music but rock culture more broadly.

When trying to hold ’secular music’ and ’sacred theology’ together, or at least to be aware that both music and spirituality are important and even determining forces in people’s lives, the stubborn tendency in North American Christian circles is to want more “Christian rock,” or to reform the liturgy (either by adding pop music to the liturgy or erasing all gestures to it in contemporary liturgical music); the stubborn tendency in secular rock culture is to foreclose theological investigations of rock by declaring rock’s independence from ecclesial culture (this is surely right but does not really get at the importance of thinking through rock culture’s spiritual phenomena or religious history — precisely for a deeper return to rock culture itself, if that is what one wants).

So we have to try to open up a new space, as the contributors here at R&T have been doing: between and across the ’secular’ and ‘religious’ — not to invent from whole cloth a new rock, a new religion, or a new theology, but simply to understand what’s happening in so many lives today… and where that happening might further lead.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, New York, United States

In this post, I continue my brief discussion of Kathryn Tanner’s book Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology. Installment one is here, and two is here.

From this postmodern platform, Tanner levels a strong critique of correlationist and postliberal theologies. Taking correlation alone for the moment (and particularly because it remains so influential within Catholic theology in the United States), her criticisms of correlation are essentially twofold:

[1] Correlation treats culture as a repository of universal human experiences, whether existential questions or limit experiences, to which the Christian message is correlated. However, theology should not presume the presence of universals “underneath” a cultural situation but should prioritize the particular methodologically. Correlation, in other words, tends to treat cultures too idealistically and ahistorically. Tanner is not arguing ipso facto against “common human experience and language,” to use the phraseology of David Tracy (in Blessed Rage for Order). However, one cannot do specific theology with such an assumption, as it dishonors the concreteness of the culture. “Common cultural processes there may be, but generalizations about them are constructed out of a comparison of particulars” (Theories of Culture, p. 66).

[2] Correlation suggests that the Christian message, texts or symbols are pure data that generate, at least initially, their own meaning. Because this method depends on linking together Christianity and culture, faith and life, message and situation, or classic text and limit-situation, correlation proceeds as if Christian doctrines, symbols or texts arise more or less independently of culture, enabling the correlationist theologian to correlate two “independently generated wholes” (p. 107). What are left unaccounted methodologically are the particular ways that culture has influenced Christian texts, or better, the way that Christian texts, symbols, and doctrines are thoroughly cultural in their production, always situated between and among various cultures. It is not as if a Christian text springs purely to the methodological table with its ownmost world to disclose or pattern of praxis to inaugurate. Rather, all Christian claims are cultural products, all the way down, in their production, maintenance, and interpretation. In Tanner’s fine formulation: “One does not first determine a distinctively Christian message or lens for viewing the world and then bring it, subsequently, into relation with other cultural practices for, say, apologetic purposes; those other cultural practices are there from the beginning as the materials out of which the very Christian message or lens is constructed… A kind of apologetics or polemics with other cultures is internal… to the very construction of Christian sense” (p. 116).

In a sense, Tanner’s critique of correlation is that it overrelies on notions of purity and univocality: that culture is reducible to a set of pure questions that speak with one accord in a coherent address to theology; that theological texts blossom uncontaminated by culture to yield a claim, a prophetic challenge, or a world. Correlation does not adequately deal with difference, specificity, history, heterogeneity, with culture as irreducible contestation over the significance of materials. Correlation does not deal fully enough, that is, with the conditions of reality.

It could be said that Tanner shows us one way in which all theology is theology of culture. Because theology is a cultural practice — from the writing of gospels to this very text composed on my laptop computer in specific places in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City — it necessarily makes use of materials (practices and their concepts, tropes, themes, concerns, styles, problematics, analyses, symbols) already at play in the cultures in which theology makes its place. Tanner’s challenge to theologies of correlation is substantial and even foundational, going to the very heart of what makes correlation correlational.

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Dr. Chris McDonald, of Cape Breton University, has written an insightful article titled “Open Secrets: Individualism and Middle-Class Identity in the Songs of Rush,” that was published in the July 2008 issue (vol. 31, no. 3) of the journal Popular Music and Society (pp. 313-328), and I wanted to briefly appreciate a few things it offers the R&T conversation here.

McDonald’s basic argument is that as evidenced in lyrics, video, musical performance, interviews, and biographical background, the music of Rush provided a generation of adolescent boys and young men with the ideology of North American middle-class individualism as an important (though very problematic) piece of identity-construction.

He references Louis Althusser’s notion of “interpellation,” especially as brokered in popular culture studies, as a way to make sense of how Rush was able to accomplish this, especially in the late 1970s through early 1980s, when they were as close to mainstream popularity as they would ever become (with the possible exception of the last eighteen months, what with a highly successful tour, the accumulated receipts of 35 years of record sales, a Colbert Report appearance, a Rolling Stone feature, a place of idolization in a recent movie, and their seemingly secure ensconcement in the rock video game industry). By interpellation, McDonald (via Althusser) means the ideological “hailing” (a vivid image) of fans through a cultural production (like pop music) that cements the fans’ own (ideological) sense of how their lives relate to their socioeconomic circumstances. (In rock culture, one might imaginatively substitute “throwing the horns” for “hailing,” as a symbolic way of saying about a band: “You are telling our own truth to us!”)

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As I’ve delved into the rock and theology conversations over the last many years, I have found myself continually going back to challenges raised in a remarkably innovative book by theologian Kathryn Tanner from 1997, called Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (published by Fortress).

In part, my frequent return to Tanner has to do with the pressure her work places on Catholic (and other) theological investigations into popular culture, for reasons I will try to explain. I would like to take a little time to write about Tanner’s argument to size up the challenges it puts to theological work on and with cultural practices.

Tanner argues for the virtues of a postmodern understanding of theological work. For her, this means taking postmodern developments in anthropological theories of culture seriously as aids to theological inquiry, not only letting them constructively inform theology but also using them to criticize the inadequacies of modern theories of culture that unthematically inform much contemporary theology.

Tanner shows how in its classically modern formulations, anthropology has a consistent interpretation of the meaning of culture. This interpretation stresses the unity and autonomy of cultures. Cultures are seen as more or less self-contained, well-bounded wholes. On this model, cultures enforce relatively strong and uniform determinants on human behavior, doing so through their organic structure and intrinsically rationalized mechanisms. Modern anthropology interprets culture as grounded in a geographic context, a specific space. This allows anthropologists to get a sense of cultures through anthropological snapshots, focusing on one moment in time as a gateway to a whole culture. Any changes to a culture originate outside the boundaries of the “organism.”

This interpretation of culture was very productive in helping make sense of cultures. It allowed theorization of the social construction of cultures, encouraged the beginnings of a “nonevaluative alternative to ethnocentrism” (p. 36) and provided a critical lever by which one culture’s practices could relativize those of another—usually a matter of the (Western) anthropologist invoking another culture’s meanings to undermine the naturalness of his or her own.

What “culture” means, on this interpretation, is the “meaning” of social practices. That is to say, a culture is comprised of a “characteristic set of norms, values, beliefs, concepts, dispositions, or preoccupations” (p. 30). The primary metaphors guiding inquiry are culture as text, organism, or work of art.

But in the last few decades, Tanner notes, a different interpretation is emerging. Postmodern anthropological perspectives interpret culture with a heightened historical sensitivity, with more attention to the workings of culture “on the ground.” In other words, postmodern interpretations foreground historicity and everydayness. Both have the effect of dynamizing culture, the former by looking for ways cultures change and adapt through historical contexts, and the latter by examining how cultures are constructed and contested in local, highly particular practices in everyday life.

More to come in future posts….

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Check out this excellently crafted, theologically provocative article by Peter Bebergal on the psych folk subgenre and how the musical descent through the body may allow a mystical plane for experience. (Full disclosure: Bebergal is an old grad school compatriot and friend.) In the midst of a discussion of the limits of drug-based inducements to a “beyond in our midst” (paraphrasing Bonhoeffer—that’s my association, not Bebergal’s), his article quotes a remarkable theological lyric from the Castanets:

“What good these myriad mythologies

And what good these magics not to be released

And what good unknowable divinity

If it’s not the world?”

Excuse me while I pull out the kneeler—surrounded by amps, lights, fans, and the yearning of rhythmic rock noise. (My mind goes to Wittgenstein’s deafening introduction to the philosophical self in the Tractatus: “The world is all that is the case.”)

Then Bebergal again, on how this music “theurgically draws down the holy.” I swoon–theologically.

I won’t even spoil Bebergal’s concluding hell-heaven of a sentence, which ought to be made the preface to any postmodern Liturgy of the Hours.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City