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.
(more…)

One of the mundane insights of my adulthood thus far has been that there are better and worse ways to conclude an ordinary day. One of the better ways is to end the day with a spiritual review of sorts, what Christian spiritual tradition (and the Ignatian tradition in particular) calls an “examen.” This is, generally speaking, a practice of carefully remembering a period of the day with the intention of noticing spiritually significant material — sins and graces, desolations and consolations, gratitudes and regrets — and paying more meditative attention to that material.

I am a naturally meditative person, and would walk around for hours each day thinking about life, if I could, so the examen appeals to me. But I also find that at the end of the day, there is particular benefit in my playing music as a kind of examen. I will plug in a bass (my Rickenbacker 4001 or Fender Jazz), and here go the headphones, pedalboard up, and then the attention can really begin. Even thirty minutes an evening feels like a descent into an unmistakable and unsolicited good. The day’s substrates can come out in hooks, tones, riffs, explorations, and even (I’ve learned) impasses, missed notes, sludgy playing. Sometimes I sense new dimensions of my day coming through in the playing. It’s almost as if I have to invent the truths of my day through the bass.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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

All praise to John Entwistle (The Who), Chris Squire (Yes), and Geddy Lee (Rush) as guys who have been the Olympian figures for me on the bass.

This is because, along with other modern masters like Billy Sheehan, they seem to have the bass as promise of an entire existence for themselves — and those who have ears to hear.

The way they hold and relate to it is as revelatory as the notes that they choose, if choice is even the right word in seismographing such immanent communion they each manifest. Others in that realm would be Flea (Chili Peppers) and Les Claypool (Primus).

These are all guys who play out front but without dominating in a “bad way,” who are constantly inventive and orthogonal in their selection of notes in regard to their own bass parts but also in regard to the guitarists with whom they’re paired, and all of whom are married sonically to their drummers.

I also notice that many of these players are white guys with the low-grade irony of suburban “cool” – or the creative detritus of the wake of its rejection – circulating all around them. This quality probably also speaks to me; I notice that bassists I like form a kind of psychologico-musico-spiritual gang.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York