A spirituality of rock - part five...

NOTE:  These are my closing observations re: why I believe a spirituality of rock music warrants consideration - especially in the Reformed tradition - for those interested in the still speaking voice of God. Future notes will ground this spirituality in the theology of culture that both Paul Tillich and later Harvey Cox explored.

Rock and roll music began with dancing.  Two exhaustive studies of the genre, Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (Joe Stuessy) and The Sound of the City (Charlie Gillett) make it clear that when rock replaced the tunes of "Tin Pan Alley," it was a generational revolution born of dance that also had an impact on racial barriers, too. Initially, music publishers "dominated the popular music industry" in the early years of recordings with live performances in vaudeville defining the parameters of the market. "When stage musicals began replacing vaudeville in its role of introducing new songs (to the nation), publishers began moving uptown with record companies following suit. (Gillett)

Steussy is quick to observe that until 1950 the music of the dominant culture was exclusively adult oriented - and white.

The recording companies were still controlled by adults; the professional song-writers, performers and consumers were adults, too. So teens simply listened to and accepted their parent's music. There seemed to be no real alternative...(What's more) the record company personnel, the songwriters, the performers and the consumers were predominantly white. As with most aspects of the music industry, the basic reason had to do with the pocketbook. Thus adult whites were the primary consumers and the recording industry aimed its product squarely at that market.

As the recording industry became more creative, however, exploring ever new and expanding market possibilities, three distinctive musical subcultures began to emerge which later combined to influence the birth of rock:  the white ethnic pop singers of Columbia, Mercury, Capitol and Decca; the Country and Western market led by Roy Acuff's publishing house and the Grand Old Opry; and the Rhythm and Blues entrepreneurs of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles specializing in "race records" like Chess, Atlantic and Imperial.  When young, white country artists began experimenting with black dance music - and rhythm and blues performers made covers of country and pop songs - the old paradigm quickly dissolved into the explosive reality of rock.  Bono synthesizes the revolution's breadth in his Rolling Stone tribute to Elvis Presley:

Out of Tupelo, Mississippi, out of Memphis, Tennessee, came this green, sharkskin-suited, girl chaser, wearing eye shadow - a trucker-dandy white boy who must have risked his hide to act so black and dress so gay. This wasn't New York or even New Orleans; this was Memphis in the Fifties. This was punk rock. This was revolt. Elvis changed everything - musically, sexually, politically. In Elvis you had the whole lot: he was a Fifties-style icon who was what the Sixties were capable of and then suddenly was not... In Elvis you had the blueprint for rock and roll: the highness - the gospel highs - and the mud - the Delta mud, the blues. Sexual liberation. Controversy. Changing the way people feel about the world. It's all there in Elvis...

I recently met with Coretta Scot King, John Lewis and some of the other leaders of the American civil rights movement and they reminded me of the cultural apartheid rock and roll was up against. I think the hill they climbed would have been much steeper were it not for the racial inroads black music was making in white pop culture. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival were all introduced to the blues through Elvis. He was already doing what the civil-rights movement was demanding: breaking down barriers. You don't think of Elvis as political, but that is politics: changing the way people see the world.

Much has been written about this transition in popular culture: how regional radio stations and specialized recording companies contributed to the break down of musical barriers among formerly racially segregated performers as well as the integration of purchasing power and taste among black and white teens; how a new generation of performers like Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis continued to blur these lines in society by adding the rhythms of their gospel church music to their pop songs; and how savvy record producers encouraged this integration of taste by promoting crossover songs by the likes of Doris Day, Fats Domino, Pat Boone and the Moonglows. The net result was an industry redefined by and for young artists, promoters and consumers that was radically racially integrated:

The evidence is plain: despite their disparate backgrounds, Berry and Presley were speaking the same musical language. Rock and roll was still less than a year old; but the new genre had already produced a telling convergence of vernacular idioms, a blend of country and blues styles, raising the prospect of a new musical fusion - and a collective leap into the unknown, without apparent regard for racial difference.

This emerging drive towards greater musical and social equality was amplified ten years later when the Beatles burst upon the scene with their "clever, ironic and acerbic... hard core rock and roll that took pride in mocking the pieties of popular culture." Theirs was a sound grounded in the American rock and roll experiment with an added art school sensibility thrown into the mix.  Rock critic, Joe Stuessy, has rightly concluded that:

Two colossal entities (rule) the history of rock music... The first, Elvis Presley, was able to bring together the three tributary streams of Tin Pan Alley, country and western and rhythm and blues that led to rock and roll and embody them all within himself.  He was the master chef who blended the ingredients into a new dish without, however, allowing the distinctiveness of each ingredient to be destroyed. As with Presley, the incalculable value of the Beatles was their musical breadth. Through their leadership, they pulled rock together one last time and slung it into the future in a variety of fragmented qualities. They were like the boy playing in the snow who gathers up a huge handful of snow, compresses it into a simple ball and then hurls it up into the air only to see it fragment into dozens of pieces.

To appreciate the novelty and the genius of the Beatles, it is critical to note the originality of their style. First, "the group's vocal style was a derivative of two American styles which had not previously been put together: the hard rock and roll of singers like Little Richard and Larry Williams and the soft gospel call and response of the Shirelles, the Drifters and Berry Gordy." The integration of musical and racial influences was electric.  Not only did it:

... resurrect original rock and roll styles... playing with a beat so big and old fashioned that it sounded brand new... (there) was also the intelligence and dedication with which John Lennon and Paul McCartney jointly pursued in the craft of popular songwriting. But in many ways the most important aspect of their idiosyncratic style, a tacit tribute to the band's art school origins and bohemian pretensions, was the spunky determination with which, at unexpected moments, they defied the showbiz conventions, demanding instead the right to create their own kind of art in their own kind of was as if rock and roll was an art!

Further, the Beatles intuitively understood that rock and folk music shared a common ground in their fiercely "do-it-yourself formats" which encouraged participation and social equality. And the liberating effect they shared with young people in the 1960s was unparalleled. Mikal Gillmore, one of the idiom's finest social critics, recalls his ecstatic reaction to the Beatles with spiritual fervor:

The Beatles made their first official live US television appearance on February 9, 1964 on the "Ed Sullivan Show..." I don't think I cold ever have received a better, more meaningful, more transforming gift... as romantic as it may sound, I knew I was seeing something very big that night, and I felt something in my life change. In fact, I was witnessing an opening up of endless possibilities... To this day, you watch those moment and you see history opening up, from the simple act of men playing their instruments and singing and sharing a discovery with their audience of a new, youthful eminence.

This is my musical, spiritual and cultural heritage: a sensually incarnational music with a beat shared by the races in an unprecedented way. But there is one more ingredient that is absolutely necessary for a spirituality of rock:  Bob Dylan.  If Elvis and Little Richard were the soul of rock and roll, and the Beatles its heart, Dylan was the poetic mind of the genre combining the erotic intellect of Walt Whitman, the nimble attention to nuance of Emily Dickinson, the loving populism of Woody Guthrie and the biting social criticism of Allen Ginsburg. Dylan's early songs of protest gave shape and form to the Civil Rights movement, creating courage in the face of resistance and fear. His carefully chosen words and melodies exposed the shadow side of the American Dream in the early 1960s - think "Masters of War" as well as "Blowing in the Wind." And when he plugged in his electric guitar, fusing a wild psychodrama poetry with blues and rock and roll in "Just Like a Rolling Stone," Dylan became a new kind of rock and roll hero:

Like Zarathustra, Nietzsche's holy fool... Dylan would dramatize a different way to live. A poet and prophet, he would write out of his own life, with no apparent regard for the pieties prevailing in society. In the spirit of Rimbaud, he would make himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of the senses, explore all forms of suffering love and madness, exhausting all poisons in himself, extricating only their quintessences through the systematic use of intoxicants and concentrating the force of his personal revelations in a music of delirious immediacy.

And this is where the personal becomes political and spiritual and all the rest for me because this is where Dylan's world broke into mine with joyful abandon: during confirmation class Bob Dylan and the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," were discussed as examples of how the Holy Spirit was fulfilling in our generation what the prophet Joel had prophesied four thousand years earlier:  "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams and your young shall see visions." (Joel 2: 28) I learned to play the guitar - and use it in new folk music worship gatherings as well as our own rock and roll creations - bringing the words of Simon and Garfunkel into communion with Bach and Harry Emerson Fosdick.

And as the decade matured - and my church wrestled with the realities of the war in Vietnam, the urban riots and political assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy - indeed, as I faced becoming a conscientious objector - it was the music of the era that gave substance and solace to my heart as prayer. 

I think of Frank Zappa writing about the devastation of Watts, Joni Mitchell reflecting gently on broken hearts and ideals, Jefferson Airplane wondering don't we all "want somebody to love" in this harsh time while Sly and the Family Stone - a wonderfully wild and racially integrated band - reminded me that we were all "everyday people."  And let us not forget the pulse of Motown, the mysticism of the Grateful Dead and the poignant and prophetic cries of the sensual social critics like Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklyn.  Thankfully, not only was I playing in a rock an roll band while serving as an officer in my church youth group, my home congregation encouraged us to bring the music of the streets into the sanctuary of the Pilgrims.  So we did with abandon and a whole lot of love.

Later, this same enthusiasm for hearing the word of the Lord in a variety of rock music grew to include the more harsh but equally loving social analysis of reggae's Bob Marley, the bitter truths of artists like NWA, Public Enemy and the grandfather of rap, Gil Scott-Herron as well as the gentle encouragement that Garth Brooks, a country music prophet, shared with those with ears to hear. For almost 50 years I have been experimenting with this music as one essential ingredient for grounding contemporary worship in history.

It is my contention that there is a spirituality to rock music that seeks to strengthen and inform the common good:  using the language of every day people, this spirituality seeks out the presence and absence of social justice and radical grace.  It begins with the notion that "something is going on all around you and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" as Bob Dylan once lamented.  It borrows from the work of Harvey Cox in his little book, Feast of Fools, born of 1969.  For what he observed long before September 11, 2001 in the United States is haunting:

The rich Western nations will become increasingly static and provincial, or, they will try to inflict their worship of work on the rest of the world. Unable to put themselves in someone else's shoes, they will grow more insensitive to the enclaves of poverty in their midst and the continents of hunger around them... Deprived of joy they will become more hateful and suspicious toward "others."

Cox suggests two broad spiritual disciplines - festivity and fantasy - and I have broadened them to shape my spirituality of rock:

+ The radical hospitality of Christ's open table (feasting)
+ The upside-down wisdom of humor (humility) 
+ The conscious feeding of the soul (prophetic imagination)
+ The playful practice of monastic improvisation (creativity)

Subsequent posting will explore each of these discrete but related spiritual practices as they relate to popular music.