In response to my post about “Rooster” by Alice in Chains, Michael Iafrate provided an interesting link to a story and accompanying podcast about research undertaken by Prof. Jonathan Pieslak (City College of New York) that describes how U.S. soldiers use heavy metal and hip-hop to get charged up to prepare for armed conflict. Soldiers, he argues, often use music to heighten their aggression and focus, and sometimes to take them out of normal human constraints and put them into a superhuman or “monstrous” mindset. Prof. Pieslak has recently written a book on the topic, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Indiana University Press, 2009).

This is sobering and important research, and I would like to read Pieslak’s book. Several things relevant for theology are at stake here: not only the practices by which people get charged up for war, deadening their resistance and redirecting their desires, but also the fact of popular music’s meanings being found in its use and not only or even mostly in its self-contained lyrical or musical structure, which confounds a great deal of theological analysis that would like to treat music as a more or less ordered text, on the model of textual knowledge in which most theologians are trained (interpret this theological work, gloss that biblical passage, which is to say, eat these words, or in other words, master them). It sounds like Prof. Pieslak’s research is showing us once again how much the meaning of popular music lies in its contextual function and local use, and so the key theological orientation becomes not textual systematicity but rather lived practice, action, performance.

In the podcast interview, he suggests that it is the sonic intensity of metal and hip-hop that makes it so attractive as a preparation for war. None of the soldiers, in other words, are listening to John Denver tunes.

Theologians can inveigh against war or can calculate the terms of a “just war,” but until theology can interpret and make interventions in the way music informs readiness for killing, it will not have addressed the level of everyday development of personae capable of military violence. This is why theology is best done in relationship to critical studies of lived experience and in an atmosphere of curiosity about how persons really get made. Far from the clarification of doctrine and interpretations of scripture that occupy so much of theological life lie the lived theologies and opportunities for academic theology to both learn and intervene, but not until it gains access to the lives of those for whom it is concerned, just as Prof. Pieslak did.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York