This essay was originally produced in Dr. John Shook's seminar on Social Ethics and Religion, during the fall of 2011, in Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program.
To what extent has popular rock music, a form historically viewed in opposition to traditional Christian theology of separation and redemption between humankind and its maker, espoused an ethic of intrinsic and experiential, spiritual experience? Among three celebrities and public figures within the genre, where has God resided in their religious vision, and how have each used their position in culture to espouse a set of ethics? This discussion will provide historical and cultural context for the review of the careers of Elvis Presley, Bono of U2, and Neil Young, assessing performers’ public output and relationship with the audience, seeking to define a specific theological stance and advocacy of a set of social ethics in each.
Spirituality in popular music is
important, as the genre supports individuals’ consumption of both lyrics and
music; often, the rhetorical message of music has been in response to and in
promotion of a specific world-view. While the distribution of recorded music
has undergone many logistical and physical changes, including new forms
(records, cassettes, compact discs, downloads), the rhetorical power of popular
music in espousing ‘religious’ or social ethics may not be underestimated in
the twenty-first century. While full and separate academic study may identify how
these transitions have established popular music’s rhetorical strength, the
progression of themes and topics in rock music are important in the extent to
which the audience has participated and enjoined the performer, in the
explanation and revealing of three performers’ histories.
Spiritual
Contextualization for Music at the Birth of Rock and Roll
America in the 1950s found itself in
a unique and transitional period: the post-war industrial boom, as well as the
rise in new cultural phenomena and technology established new levels social,
political, and economic success. From this, artistic and creative movements in
poetry, film, and music rose, emboldening discussions of spirituality and human equality. After
less than a decade of the public's exposure to celebrities like James Dean,
Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, Norman Mailer (1959) identified a growing cultural
schism in popular culture, in his essay “The White Negro: Superficial
Reflections on the Hipster,” one that would only continue to widen through the
revolutions in thought and action over the coming decades:
...whether the life is criminal or
not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that
domain of experience where security is boredom
and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present
which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat […]
The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance quivers with the
knowledge that new kinds of victories
increase one's power for new kinds of perception; and, defeats, the wrong kind
of defeats, attack the body and imprison
one's energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people's habits,
other people's defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is
Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is
beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one
conforms (Mailer, 1959, as cited by Charters, 1992, p. 527-528).
Mailer
(1959) sought to identify the “psychopathic brilliance” in a new and “Hip”
pervading culture, while record companies' creation of celebrities became
quickly calculated, as they sought to package and distribute a lucrative
version of what Mailer named as “muted, icy self-destroying rage” in the
evolving genre of popular rock music. In part a rejection of domestic security
available during the economic prosperity that followed World War II in America,
the security that Mailer characterized as being sickeningly boring to the
“Hip”-- this rejection, along with racial categorization in music, helped shape
the genre of rock. Rhythm and blues
record sales came to reflect a host of musicians whose beat and lyrical topics
classified them quickly as the opposite of “Square,” to such an extent that
record companies sought to redefine rock into a lucrative and acceptable genre.
By the mid-1960s, a host of
performers sought to describe and account different visions for and of society.
Use of the genre of popular rock music as a means of delivering a message was
polarizing, changing the way individuals defined their relationship to their
chosen music: “Like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, Little Richard offered an
endless chain of signifiers, which in their social and historical context
unsettled the discourse of the dominant culture” (Tucker, 1989, p. 286). Describing
traditional constructions of Christianity, from which would contrast liberatory
and empancipatory theological beliefs, Cornell West’s characterization is useful
in understanding the cultural and spiritual place from popular rock music was
born:
For Christians, truth is not a
property, characteristic, or attribute of a theory, portrayal, and description,
not even a Christian description. Rather, Jesus
Christ is the Truth, a reality which can only be existentially appropriated
(not intellectually grasped) by fallen human beings caught in ever- changing finite descriptions. And the fact
that this view itself is but part of a finite Christian description may be trivially
self-contradictory, but, more
important, a self-description of our fallenness and finitude. In short, we are inscribed within the hermeneutical circle
with a dim hope for awareness of the
whole, but with no intellectual access to it (p. 98).
The
discourse of popular rock music—across examples of Neil Young, Elvis Presley,
and Bono—is one that has come to challenge the “finite descriptions” and the
Fall itself, as referenced by West. How three groundbreaking performers in
popular rock music have sought to establish an “awareness of the whole” in
their conceptions and actions within society, through their music as well as
their public action, is important to an understanding of how spiritual,
rhetorical strategies may advocate for a specific set of social concerns and
ethics: a new spectrum for a specific and lucrative realm of the humanities
grew as both Hip and Square, a cultural response to and societal reckoning with
a reality that includes a higher power accessible only through “existentially appropriated”
means.
While this discussion proceeds to
identify three performers as examples of distinctions rooted in the Paradox of
Divine Morality—the extent to which individuals are made aware through their
own actions of a higher power, and the extent to which these actions are
representative, in part or in sum, of humans’ ethical abilities, the
designations of Presley as traditional, Neil Young as prophetic, and Bono as
progressive are not intended as ultimate, but as illustrative of working models
of social ethics in popular rock music. Arguments may likely be made against
these designations-- Presley, for example, explored Christian mysticism from
his palatial Tennessee mansion Graceland. This discussion focuses on each
performers’ public entries into an evolving sphere of rhetorical statement;
details of each performers’ career and public reception are discussed, the
usefulness of the humanities’ recognition and assessment of its participants in
regards to their ethical status and message becomes clear.
The Paradox of Divine Morality is an
important critical lens for the examination of performers’ discussion of
spirituality in the genre of popular rock music: as the derivation of one’s
central vision of moral, ethical behavior may be an intrinsic quality to artists
of many types, this examination has illuminated and described the careers and
ethical advocacy of three groundbreaking individuals: Elvis Presley, Neil
Young, and Bono of U2. This new realm of the humanities—rock and roll—remains a
cultural and societal marker, one that continues to evolve with the
participation of a diverse group of individuals. Following Mailer’s definition
of ‘Hip’ and ‘Square’ established in the late 1950s, a new and creative place
for a societal concept of the sacred has continued to emerge, in the form of
performers’ religious qualities and ethical advocacy.
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