Given the recent discussions here at R&T about children and their presence or absence in church consciousness, practices, and power structures, I have been thinking about how children show up (or not) in rock culture, and how what is learned about children through secular music relates to spiritual attention to childhood in general and children in particular. There is obviously a great deal to talk about on this topic, because it is not just music that is relevant here, but videos, video games, concerts (and the different hospitability of indoor and outdoor concerts for children), and many other parts of rock culture (including merchandising to children). Given this complexity, I wanted to step back and ask if I could think of a symbol in rock music for what rock might have to say about children, and I thought of this video of Rod Stewart’s version of “Forever Young.” It makes me think about the real lives of rock musicians and fans (as mentioned in my recent post on Anvil), which often includes children, however absent they can be in rock places, lyrics, and tales. It makes me think, even more, of the ways in which involvement in rock culture keeps us young. It reminds us of adolescent dreams and their adult vicissitudes, of the power of feeling for making life meaningful, of elemental joys. There is something childish even in the most adult rock: being guided by emotion, being led by that uneasy and short continuum between gratification and unselfish love. It is as if kids have to be mostly absent in rock because they are so present in its unconscious. And as a steady plank in all of that, here is a relatively straightforward moment in rock: Rod Stewart singing about childhood, to a young boy in his arms. I remember sitting in my apartment in college, watching this video on MTV with my friends, and one of us wondered whether Stewart is also singing to himself, to his younger self, wishing in retrospect that he will have a good life. And in that way it would be like a prayer, a supplication for another, even another self, aimed for a place outside of how we experience time, even sent “backward” in time. Whatever is going on, see and hear for yourself:

Now, if most rock music were like this, I would probably hate rock (because the presence of children introduces limits to the many kinds of adulthood, and also just the many bombastic and irreverent noises, that rock explores and celebrates). But as a symbol for a crucial dimension of rock, including its creative ethical space, I am drawn to it. It is helpful to remember that the Rod Stewart who could make this video was the same Rod Stewart who did this:

So here is to a kind of rockish formation, without sentiment, but with the releasement to the mystery of natality that Christian theology has also occasionally indulged, that keeps us “forever young.”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States