Personal Jesus (Engaging Culture)

How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls

Clive Marsh, Vaughan S. Roberts

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801039096
• eBook ISBN: 9781441240507
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Pop music is now an ever-present force shaping citizens in the West. Even at funerals, pop music is often requested over hymns. But how does popular music work? And what roles does it play for listeners who engage it? This new addition to the critically acclaimed Engaging Culture series explores the theological significance of the ways pop music is listened to and used today.

The authors show that popular music is used by religious and nonreligious people alike to make meaning, enabling listeners to explore human concerns about embodiment, create communities, and tap into transcendence. They assess what is happening to Christian faith and theology as a result. The book incorporates case studies featuring noted music artists of our day--including David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Sigur Rós, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and Lady Gaga--and includes practical implications for the church, the academy, and daily musical listening. It also includes a foreword by Tom Beaudoin, author of Virtual Faith.

We all used to listen to a preacher every Sunday; the human need for that kind of storytelling does not go away. It’s up to writers and journalists to fill the gap.

Malcolm Gladwell, writer[1]

It is a nice thought that you might be able to listen to lots of popular music and call it “work.” That is what popular music critics do for a living. Of course, they would quickly point out that they must listen to a lot of dross in the process of discovering the next big hit or an emergent new band or genre. It is a nice thought, too, that you might listen to popular music while knowing that it contributes positively to the shape of your life. Perhaps popular music develops or supports your spirituality even while giving you a good time. Perhaps it influences your politics or at least gives a way of proclaiming publicly the political views you have. Perhaps it somehow gives meaning to your life or helps you figure out what, if any, meaning you think life has.

Yet popular music may do none of these things. Some philosophers, theologians, and religion scholars—especially those trying to be fashionable and in tune—and even some cultural critics might want to think that it does such things. But perhaps popular music really is just for fun. Perhaps people consume popular music in the same way that they buy socks. Perhaps buying a CD or downloading an album is a feel-good action that has a temporary effect and no more. Through their choice of music, consumers may simply be consciously escaping everyday life or managing their moods.

There’s a Lot of It Around

The scale on which people listen to music across the Western world deserves attention. As Adrian North and David Hargreaves have tellingly observed, “The UK spends more annually on music than on water supply.”[2] Daniel Levitin similarly reports of North America: “Americans spend more money on music than they do on prescription drugs or sex, and the average American hears more than five hours of music per day.”[3]

This mass consumption pertains to many different kinds of music. But only if all music is deemed mindless escapism can this large-scale consumption be considered wastefulness or avoidance of life. Without making any assumptions or judgments about good music or bad music, high or low culture, it is clear that such consumption might well be doing something to and for people, even if this is only keeping people happy. That may be no bad thing. But it is worth exploring how music is doing this and what other functions it has. Here is where this present book fits.

“Music has always had an association with the numinous and has been commonly put to ritual use.”[4] “With regard to mood management it goes almost without saying that, like everyone else, adolescents will use music to achieve or alleviate particular moods.”[5] Such scholarly statements stand alongside the many anthologized quotations from great and good people reminding us of music’s importance. We can head back to the Reformation and hear Martin Luther’s placing music alongside theology as a gift from God: “I have no pleasure in any man who despises music.” The atheist Aldous Huxley declares, “After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” We may agree with jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker that “music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” There is plenty of floating testimony to the function and significance of music. Luther and Huxley did not have post-1950s popular music in mind; hence one of the matters we need to address in this book is whether such positive statements about music can potentially apply to any type of music. Our simple opening observations are these: (1) There is a lot of music around. (2) People use music for lots of reasons and gain much from it. Yet there is also a question: Can popular music possibly have a function similar to the religious or classical forms more readily associated with being cultured, being educated, or fostering personal and spiritual development?

The practice of listening to popular music takes its place within a whole range of contemporary activities that cluster under the umbrella of “popular culture.” Along with watching television and films, playing video games, and doing and watching sports, listening to popular music is something a lot of people spend a great deal of their time doing. All of these practices merit close scrutiny. As for music, whether listening is a conscious and active practice (choosing to turn on a radio or MP3 player, listen to a CD, or attend a live concert), or a more incidental activity (background music while shopping or eating in public), listening to music is an everyday occurrence. As such, it falls within the purview of what scholars of religion and culture need to address if we are to understand how religions function today. Moreover, if religions are in decline in the West, then (in so-called secularized times) it is important to scrutinize any practice that can seem religion-like to see if it is functioning as religion or in place of religion. If so, a further question remains: What has happened to metaphysics and to God? To demonstrate that social practices are religion-like merely shows that such practices are functioning as religion functions. It says nothing about the belief structures upon which specific religious traditions depend.

In using contemporary practices of music listening as an extended case study, this book contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between popular culture and religion and assesses the significance of its findings for Christianity and for Christian theology (see part 3). We focus on Christian theology because of our interests as authors and because speaking of religion in general terms only is impossible. After all, religions are specific, even if they change and are changeable to some degree. But we must undertake some general inquiry too. We dare not draw specific conclusions too hastily if we are to let contemporary practices speak to us. We need to ask what contemporary Western citizens actually do. Before that, however, we need to be clear about what work has already been done in religion/theology and popular culture (specifically regarding music). We need to delve into many other disciplines in search of material that will inform and illuminate—even explain—what we find. But for the moment we need to see what is around in religious studies, theology, and the sociology of religion, explorations within which our own study can find its proper place.

Bread, Circuses, and Popular Songs

The first recorded use of the phrase “bread and circuses” is attributed to the Roman satirist Juvenal (ca. 50–ca. 128 CE), who referred to the way the general populace can be easily bought off, or become preoccupied, with simple pastimes, as a way of being distracted from more important matters.[6] Juvenal was concerned that politicians were offering bribes—like giving candy to children—to deflect the people’s interests from politics. The recipients, caught up in mindless activities, would thus neglect their public responsibilities. Switch to the present, and we hear echoes of the same concern as observers declare that popular culture numbs people; it lures them away from life’s monotony. In the same way that Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the people,” popular culture is a drug that draws people away from the task of changing the world. Rather than being a helpful escape, all it does is feed an addiction—to more and more of the same—inviting people to step onto the path to hedonistic self-interest. Popular culture is produced at the instigation of wealthy, devious impresarios, or big businesses, who make money off unsuspecting victims by feeding them lazy, cheap thrills that seem to satisfy but do so only temporarily and not in any really meaningful way. So some say.

Such opposition to popular culture and its dangerous impact has deep and influential scholarly roots in the modern period. Theodor Adorno (1903–69) is perhaps the writer cited most often with regard to such a line of thinking. In a series of essays written throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Adorno launched a fierce attack on popular music and on “the culture industry” for promoting mass standardization under the guise of fostering individuality.[7] Rather than encouraging listeners toward independent enjoyment of music and its potential depths, popular music merely lured people into vacuous repetition of standard formulas. It numbed them into mass groupings and stifled individual creativity.

To the “hypnotizing effect of mass culture” and the stifling of individual creativity, Kelton Cobb adds three further features of the Frankfurt School’s opposition to popular culture: “the affinity for kitsch,” the commendation of the avant-garde, and the preference for folk art over mass culture.[8] Kitsch as “garish, pretentious, or sentimental art,” and “sugary trash,” in Adorno’s words,[9] demands too little of the viewer or listener and numbs the imagination. Avant-garde art, by contrast, wakes people up. And folk art carries with it an authenticity that cannot be reflected in the technological productions of mass culture. With respect to popular music, these views led Adorno to reject any form of music that is blatant in its sentimentality or nostalgia, is too easy to understand, or fails to demonstrate a raw authenticity.

Adorno presents an important line of argument. Though ultimately concluding that there is a “surplus of condescension” in the Frankfurt School’s approach to popular culture, Cobb recognizes the dangers of too hastily dismissing their views as “shrill and elitist.”[10] This is reflected in music studies too. In 1990, Richard Middleton observed that there are flaws in Adorno’s approach but that interpreters need to understand both his method of understanding music and his historical location rather than simply dismissing him “as an embittered elitist pessimist.”[11]

We agree with Cobb and Middleton. Whatever may be said about the context out of which Adorno and his Frankfurt colleagues wrote (opposition to Nazism), or of the privileged intellectual milieu out of which their thinking emerged, their critique remains potent. Having to work at music can be much more rewarding than being presented with wholly undemanding listening, which becomes tedious after multiple auditions. Furthermore, technology has had a huge impact on music by facilitating its mass production and distancing hearers from the original creators. Authenticity can too easily be compromised when the skill and creativity of those who compose and create music is filtered through multiple layers of technological processing to serve the desired market-driven needs of financial backers. These critical observations should not be overlooked.

That said, Adorno’s criticisms do not always hit the mark with how much popular music (indeed much music) actually works. For one thing, repetition is an important feature in all music, within a single piece, in the act of playing (practicing) and in the act of listening. To be critical of popular music’s repetitiveness fails to respect this feature of music per se and by extension disrespects ritualistic dimensions of human life more generally. Middleton’s point about understanding Adorno’s “immanent method” for understanding music (“the ‘truth’ of a work is to be found within the work itself”)[12] is also well made. But as Middleton explains, though Adorno’s criticisms may hit the mark with Tin Pan Alley music of the 1930s and 1940s, they do not really do justice to the complexity and diversity of “the entire musical production-consumption process” as it has developed. As we shall see, the move to a greater respect for the participative nature of music consumption—according to which a contemporary listener (of all forms of music) is not to be regarded as merely a passive, numb consumer—substantially qualifies Adorno’s critique. Furthermore, we need to consider the positive impact of technology upon music, both in terms of the music created (e.g., by electronic means) and technology’s role in disseminating music.

It is clear, then, that within current academic discussion of the interplay between theology or religion and popular culture, substantial criticisms of popular culture are possible and perhaps necessary. At the same time, we should not permit those criticisms to have the last word. Whatever the dangers of popular culture, there has been such a shift—in the way popular culture works, in the way popular arts and media are produced and consumed, and in the context where reception of such arts and media happens—that it is vital for these to be respected within theology/religion and popular culture discussions.

From Mass Culture to Pop Culture

Three important conceptual developments that affect our understanding of the relationship between religion/theology and popular culture form frameworks that take us beyond Adorno and the critical assessments of his work.

The first of these is the shift from mass culture to pop culture. Middleton logs “three ‘moments’ of radical situational change” in the development of Western music history over the past two hundred years: the “bourgeois revolution,” the onset of mass culture, and the emergence of pop culture.[13] It is the shift from the second to the third moment that we must note here, while Adorno’s critique of popular music applied largely to Middleton’s second moment. This means that we are in a different place from Adorno when looking at popular music’s relationship to theology and religion. By “mass culture” Middleton means “the development of monopoly-capitalist structures” and “an emerging American hegemony” as music became internationalized and its consumption more standardized across the West.[14] In the third moment—the emergence of pop culture—Middleton observes that while the global reach of the music business continues, “the existing monopolistic cultural formation both confirms itself and, at another level, becomes noticeably fissured, through the development of an assortment of transient subcultures.”[15] These developments are allied to changes in technology and production, as well as linked to groups’ identity formation, especially the emergent youth market. In other words, widespread expansion of music consumption happened in the 1950s and 1960s, with global aspirations on the part of the music business, while the seeds of diversification in music taste and styles were sown, which came to fruition later. In the 1950s, pop music culture may have appeared to be largely about rock ’n’ roll. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, rock, folk, punk, heavy metal, hip-hop, garage, country, and many other types of music all had their market niches.

Middleton acknowledges that the moment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Tom Beaudoin
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Music and Religion
• Part 2 Living by Pop Music
• Part 3 Pop Music and Theology
• A Programmatic Postscript: Practical Consequences for Church, Academy, and Daily Living
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Music Index
• Back Cover