I was writing a response to Jeff Keuss’ thoughtful post below, asking what rock is, when I realized my reply was getting slightly too long for the comment box, so I’ve put it here as a post:

Thanks for raising this, Jeff, and thanks for the responses to Jeff’s post that help me think about what makes rock rock, and what it means to call this the “Rock and Theology” project. When I say “rock music” now, in the United States, I feel instinctively that the term has been surpassed by something more diffuse, and that by even using the term I have declared the expiration date of that rockish musical agenda (bombast, irreverence, technique, Big Ideas, the carnivalesque) that was so influential for me. Here is Twisted Sister’s memorable celebration of the rock idiom from the mid-80s, which rings the changes between now and then. Few today would cry out “I wanna rock!” unselfconsciously. But notice the constant theme in the video of (as I have written elsewhere) modest rebellion against the smallness of white suburban mores. As hack as that seems now, everyone has to start their journey out (and journey in) somewhere.

That said, global mileage varies; to say “rock music” in other geographical contexts today is to mean what those of us in the United States and Canada might call disco, hard rock/metal, or any loudly-played popular electrically-produced music with melodic hooks and prominent backbeat. In the last several decades, amplifiers-full of academic research have gone into isolating the essential rock sound — or in recent years, the essential rock culture in which distinctive sounds are produced and counted as “rock and roll.” Indeed, in the USA anyway, “rock music” tends to call up a somewhat different constellation of images, sounds, and concepts than “rock and roll.” I take the latter to be the historically broader, though now fairly antiquated, term, caught up in the crucial 1940s/1950s musico-cultural dynamics that Mary McDonough sketched above.

I confess that my own weakness is for the term “rock culture,” because I have been persuaded by the research, in different disciplines (including in theology and in popular culture studies), on the world-generating power of cultural practice. And I have also been persuaded by my own experience, as a rock fan from about 1980 forward, and having played bass in rock bands from 1986 right to the present, that the pleasures, meanings, and formative powers (and, yes, “dangers”) of “rock and roll” or “rock music” lies in the array of practices and trainings of sense that happen through the zones of performance always present in rock listening, from ways of listening to the radio to ways of enjoying live music to ways of adornment to ways of rehearsing to ways of conducting oneself backstage to ways of carving out the physical relationship on stage between drums, guitars, bass, and singer, and much more. There really do

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The Occupy movement is coming up for a lot of informal conversation here at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco. I would like to reflect a little more on a theology of protest and do so, as appropriate to this blog, with respect to music. For the sake of digestible blog-sized portions, I’ll break these reflections up into a multi-part post.

First, setting the stage musically: The video below recaps the massive Occupy day of action on 17 November, which featured actions around the USA and the world, especially a large protest in New York City that drew well over 30,000 people. Toward the end of the video, you hear protesters singing “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” a song by the rock band Twisted Sister.

Here is the original song/video by Twisted Sister:

Now, beginning to set the stage theologically: As I and others have been reporting since September, the Occupy movement has a noteworthy presence of spiritually/religiously motivated activists – from across a very broad range of commitments/theologies.

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This just in, from The Onion:

NEW YORK—In a stunning reversal of their long-stated reluctance to take it, members of heavy-metal band Twisted Sister announced Monday that, after 24 years of fervent refusal, they are now willing to take it. “I acknowledge that we promised not to take it anymore, but things change. The world is a different place today, and with that in mind, we would like to go on record as saying that, starting right now, we are going to take it,” read a statement released by the band’s lead singer, Dee Snider. “To clarify, we would still prefer not to take it, but as of now, taking it is an option that we would be open to. That is all.” Bassist Mark “the Animal” Mendoza also stated that, in regards to what he wants to do with his life, he no longer solely wants to rock, but would instead prefer doing other things, such as raising a family and working as a claims adjuster in Rye, NY.