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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Back in the early days of the web, there used to be things called “web counters” that would publicly tally how many visits a site had gotten. For whatever reason, those counters have been disappearing from websites, but behind the scenes we still look at them. In fact, it is a little unnerving how much data is aggregated through hosting-sites like WordPress (whose platform is used here to manage Rock and Theology). “Backstage” of the blog, we can see not only the number of visitors from day to day, but which links are clicked, which blog posts are clicked, and which specific Google searches have led to a visit. None of this is associated with any usernames, IP addresses, or other identifying information. (Still, the contents of some of those Google searches that lead to R&T have been … illuminating.) In other words, lots of website interaction is collected, but none of it is traceable to any particular visitor.

This banal disclosure is simply an attempt at an open-handed gesture of gratitude to you who are our R&T readers, because today we reached 10,000 visits to the site. We went live (with the help of Kiss) on 5 January 2009.  The traffic makes me happy for a boutique blog such as this, which a rock-vocalist friend recently called, gently, “a little niche, if I may say so.” (With “niche” used as a substantive adjective.)

Happy to say that the number of visits is steadily increasing, too, as the months go on. The high point for visits so far has been the coverage of U2 playing right outside my office here at Fordham. And a great many readers are still clicking on Brian Robinette’s discussion of “Album Warts and Other Blessed Imperfections.”

I promise not to mention visits and numbers again. Until we hit 100,000. Many thanks to our contributors (Brian, Mike, Loye, Adrian, Andy), to our readers, and to our sponsor, Liturgical Press. Here’s to more theology, more rock, more life.

Tom Beaudoin
New York City

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