Traces of the Spirit

The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music

Robin Sylvan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814708651
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"Sylvan's thesis furnishes far more of the same valued experiences than is usually realized: ritual activity, communal ceremony, a philosophy and worldview, a code for living one's life, a cultural identity, a social structure, a sense of belonging, and crucially, Sylvan argues encounters with the numinous."
— Journal of Religion

Most studies of the religious significance of popular music focus on music lyrics, offering little insight into the religious aspects of the music itself. Traces of the Spirit examines the religious dimensions of popular music subcultures, charting the influence and religious aspects of popular music in mainstream culture today and analyzing the religious significance of the audience's experiences, rituals, and worldviews. Sylvan contends that popular music subcultures serve the function of religious communities and represent a new and significant religious phenomenon.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork using interviews and participant observation, Sylvan examines such subcultures as the Deadheads, raves and their participants, metalheads, and Hip Hop culture. Based on these case studies, he offers a comprehensive theoretical framework in which to study music and popular culture. In addition, he traces the history of West African possession religion from Africa to the diaspora to its integration into American popular music in such genres as the blues, rock and roll, and contemporary musical youth subcultures.

PART TWO
Popular Music Subcultures as Religion:
A Comparative Analysis Based on Ethnographic Research

In 1996, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct research and do fieldwork in the four popular music subcultures of this study—the Grateful Dead and the Deadheads, rave and electronic dance music, heavy metal and metalheads, and rap and hip-hop. There were a variety of factors that went into my selecting the Bay Area as a site for this research, but the most important of these was simply the fact that all four of these subcultures had thriving, vibrant scenes that were reasonably accessible. During the year and a half that I conducted this research, I attended dozens of musical events, from intimate underground settings to enormous commercial arenas, spanning the spectrum of the diverse popular musics discussed in this study.

I also had the opportunity to spend time with people from these subcultures outside these musical events, which helped me to get a feel for the texture of their daily lives. This constitutes what I call the participant-observer component of my fieldwork, which enabled me not only to have direct personal experiences of the subject matter, but also to make detailed firsthand observations. In addition, I interviewed twenty-five individuals who were strongly involved in these subcultures so that they could speak for themselves in their own voices on the subject, and I have included extensive direct quotations from these interviews in the chapters of this section.¹ While I do not claim that these musical events and individuals constitute a representative sample of their respective subcultures, nevertheless it is clear to me that this fieldwork did allow me to deepen my understanding of these subcultures, their forms, experiences, and meanings.

Once the research and fieldwork had been completed, my next task was to analyze the material to bring out the dynamics, nuances, and contradictions of these subcultures as religious phenomena. This was no easy project; as I noted in the introduction, these musical subcultures do not constitute religion in the form that one would normally expect to find it. First of all, they are not formal churches and congregations with clearly delineated theologies, liturgies, and organizational structures, but ephemeral phenomena spontaneously arising within a popular culture context often viewed as superficial and disposable entertainment. In addition, their religious dimensions are tangled up with other important features not normally associated with traditional institutional religion, such as mass media transmission, sophisticated digital technology, and oligopolistic corporate economics, to name just a few. Finally, the religious dimensions are often not consciously recognized as such by the actual members of the subcultures themselves. Thus, the religious dimensions are not laid out in an obvious straightforward manner and, consequently, do not fit neatly within a standard religious analysis. Nevertheless, as we enter life in the twenty-first century, with all its speed and complexity, the religious landscape is rapidly evolving in unexpected ways, and we need to develop analytic tools that enable us to make sense of its newly emerging forms.

In this regard, there is a growing body of scholars who recognize that, as traditional institutional religion has become increasingly irrelevant to many people, the sector of popular culture has become the new arena for their religious expression. Theologian Andrew Greeley has argued that “popular culture is a ‘locus theologicus,’ a theological place—the locale in which one may encounter God. Popular culture provides an opportunity to experience God.”² This shift from institutional to cultural religion is summed up in the title of Jon Wiley Nelson’s book, Your God Is Alive and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture.³ With respect to popular music in particular, theomusicologist Jon Michael Spencer has written insightfully of this shift, and it is worth quoting him at length:

People in America are as religious today as they ever have been, but religion is far more diffused throughout culture. . . . In addition to traditional institutionalized religious belief and practice, religion has . . . been relocated from the church to the streets, nightclubs, concert coliseums, and music festivals. . . . Religion’s relocation to the nightclubs includes the weekly oscillation of secularists to the rite and ritual of the Friday and Saturday night function. Its relocation to concert coliseums and music festivals includes weekly, annual, or seasonal excursions to sacred gathering centers where groups of people find themselves in more comfortable spaces. The purpose of these events is to maintain cultic bonds and to achieve heightened forms of community that reaffirm mythologies and theologies and generate the kind of cosmological orientation and spiritual empowerment needed to sustain the members of these groups until subsequent gatherings.

Obviously, research into revelations of and reflection on the spiritually sacred, the ethically didactic, and the mythologically ultimate cannot be restricted to the church and church music. The depths of secularity must be plumbed for disclosures of sacramentality, spirituality, and even scripturality if ever we are to understand the nature of humanity. . . . To catch the masses in their natural living and in their casual thinking, we must peer through the transparency of popular music into the religious imagination of the populace.⁴

Historian of religions Charles Long has identified two key elements that I think are extremely helpful for understanding this new type of religiosity which is imbedded in popular culture, the first of which is “the mode of transmission.”⁵ Popular music illustrates this point perfectly. Its mode of transmission is intimately bound up with beat-heavy music, electronic instrumentation and amplification, digital recording, mass production technology, corporate marketing, radio and television air-play, live performance, and home stereo technology, as well as with the individual’s unique way of receiving and processing the music. Each of these aspects has its own particular set of parameters and dynamics which, taken in sum, account for many of the complexities of popular music as religion. I should note that each has a strong material component as well.

The second element is the “cognition afforded by the modes of transmission” which, because of powerful contemporary mass media technology, has been greatly intensified.

Considerations of this sort raise issues regarding the locus and meaning of religion in contemporary industrialized societies. Because of the intensity of transmission, the content of what is transmitted tends to be ephemeral; thus, the notion of religion as establishing powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations is shifted away from content and substance to modes of experience. Popular religion is thus no longer defined in terms of sustaining traditions, but in the qualitative meaning of the nature of experience.⁶

In the case of popular music, then, the key to unpacking its religious significance lies in understanding the intense experiential states which it engenders. In an intriguing article written at the height of the psychedelic counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, sociologist William C. Shepherd noted the many similarities between religious and musical experience, and explored the idea that they were analogous in some fundamental way. He found that the analogy broke down in traditional Western theistic religions because the truth claims they made about God had no analog in music. The psychedelic counterculture, however, made no such truth claims about the religiosity they found in the powerful experiential states of rock music and drugs. Therefore, wrote Shepherd:

While the analogy between religion and music is invalid with reference to the standard forms of religiosity in our culture, it seems to me valid with reference to a newer form of religiosity emerging among the young. . . . I would argue that we are witnessing the birth of a new religious life style in which religious experience is precisely analogous to the aesthetic experience of music. For the incompatible elements so basic to other sorts of Western religiosity, dogmas or truth claims about supersensual entities, are truly missing here. If the analogy between religion and music fails as regards traditional theistic religions, even of the very liberal variety, it succeeds as regards the emerging religiosity among a good proportion of our young.⁷

And the primary emphasis of this emerging religiosity, he argued, along lines closely parallel to Long, is on the experience, which is both musical and religious at the same time.

Thus, the first and most important aspect of my analysis of the religious dimensions of these musical subcultures focuses squarely on the powerful experiential states their members attain through the music, states that are clearly analogous to a variety of classic religious experiences. I see this focus on the primacy of religious experience as continuing and updating a long-standing tradition of religious studies scholarship that emphasizes the encounter with the numinous as the central ordering structure for human beings. This primary religious experience then becomes the basis for subsequent developments that lead to social expression and the organized exterior forms that we call “religion.” In this section, I will look closely at two of these developments in particular: First, the ritual forms that bring participants together in religious communion; and second, the worldviews, philosophies, and codes for living that provide them an orientation to the world and a meaning system through which to construct their ongoing reality.

I was struck by the ritual forms both because they uncannily reproduce so many components of classic religious rituals and because they provide the same kind of regularly recurring sacralizing function in members’ lives that traditional rituals do for their respective members. The worldviews, philosophies, and codes for living caught my attention because they demonstrate the ways in which the religious dimensions of these subcultures have been integrated into members’ daily lives and have changed them for the better. Obviously, religious experience, ritual practice, and orientation do not necessarily constitute religion per se in and of themselves and I am not arguing that they do. But I am arguing that these features do provide compelling evidence of a phenomenon which has powerful religious dimensions, and which serves as the functional equivalent of religion for the people involved.⁸

Religious experience is one of the most difficult subjects for scholars of religion to analyze because it is of a uniquely subjective personal nature that cannot be objectively observed or empirically measured. What one can do, however, is to examine seriously the accounts of individuals who have had such experiences and to use techniques of comparative analysis to tease out consistent threads of similarity and difference. This is the approach that William James took in his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience, an approach that could be characterized as a kind of radical empiricism.⁹ While clearly useful for marshaling objective evidence of a subjective phenomenon and identifying structural patterns, such an approach, however, still leaves one on the outside looking in, separated by a glass wall from the interior texture of the experience.

As a corrective, therefore, certain strategies have been developed within the discipline of religious studies which seek to overcome this separation. Joachim Wach’s strategy is found in the hermeneutic enterprise, the attempt of the scholar to interpret the data using not only the intellect, but his or her total person, which also includes emotion, will, and experience. He writes: “A love letter will appear meaningless and silly to anybody not in love. . . . By the same token a religious utterance will bewilder, frustrate, or repel anyone whose religious sensitivities have not been developed.”¹⁰ In similar vein, Gerardus Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological approach balanced objective techniques of epoche (bracketing and temporary suspension of presuppositions) and analytical categorization of phenomena with the scholar’s empathetic interpolation of his or her own experiences. He called for “a systematic introspection; not only the description of what is visible from the outside, but above all the experience born of what can only become reality after it has been admitted into the life of the observer himself.”¹¹

In terms of the life of this observer, I can say that popular music has exerted a tremendous influence on me since my adolescence, an influence that has continued into my adulthood. I regularly acquire and listen to vast amounts of recorded music and regularly go to numerous concerts and dance clubs, all purely for my own personal edification, independent of academic concerns. I am also a musician who has played and performed in a variety of contexts, and this has been an important part of my life. Therefore, I have a natural empathy for the subject I am studying as well as a set of powerful experiences I can draw from in making my interpretations. The material that follows arises out of my own lifetime of experience with music, my year and a half of fieldwork in the Bay Area, and methodological aspects of James’s radical empiricism, Wach’s hermeneutics, and Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological techniques of epoche, analytical categorization, and empathetic interpolation.

3
Eyes of the World
The Grateful Dead and the Deadheads

Perhaps the best example of a popular music subculture with obvious religious dimensions is the band the Grateful Dead and its followers known as the Deadheads. The Grateful Dead got their start in San Francisco in 1965, beginning as an acoustic bluegrass jug band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, which included core members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Pigpen (also known as Ron McKernan). Soon thereafter, the band decided to switch to electric instruments and a more rhythm-and-blues-oriented sound, changed their name to the Warlocks, and incorporated other core members Bill Kreutzman and Phil Lesh. After discovering that another band already had the name the Warlocks, the group changed its name to the Grateful Dead, an appellation based on a motif from a cycle of folktales that Garcia had seen in a dictionary.

The Dead, as they are affectionately known by aficionados, began recording and performing around the Bay Area in a configuration that was to continue with few changes for the next thirty years: Garcia on lead guitar and vocals, Weir on rhythm guitar and vocals, Pigpen on keyboards, harmonica, and vocals, Lesh on bass and vocals, and Kreutzman on dr...