Exploring the Spiritual in Popular Music

Beatified Beats

Georgina Gregory, Mike Dines, Georgina Gregory, Mike Dines

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350086944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book highlights how the diverse nature of spiritual practices are experienced and manifest through the medium of popular music. At first glance, chapters on Krishnacore, the Rave Church phenomenon and post-punk repertoire of Psychic TV may appear to have little in common; however, this book draws attention to some of the similarities of the nuances of spiritual expression that underpin the lived experience of popular music. As an interdisciplinary volume, the extensive introduction unpacks and clarifies terminology relating to the study of religion and popular music. The cross-disciplinary approach of the book makes it accessible and appealing to scholars of religious studies, cultural studies, popular music studies and theology. Unlike existing collections dealing with popular music and religion that focus on a specific genre, this innovative book offers a range of music and case studies, with chapters written by international contributors.

1

Beatified Beats, Ritualized Rhymes: Intersections of the Popular and the Sacred in Music

Antti-Ville Kärjä

Introduction

For many, it appears, the year 2016 represented the irrefutable loss of significant musical talent and objects of idolization. With the demise of megastars such as David Bowie and Prince and other significant artists like Pierre Boulez, Keith Emerson, Merle Haggard, Paul Kantner, Sir George Martin and Maurice White, music fans had good reason to mourn. A common consolation to all followers is nevertheless that ‘his [sic] music will live forever’, as demonstrable through a quick internet search (as of 29 November 2018). When combined with David Bowie or Prince, the phrase yields roughly 30,000 hits, while Haggard, White and Emerson get a tenth of this, Kantner exactly 170 and Boulez, well, five. The result for Sir George is 17,500, but the overwhelming majority of hits leads to another dead George and his fellow bandmates known as the Beatles.

Issues of idolization, megastars and the notion of investing music with eternal life connect the discussion to themes that are conventionally conceptualized as religious and linked to questions of transcendence, the otherwordly, the mystical, the numinous and the sacred. To spell this out: idols are, etymologically, (false) images or objects representing deities, while stars refer to heavenly phenomena, and the idea of eternal life, or life after death at least, is common to most major religions. At the same time, idols and megastars are by definition popular in that, like religions, they are favoured by a large number of people. Furthermore, most of the artists mentioned above represent ‘popular music’ in one form or another; even Pierre Boulez, who has been celebrated as one of the key figures of musical modernism, was known for his association with rock auteur Frank Zappa. Moreover, death is no stranger in the realm of cultural activity known as popular music, and as the rock ’n’ roll cohorts are ageing, rebellious lifestyle as a cause of demise – or what Steve Jones (2005: 273) has called ‘death by fame’ – is being supplanted by natural deterioration.

It is evident that the deathly brushes in question – as well as any similar ones – foreground the ways in which the ‘popular’ and the ‘sacred’ become intertwined and inextricable. Yet, it is commonplace to treat the category of popular music as separate from and in many cases even antithetical to religious ideologies; but as Simon Frith (2001: 106–7) points out, ‘even in these relatively Godless times most of us have sung hymns and carols at some stage of our lives … and the translation of gospel into soul shows how easy it is to love a man or woman musically in the same way that one loves God’. As this remark suggests, there very well may be more to the intersections of the popular and the sacred in music than that which is aroused by the quietus of one’s favourite artist.

Thus, it is my aim to interrogate these intersections more carefully, by focusing on the multidimensionality of both denominators. On one hand, this entails asking: in the event one detects such an intersection, what definitions of the popular and the sacred are implicated? On the other, one may ask slightly more provocatively: what kind of definitions of the popular and the sacred would be operationalized in the event a ‘popular’ musical phenomenon was reconceptualized as ‘sacred’, or vice versa? In my treatment I will concentrate on conceptual issues and definitions of the two terms but also concretize the dynamics in question with selected examples. Hence, a broader aim of mine is to provide a general analytical framework that may be then tested and challenged with more varied examples.

Underlying my argument there is a frustration that stems from taken-for-granted utilization of the label ‘popular’, especially when used as an epithet for music or culture more generally. Certainly, to talk and write about ‘popular music’ may serve as a useful shorthand in order to secure that participants of the discussion are on the same page, as it were; yet, as a popular music scholar, I find it imperative and even fundamental to ask constantly, or at least to be mindful of the questions: ‘what is popular’, ‘what is music’, and ‘what is popular music’? From this stance, a particular point of interest is how the sacred might be of aid in reconceptualizing the popular in the context of music.

Popular music and the post-secular postcolonial condition

The intersections of the popular and the sacred in music are of course implicated in various sets of broader cultural dynamics in the twenty-first century (according to the Gregorian Christian calendar). In very general terms, at issue here are the changes in the ‘religious landscape’ caused by global migration and cultural pluralism. As a consequence, the recent relatively Godless times may not be that Godless after all, albeit references to deities may not always be the most appropriate choice when discussing the change. This is to say that in addition to the continuing or re-emergent popularity of Christianity and other Abrahamic and monotheistic religions, there are various ‘alternative spiritualities’ available. One way to conceptualize this shift is constituted by the notion of post-secularization, which refers to the possibility of broadening the ethics and values of modern secular states through various religions and traditional cultural practices in the world (see James 2007).

Alongside alleged post-secular processes, the religious change can be associated with questions about multiculturalism and the so-called global postcolonial condition (see Young 2012). In fact, while the post-secularization thesis may be criticized as Eurocentric, the other two terms point to global dynamics in that no society, conceived no matter how, is culturally entirely homogenous, and the effects of the era of European colonialism and imperialism have scarred the world profoundly. It is nevertheless worth bearing in mind that when talking about multiculturalism here, what is at stake is the ‘narrow’ version of it. Simply put, in this version of multiculturalism, the notion of culture is equated almost exclusively with ethnicity, nationality and religiosity, with a particular emphasis on the effects of immigration and the ‘ethno-religious mix’ caused by it (Modood 2007: 2–8).

It is also important to recognize that the postcolonial condition manifests itself differently in different spatio-temporal contexts. Writing from and in, and maybe for, the north-eastern corner of ‘Fortress Europe’, one can start by noting how, boosted by the waves of both global migration and economic crisis, debates over multiculturalism and racism have increased tremendously in the region, accompanied occasionally (but increasingly frequently) by acts of extreme violence. There is a growing body of research where the role of Nordic welfare countries in colonial and postcolonial processes has been re-evaluated (Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012), yet not often have these reassessments been done in an explicit connection to religious issues. Also, music is largely absent in these debates, despite racialized genre classifications, exoticism in cultural industries and the contradiction between strong associations with national traditions and the assumed ability of music to transcend cultural boundaries (cf. Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Radano and Bohlman 2000).

A particular area of inquiry in this respect is constituted by the position of Islamic communities in secular Western European societies. Despite this assumed secularity, however, the situation also gives grounds to explore more carefully claims about Christianity as one central part of Western European cultural heritage. Islam provides, in addition, a fruitful starting point with respect to cultural expression in that, depending on the interpretation of religious tenets and scripts, there may be severe restrictions on freedom of expression, especially in the realm of music and beginning with the definition of mūsīqā itself (see al-Farūqī 1985; Shiloah 1995). Furthermore, the cultural value of contemporary religious music has been recognized too, alongside its apparent economic dimension (Evans 2006). Moreover, this entails not only challenging conventional notions of popular culture as a secular sphere of activity on the basis of its apparent commercial framework, but emphasizing the economic imperatives of institutionalized religions in general. Thus, post-secular belief systems and musics provide a context for closer examinations of the denominator ‘popular’.

The Music, itself, ingeniously

Music, for its part, constitutes a particularly pertinent realm of investigation of the popular/sacred dynamics. This is so not only because of etymological reasons that lead to the Greek mythology, but also due to what musicologists Susan McClary and Robert Walser (1990: 280) call ‘[a] choice between poetic or technical mystification’ of music either through impressionistic vocabulary or graphic notation. To this, one can add the legacy of the Romantic aesthetic movement with its emphasis on ideas about the autonomy of Western art music, the ingenious artists and the spiritual origins of compositions, for example. In her analysis of the work of prominent Finnish composers, Milla Tiainen (2005: 52–145) points to the ways in which these ideas are closely connected and even implicated in Christianity most evidently through claims about the transcendent nature of music and composing, whereby the composers are invested with deific creative powers or, alternatively, subjected to the celestial ‘will of music’ itself. Such claims are by no means unique to music, but evince a broader and profound influence of Romanticism in the ways in which artistic geniuses become constructed and conceptualized as demi-gods ‘with Protean powers to take on different forms and roles in the various ages and stages of historical development’ and capable of bringing transcendent essences into existence (Battersby 1989: 14, 44).

Either divine geniuses or intermediaries for the transcendent, composers and other artistic geniuses remain the chosen ones whose work and works separate them from ‘mundane materiality’. This separation is in turn heavily gendered; according to Christine Battersby (1989: 14), the genius ‘is always a “Hero”, and never a heroine, [nor] are his social duties consistent with those of fulfilling mundane domestic or reproductive tasks, nor of living a life of enforced, upper-class ease’. Instead of investing the notion of the genius with transcendence, or ‘a naïvety about the relationship between facts and values’, Battersby (1989: 156–7) suggests it be approached in pragmatic terms by evaluating and assessing cultural achievements ‘against an appropriate background of artistic genres and traditions’ where novelty and ‘lasting value and significance’ are the key criteria. Thus, for her, ‘a female “genius”’ is not a unique, élite individual but rather ‘a woman who is judged to occupy a strategic position in the matrilinear and patrilinear patterns of tradition that make up culture’. As a result, ingeneity does not depend on types of personality or psychic processes but on influence and ‘cultural “momentousness”’, as determinable through situating individual creators within a series of collectives of tradition (Battersby 1989: 157).

The notion of a female genius, or a feminist notion of the genius to be more precise, remains contested nonetheless. Marcia Citron (1993: 225), in her excavation in the gendered aspects of canonization of music, fears ‘that the label of genius would only hurt historical women: genius would inevitably be associated with transcendence’. Also Tiainen (2005: 75–8, 91–7) pays specific attention to the gendered aspects of constructing composers as godlike geniuses and argues that, on the basis of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s writings in particular, women remain largely excluded from the construction of musical geniuses, either through emphasis on females as material creatures or a ‘myth of martyrdom’ hinging on the figure of Yeshua Ha-Nozri, better known as Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, Nazareth is also the name of a Scottish hard rock band, which, alongside such appellations as Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and HIM (a.k.a. His Infernal Majesty), clearly suggests that within the realm that is commonly referred to as popular music, references to and associations with religions and religiosity abound. The list can be augmented by a myriad of album or song titles attesting to the same. Intriguingly, there are extremely few female artists known for such acts of naming; within an online top thirty of ‘Bands Named After Things from the Bible’ (from ranker.com) there are but two with female members, namely Peter, Paul and Mary (Travers) and Teenage Jesus and The Jerks (led by Lydia Lunch).

From rescripting the sacred …

Despite the abundance of bands and songs with religious names since the late 1960s – not to mention the significantly longer histories of gospel and spirituals as genres of popular music – a focus on the interrelatios between religiosity and the notion of popular culture is a very recent phenomenon indeed. Only during the first decades of the twenty-first century has there been a remarkable upsurge of studies focusing on different forms of religiosity and spirituality, and often discussed as popular culture. Alongside post-secularization, the rubrics used in this discussion include new religious movements, re-enchantment and occulture. This body of research attempting to ‘rescript the sacred’ (Santana and Erickson 2008), as it were, emanates especially from within anthropology and sociology of religion.

Within this field of study, a foundational argument is that until very recently popular culture in general has been shunned within the aforementioned disciplinary settings. According to Gordon Lynch (2005: 22), the shift from the study of abstract belief systems and practices of religious elites to exploration of everyday functions of religion has taken place primarily during the twenty-first century. Lynn Schofield Clark (2007: 19) in turn notes in a sarcastic fashion that ‘conventional wisdom held that those in religious studies [and] theology should attain expertise in something suitably ancient and respectable, only to “dabble” in popular culture studies after tenure had been safely secured’.

The dabblings in question are noteworthy and commendable as they indisputably demonstrate the value and importance of religious and spiritual modes of thought in diverse contexts, but at the same time there are problems in this scholarship due to a trend towards taken-for-granted utilization of the notion of ‘popular culture’. On one hand, there is a plenitude of unproblematized references to mass production, everyday life, consumerism, leisure and media in particular (e.g. Deacy 2009; King 2010; Pattison 2009 ), which in the end raises the question of whether there is anything that remains outside of ‘popular culture’.

On the other hand, one can note an emphasis on what is labelled as ‘everyday life’, and while many scholars appropriately point to the problems in defining and conceptualizing both religion and popular culture (e.g. Lynch 2005: 2–17, 27–32), the dynamics and ambivalences inherent here tend to be subsumed and simplified into ‘the shared environment, practices, and resources of everyday life in a given society’ (Lynch 2005: 14). In other words, in these studies ‘popular culture’ is defined, yes, but not problematized in relation to its multidimensionality. Moreover, in deciphering the concept of everyday life, ethnographic approach has been given a virtually dogmatic status, with an emphasis on audiences and what they ‘actually “do” with media and popular culture in their everyday lives’, rather than subjecting rituals, texts and symbols to theoretical readings (Lynch 2007: 159).

David Morgan (200...