The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music

Songs of Fear and Trembling

M. Grimshaw, M. Grimshaw, M. Grimshaw

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137394118
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

In this unique collection, theologians born and formed during the Cold War offer their insights and perspectives on theological relationships with such musical artists and groups as Joy Division, U2, Nick Cave, and John Coltrane. These essays demonstrate that one's personal music preferences can inform and influence professional interests.

Chapter 1

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Introduction—Sonic Bibles and the Closing of the Canon

The Sounds of Secular, Mundane Transcendence?

Mike Grimshaw

“The 3Ds came to me like Chinese whispers. Sweating and drunk, my friend Mike, who was studying theology, wandered out of an Orientation gig and declared them rock ‘n’ roll gods. I thought if anyone could recognize the divine, he could.”¹

On their night, the 3Ds were an as transcendent, redemptive experience as one could ever hope for. Any album doesn’t do justice to what occurred as these post-punk garage-pop maniacs sonically immolated themselves before a sweaty, drunk crowd (there was no other in Dunedin) seeking that simultaneous loss and gain of self that is central to rock ‘n’ roll. There were a number of such gigs that I could have wandered out of in a similar state and with a similar declaration at that time. Such glory it was to be young and in Dunedin at a time when bands from this small, university city at the bottom of the world were creating an underground “Dunedin sound” that found its way to influence generations of American college bands and circulate within the larger British and European indie-music scene. The big names were the Clean, the Chills, the StraightJacket Fits, the Verlaines, and the 3Ds; but often it was the gigs of smaller, lesser-known bands that burned their way into your soul. These were the Torquemadas—Dunedin students providing an antipodean answer to the Ramones—, Funhouse who channeled Iggy and the Stooges, the Orange who harmonized psychedelic pop, and Snapper’s dirty-fuzz riffing. Venturing up to Christchurch there was the sonic assault of Dolphin’s superpower pop and the concrete wall of sound of Bailter Space. But best of all these were local bands, made up of people who sold you records, who lived in flats two houses down, who drank and got drunk in various pubs and played great indie-pop and rock ‘n’ roll to an ever-expanding mess of students, hangers-on, and dropouts all looking for that which took them out of the mundane banality of everyday life and plugged them into something transitorily transcendent. This was sound, music, rock that made you feel different to the core of your being. You felt changed for having experienced it; the possibilities of sound to make you feel and think anew was transformative. The tinnitus I carry is my aural wound of Jacob’s wrestling.

The sound itself was a mix of English punk, 1960s Americana and the Velvet Underground all taken up with a “give it a go” attitude that meant at some stage almost everyone you knew was in or had been or was friends of someone in a band. It was the freedom offered by three chords and an attitude. The freedom that rock music offers to make transformative noise. If the band scene was one side of this endeavor, the other was a “high fidelity”-like obsession with vinyl both new and second hand with an undercurrent of homemade mix-tapes that circulated and got dubbed and redubbed independent of their compilers. I can remember putting together a number of eclectic tapes that then got lent out to parties at houses other than the ones I was going to and later meeting up with people who knew of me through my mix-tapes. The tapes were a mongrel-mess of sounds and songs that brought together England and Scotland, New York, Minnesota, Los Angeles, New Zealand, and Australia in a new sonic narrative of chapters and texts that attempted to speak to and speak of the times and world we found ourselves in.

The mix-tape was the way most of us back then heard of what was new—and rediscovered that which had gone underground. The making of a mix-tape was an introduction to editing—what song follows this, what I am trying to do by placing this here next to that, what impact, how many fast songs can one play, do I have too many of this compared to that? They became statements of sonic identity that, if successful would be adopted by others as providing possible soundtracks to their lives.

While we tend to think of the album as the text of rock, the reality is that it is first the single/s and then some selected songs of an album that we really respond and relate to. The mix-tape, in the age before the skip-function of the CD and then the perpetual singles of the download and iPod, allowed you to read and reread albums in your own way. No longer did you have to manually lift the stylus from one track, skip a couple of other tracks, and then lower it gently onto the one you desired. No longer did you have to risk the drunken DJ decision that all too often resulted in a screeching skid across the tracks accompanied by that ear-popping drop, all too-frequently slightly misjudged whereby the song began somewhere in the opening chords and lyrics.

The mix-tape, if chosen well, allowed the music to drive the moment, to create a feeling, a response, an ambience, a mood without interruption. Its equivalent was a great set by a band that had planned what they wanted to do to and with their music and their audience. For what the mix-tape allowed was for you to pick the moments of meaning from a variety of sources and remake, reorder them in a way that spoke to you. In short, for those of us born into that postwar pop-music generation, it was our introduction to hermeneutics. These were ways of creating the soundtracks of our lives; they became a type of sonic autobiography.

I have always been moved and troubled by a couple of lines from the New Zealand poet and critic Allen Curnow that go: “A young man in Wellington with Rimbaud in his pocket and Speights under his belt, may or may not know just where he stands—which side of those never-to-be-quite determined frontiers of our island selves.”²

Curnow wrote this in 1953 in an open letter to another poet, Louis Johnson who lived in the city of Wellington, at the bottom of New Zealand’s North Island. Johnson was a poet of suburban, domestic lives while Curnow had moved from being a poet associated with cultural nationalism (the attempt to establish a new culture in a new country through an engagement with landscape and history) and was on his way to becoming an international modernist, also signaled by having moved from Christchurch in the South Island to the major city of Auckland in the North Island. He had also shifted from being a journalist to being an academic. Curnow was never one for rock ‘n’ roll but he was a great poet of the modern condition, that searching for meaning in a world where Marx had noted all that is solid melts. He had originally decided to follow his father into the Church of England clergy, but doubts and literature, modernity and poetry caused such tensions that he symbolically cut himself adrift by throwing his Bible into the sea on a midnight crossing of Cook Strait between the North and South Islands of New Zealand. His friend and fellow poet C. K. Stead recounts this moment in “Without”³: “It was/ then he threw his/ Bible into the/ sea. He was a/ poet and would write his own.”

To write our own bibles is part of being modern: to write out of doubt, angst, existential yearning, and hope, to attempt to make present that which we perceive and experience as absent, to deal with those issues of self and time and place and identity, to give voice to the questions and troubles of existence.

We (i.e., postwar pop-music generation) turned to rock ‘n’ roll as the accessible sonic poets of meaning and transcendence in what is a world of melting modernity. I would argue rock ‘n’ roll is secular, in that it is of the saeculum (the world of shared experience), yet contains the elements for a passing transitory experience. Like Curnow, rock ‘n’ roll attempts to write its own bibles, but the sonic bibles of rock ‘n’ roll are mundane, rebellious, blasphemous, yet also full of that Kierkegaardian fear and trembling.

Greil Marcus’s presentation in The Dustbin of History of the issues lying behind the rock critic’s task speak into the hermeneutics of the sonic bibles:

The worry that our sense of history, as it takes place in everyday culture, is cramped, impoverished, and debilitating; that the commonplace assumption that history exists only in the past is a mystification powerfully resistant to any critical investigations that might reveal this assumption to be a fraud, or a jail. The suspicion is that we are living out history, making and unmaking it—forgetting it, denying it—all of the time, in far more ways than we have really learned.⁴

Yet such an existential dilemma, that sense of modern melting, the hermeneutics of rock, in and out of which are created the secular sonic bibles, exists within the experience that Barney Hoskyns writes of:

Nothing has ever moved and excited me like great rock ‘n’ roll—like punk, soul, electro-pop, alt-country and all the other sub-strata of the Anglo-American genus Rock . . . what rock ‘n’ roll was really about: the irresistible combo of sound and spectacle; of music, performance, image, attitude and ritual.⁵

In short, we could argue that rock is an ontological attitude, but then Hoskins makes a fascinating qualification:

Music is about spirit, not matter: it’s about our emotional lives, not our material status.⁶

Therefore a further qualification is required—rock is the expression and hermeneutics of emotional lives in a material word, of how spirit is claimed and experienced in matter; which I would argue is that tension that drives secular and radical theology.

Therefore I always read Curnow’s young man’s dilemma of not knowing where one stands through the hermeneutics and memory of rock. For rock ‘n’ roll is infused with spirit of Arthur Rimabud, while Speights is a beer that provokes and produces loyalty out of all proportion and meaning to its taste and quality. But that tension of a head full of poetry and a gut full of alcohol, each driving the other as ways to transitory transcendence of the mundane is part of the secular transcendence of rock ‘n’ roll.

Of course this is also something to do with my age. I was fortunate to be born during the age of rock ‘n’ roll and be able to grow up with a constant soundtrack that was secular, that was of the saeculum. That is, a soundtrack of a world of shared experience. As Jon Savage notes of the members of Nirvana, born 1965–1969: “The three were born into an environment where pop was the way of interacting the world.”⁷

I was born in 1967, three days after Kurt Cobain, three months before Noel Gallagher; that is into the world of rock ‘n’ roll. I can’t remember a time before rock, even though I increasingly find myself in a post-rock world. But that is because the secular, the saeculum has broken and also because there seems no way really forward. In writing this chapter I have been trying to think of the music that has made me stop and think, that has impacted upon me as did the music of last century. Here of course there is that ever-present danger of the dreaded specter of dad-rock. Yet why should rock music be immune from the periods of cultural resonance and recession? In literature what is current and contemporary may not be accorded the same status and meaning of what went previously, the same in art, in jazz, in classical, in cinema. Only really in rock is the emphasis so firmly on “the now” that the past becomes a cause of derision. Of course the answer is, I would argue, to be ever-open to both the new and the re-heard old; to listen to the past with the ears of now, to be open to what is now seeking the possibilities of transformation that can never just be lost to the past in the equivalent of the sonic fundamentalist. YouTube can be both a help and a hindrance—was it really a decade ago that the Strokes reimagined dirty-riffing rock ‘n’ roll?—but since then it all too often and easily has become so mundane as to be banal; likewise, the swift collapse following that brief spurt of post-punk retro riffing of the Arctic Monkeys. Of course these references date me and it’s not that the Strokes or the Arctic Monkeys were inventing something new, but they did what great rock ‘n’ roll always did, and that was involve themselves in sonic hermeneutics. They took the past and made it sound new by remaking, rethinking, and reimaging it in a new time and new place. To do that, however, you need to know what you are dealing with; you need to know your history in order to successfully remake it. My concern is that too much of what occurs today is not hermeneutics, it is merely karaoke and pastiche, or just as bad, a type of imitative fundamentalism of limited knowledge and sensibility. I spend too much time scanning music video channels looking for something new and exciting and while I hear a lot that is good it is rare to find something exciting, something that makes me pause. In this I am no different to the art critic, the literary critic who has accumulated enough knowledge to be able to make discerning choices and comparisons—and of course look back on some of one’s prior enthusiasms and championings with a critically reflective eye and ear. Similarly my car radio is permanently tuned to the local student radio station and there are still moments of what can be termed “atheist materialist Pentecostal exuberance”—or otherwise known as attempting to sing along to new song in what can sound like a nongifting of tongues. I have never been a Pentecostal but can imagine the profane similarities to being caught up and transfigured in the event such as in the encounter with music, art, liter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction—Sonic Bibles and the Closing of the Canon: The Sounds of Secular, Mundane Transcendence?
• 2   My Affair with Ian
• 3   In the Colony with Joy Division
• 4   Sonic Stigmatas: Toward a New Fear and Trembling
• 5   Improvisation and Divine Creation: A Riff on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
• 6   Protocols of Surrender: Stammering along the Gothic Line
• 7   Louis Armstrong: A Rhapsody on Repetition and Time
• 8   I Know My Way from Here: Walking the Hutterite Mile with David Eugene Edwards
• 9   Meeting God in the Sound: The Seductive Dimension of U2’s Future Hymns
• 10   Praying the Confiteor at Westminster Abbey: Four-on-the Floor Apocalypse
• 11   Nick Cave and Death
• 12   Combine Dry Ingredients, Mix Well: Constituting Worlds through Mix-Tapes and Maxi-Mixes
• 13   Why Kanye West Gets It Wrong: It’s Not “Jesus Walks” but “Christ Who Is Glimpsed” . . . (or How to Think Theologically in the Modern City)
• 14   Stop, Think, Stop
• Radical Theology Playlist
• Contributors
• Index