Rock'n'roll as Quest for the Infinite: Cracks in Postmodernity Podcast, with Sephen Adubato
‘The singer is . . . like the filament in a bulb — the most flimsy, and yet carrying this high-octane . . . this current . . . this charge, that is capable of melting everything around him.’
There’s no ‘right thing!’
A conversation about music, colonialism and the prospects of healing the wounds of history, with my New Yorker friend, Stephen Adubato, recorded in September 2023.
Is it possible that a fleeting song on the radio transmits the most fundamental longing for ‘something beyond’ felt by one human being — the writer/singer/musician – through time and space, to the heart of another, the listener?
The story of music begins as a Cry from the heart of man, and there is no reason why that impulse may not be conveyed as well by popular forms as by classical or elevated ones.
In the beginning was the Cry: the Cry of the first baby, the cooed
reassurance of the first baby’s mother. Later, there was the Cry of the grown-up baby, now a slave in the plantations of America’s deep south, hollering to his brother further along the chain-gang. Eventually, caked in Mississippi mud, came the Blues, which merged with negro spiritual singing and Country music, itself the offspring of Irish folk songs, far-travelled in the hearts of starving emigrants fleeing famine at home, to form what is now called rock ‘n’ roll.
At its best, even third millennial rock ‘n’ roll continues to provide a conduit for that Cry, which nowadays may amount to a secret knowledge shared between musician and listener, carried heart to heart without losing anything. Perhaps we might add that the Cry today emanates from the heart of a human more threatened with re-enslavement than at any time in living memory.
A dozen years ago, I curated an exhibition for the Meeting of Rimini, 3 Chords and a Longing for the Truth: Rock ‘n’ roll as a Quest for the Infinite, which was intended not so much as provocation as suggestion, lightly drawn, the opening gambit of a discussion. One of its motivations was respectfully to take up a challenge posed previously by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who had several times expressed fears about the unwholesomeness of rock ‘n’ roll. For example, in his address to the International Church Music Congress in Rome in November 1985, he observed:
In not a few forms of religion, music is ordered to intoxication and ecstasy. The freedom from the limitations of being human towards which the hunger for the infinite proper to man is directed is to be attained through sacred delirium, through the frenzy of the rhythm and of the instruments. Such music lowers the barriers of individuality and of personality. Man frees himself in it from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy, liberation from the ego, and unification with the universe.
Today we experience the secularised return of this type in rock and pop music, the festivals of which are an anti-culture of the same orientation — the pleasure of destruction, the repealing of the limits of the everyday, and the illusion of liberation from the ego in the wild ecstasy of a tumultuous crowd. This involves forms of release which are related to drugs and thoroughly opposed to the Christian faith in the Redemption.
Here, and elsewhere, Joseph Ratzinger’s primary argument was that rock music should not be used in a liturgical context. On this point there is little basis for argument. But his observations, clearly, amounted to a critique of the music in a more general sense, and many of his observations in this context were well-founded, and typically well observed. However, whereas the concerns he expressed are pertinent and valid conclusions regarding the ideological, cultural and social context of much pop music of our time, they do not explore the total context of this music and its origins and artistic potentiality.
The great British music writer Paul Morley, in his book, Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, wrote about the words of a pop song disappearing into themselves ‘as though boiled down, as if they are changing from solid to liquid, forming a sensuous, absorbing musical form that implies how all music began with the human voice. The sound of the human voice imitating sounds around us; the sounds of nature, animals, even the sound of silence. The sound of the human voice copying the voice of God.’
There is sometimes more to rock ‘n’ roll than meets the eye of the external observer, and we should remember this when considering the music our children love, or which we have ourselves loved. If it is true that desire is always a clue to something deeper, then what attracts the young to this music must bear some relationship, to begin with at least, to the true source of human longing and to the nature of human destiny. This, really, is the case the exhibition sought to state and elaborate upon.
For one thing, consider the question of roots; for another, the fundamental human impulse which gave rise to the traditions out of which present-day rock music evolved. For yet another, contemplate those among today’s practitioners still seeking to adhere to that original impulse, and to add their contribution in a manner in keeping with that impulse, though always bringing some newness born of the imperative to say what seems unsayable.
For the artist/musician, the rock ‘n’ roll ‘product’ begins life as the most private thing. The heart looks to itself and searches for words and notes and sounds to speak of something that is as far from noise and glitz and distraction as is possible to imagine: one man or woman with a guitar or piano, pouring his/her heart out into a song. And then, constructed within an idiom that manages to convey the original impulse and yet encrypt it in a form that can give rise also to the most radical misunderstandings, the song travels though a thousand circuits and channels, via innumerable wires, negotiating the paraphernalia of the world’s most fashion-obsessed business, kneaded by the hands of accountants and technicians, until finally being decoded in the heart of the waiting listener. Outwardly reduced by understandings of ‘showbusiness’ and ‘entertainment,’ the holiness of the song is therefore forced inwards into a closed circuit, a communicating-and-receiving that risks confusion with the anti-qualities that have become its public codes: affectation, pose, narcissism, diversion, constructed mystique, avoidance.
Amy Winehouse giving voice to a plaintive plea for love before dying alone; Van Morrison, who takes us to the heart of the great questions, struggling with them, doubting, pleading for reassurance; Johnny Cash, who told us of his life, right unto the end, enabling us to see our own lives as coherent stories, defined by significance and destination; and always, in the foreground, the gyrating shadow of Elvis, whose spastic dance brought it all together in the back of a Memphis shop: Is it possible that all this might amount to the constructed Trojan horse whereby the most fundamental understandings necessary for human survival might be transmitted through hostile cultures, in the most unlikely form, heart to heart?
Rock ‘n’ roll has one foot in the sacred world and the other in the material; part spirit, part flesh; half-holy, half-profane. Thus, in this medium, perhaps more than in any other, man captures and feeds off the contradictory, dualistic nature of modern life — at once an exaltation of something greater and a flirting with idolatry, an assertion of human self-assurance, a metaphor for the interaction in modern societies of the secular and the sacred, and a cry for help directed upwards from the heart of the bunker that man has constructed to hide from the Mystery. Rock ‘n’ roll and its attendant outward distractions and misdirections, allows for a camouflage, by which the artist contrives to conceal the pure intention of the song, but in a way that the listener, in his or her own heart, can receive it.
Isn’t it astonishing, when you think about it, that such a Trojan horse has become necessary? Why is our culture so afraid of these questions now? But, equally astonishing is that, in spite of everything, such cultural transactions remain possible.
Click on arrow below to listen to podcast
Alternatively, click on arrow on bottom right-hand corner of panel
Buy John a beverage
If you are not a full subscriber but would like to support my work on Unchained with a small donation, please click on the ‘Buy John a beverage’ link above.