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 an 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.

Here — I repeat I was fairly shocked to sense it — I too am belonging to something like a secular religious tradition both young and old. I recognize these figures, these sounds, these gestures, I see the 1950s gospel in the 1970s grooves, I see the 1930s blues in the 1990s grunge, I see how it can fit together, and feel how it has knit itself into me, this history of ways of somatizing secularly the sacrality of sound. This was for me a further vindication of my emerging sense, articulated frequently on this blog, that I (and many others) live in multiple traditions of spiritual exercise at once: a rockish history and a theological history.

*Later in the exhibit, one encounters a large three-dimensional map of Manhattan staged at desk-height and colored a pale white. Surrounding the map are computerized screens that show dozens of famous rock sites in the borough and give a snippet of information. Press on, say CBGB, and high-resolution pictures come up with some information about its place in rock history in New York City. There is also the option of having the site “light up” on the map in front of you so you can see where it sits in relation to the other historic sites and the borough as a whole. I thought of two things as I did this exercise: it reminded me of the “Operation” game I played as a child (“the wacky doctor’s game”), where you see arrayed before you a corpus that is at the same time a map that tells a story of its charming, fabulous, or strange innards;

and in this recollection I thought of the importance of the ancient spiritual exercises that give the “view from above” (according to Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life, What is Ancient Philosophy?, and other works). As children, one way we got the “view from above” regarding bodies was from the “Operation” game; this allowed a way of playfully imagining what made up a body. And with this map of Manhattan rock sites, one can have the “view from above” that becomes a way of imagining how many and varied are the places that go into constituting what we think of as a tradition, a history, a genre — an experience. It was impossible to exit the Annex, return to Mercer street and out into SoHo, the world of the avenues “from below,” and not simultaneously be sensing the city in a new way, “from above,” and holding a slightly different place for rock culture and how it presses in on so many sides, all the time — and a new sense for the ethical choices to be made to preserve such locales of musical invention (such as this alliance for SoHo) … If one can but be with rock in this mappish spiritual operation.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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