On Saturday night, I went to a rock show at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. On the bill were Orphan, Lights, and The Entrance Band. (I have written earlier about Entrance Band at Rock and Theology here.) With me was my friend C, who does not normally listen to rock. Here are two facts about the show: it was wicked hot. I mean really, really hot. And the Entrance Band was wicked loud. I mean really, really, really loud. As I have written on this blog, I have (finally) taken to wearing ear plugs at live shows in face of creeping hearing loss. But C had not anticipated how loud it might get, and it surprised me a little, too. He ended up tearing up tissue and stuffing it in his ears, and I think some of the marvel of the power of Entrance Band was thereby diminished. Leaving Brooklyn in the early morning hours, I thought about this experience, and was struck by how I had assumed it might get loud, had prepared for it, and had that loudness as part of the schooling in rock that was there for me. And how I was also quite willing to endure the intense heat as part of what constituted the experience.

Brian Robinette and I published an article a while back about the ways in which being overtaken sonically is a way in which rockish personae get shaped. The very force of the music, in many ways, including its dynamics, pressures the rock fan into a certain kind of enjoyment, sets the bar in a certain way for experience, and teaches how to be with difference, otherness, to calibrate intensity, in a way that becomes cemented into one over time through the experience of attending live shows, of losing oneself in a crowd, of submergence into a scene for a few hours. Withstanding intense sound and adverse elements (whether heat, rain, mud, or all of them) are more or less what one commits to in practicing well (or at least fully) the rock persona. I marveled at how connatural this had all become for me when compared to my friend’s musical tastes, but more than tastes, it is a matter of habits, but more than habits, of habitus, of a self able to expect and handle certain experiences due to choice and structure over time. I do not think I appreciated in my 20s how deeply this process worked, and in my 30s, once I began to get aware of it, through theological and musicological literature on reworking self and community through experience, it made the sense of what was happening even richer.

But not untinged by regret or a kind of mourning for the other kinds of musical experience, and the allied spiritualities they allow, that I will never experience. I cannot have the felt sense of bombardment and the desire for a very different kind of presence that my friend C did when at that show. I can learn it, perhaps, but not by unlearning the last 25 years of rock culture populated with dozens or hundreds of such shows. Theology, which cares so much for the trace of the impression that divinity leaves on our lives, learns something about the sculpting of sense from these rockish examples. And theology has its own words about why we trace these rockish waters over the rocks of our lives in the first place.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, United States

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