Growing up in Independence, Missouri, I lived in two different “townhouse” complexes that were federally-supported housing for families hanging on to something like the dream of their own modest space in a relatively safe place. Most of the families were mostly lower-middle-class white families, with a few firmly middle-class as well as a good number of working-class folks. The education I received while living there in the 1970s-1980s, about the values and practices of nonelite white cultures, was probably as formative as my relatively deep and positive exposure to Catholic culture as a boy, or as my later formation in academic theological cultures as an adult.

In Independence at that time, there was a rolling interaction of that fairly narrow band of socioeconomic cultures, at school, at the mall, in our housing complex, and at an annual festival in downtown Independence called Santa-Cali-Gon (commemorating the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails leading out of Independence). As classic evidence in the local lexicon for the importance of and anxieties around class, the annual festival was jokingly and derisively called the “white trash festival” by some of us who imagined that we could participate in that culture but not be touched by it. Whoever wrote this Santa-Cali-Gon entry is aware of the same class fear/identification as I was.

I was thinking of the kind of talk, music, camaraderie, ways of boy-girl interaction, and more as I thought about the recommendations people made in response to my recent post about music with “low cultural capital” today, music often presumed to be of little positive interest for theology. Whatever other class-based scoffings have been trained into me since I left Independence, I still find that I instinctively want to think about the ways in which this music is a part of people making sense of their lives, even as it symbolizes and enacts what holds people back. Placing a theological analysis of music in the context of lived life gets us away from preoccupation with a theological semantics of the songs or videos themselves, and moves us toward a curiosity about placing this music back in the lives of those who find it meaningful, available, or at the least unavoidable. Here are a few tunes from some of the groups thought of as lower on the musical food chain today. How do our relationships to these artists or songs, musically and spiritually, give us information about our social class? And what does that tell us for theological work?

*

This, anyway, was how my original draft of this post went. I spent a good deal of time sifting through videos that I wanted to add, for example, from Kid Rock and Insane Clown Posse. And I decided that someone who is better able than I am to show how these songs work culturally today should probably do this analysis. I had originally pasted up a few videos, but then could not stop wondering if abstracting them from their everyday use was contradicting the very point I was trying to make above.

Moreover, the more I started surfing around the Internet and remembering what people have found so offensive about Kid Rock and Insane Clown Posse, I thought maybe I simply ought not feature their videos until I have thought more about exactly what I want to defend about them other than making the general point above about the importance of accounting for performances of taste in theological judgment about popular culture.

*

And then I watched the video for Kid Rock’s “Only God Knows Why,” and I imagined that if this tune had come out when I was an adolescent, it would have been a big hit where I grew up.

The autotuned verses are like a long meandering buildup to the un-autotuned payoff at the elevated mid-song verse: “You get what you put in, and people get what they deserve!” On the one hand, while this is the kind of sentiment that, cheerily enough expressed, one might want to repeat (with a little less verve) to an undergraduate just starting college, as a life map it is so patently false as to be cringe-inducing. (Not to mention dangerous when people try to turn this aphorism into social policy.)

On the other hand, what an unsurpassable refrain for all the knotted, compelling grievances tucked just underneath the surface of that everyday life in Independence! Especially when followed by “Still I ain’t seen mine! Only God knows why!” Whatever was stultifying and base in the culture in which I grew up — and the petty and profounder indiscretions of adolescence offered their share — I received reduced-price or free lunches at school with some other kids who were being raised in families with a diffuse sense of having been ripped off, left out, or let down. From what, I wasn’t sure. These kids were not the majority, but in retrospect they taught me about a certain anomie that broke the surface in the occasional public familial yelling, the furtive teen toxins of cigarettes and schnapps, sometimes harder stuff. (A few years after I left home in the late ’80s, Independence became known as the “meth capital of the United States.”) But I think now that it was that small range of social classes that kept us keeping an eye on something bigger, even if many of us backed into a way out instead of heading into it. This narrow class mixture was just enough to constitute a coherent white lower middle class culture, especially in those housing complexes, but the range was also just enough to let most kids think that you could do better than where you were living. And we listened to Kiss, Warrant, and Bon Jovi, whose successors are the Kid Rocks and Nickelbacks of today. Which is not to say that these bands are the most theologically interesting, but only to say that where music gets placed in people’s lives and bears on their hope for more for themselves and others is theologically important, insofar as that hope for more is something we neither invent nor control.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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