A dull and garbled murmur teases my ears, snug in the embrace of my headphones, as if I were floating at the bottom of a pool, half aware of the conversation above. In these moments, outside sounds are summertime icicles, their sharp tips of detail quickly melting into acoustic puddles, and only a diffuse, frothy awareness of a world outside remains.

Down the red stone hallway, in the bomb shelter-sturdy chapel, Mary's forlornly open arms receive the chanting of two dozen brown-smocked monks. While they intone Psalms, I lie in my room here in the monastery where I am on retreat, the light of my laptop shining in the darkness.

There's nothing particularly original about Creed, whose music I'm soaking in, but at ear-damaging levels they are a guilty pleasure, with lyrics elliptically Christian enough to sustain crossover listeners who like their music loud, their doctrine grated through refrigerator-sized amplifiers, their spiritual sentiments unvarnished, and their piety vaguely evangelical.

The effect of the music coursing through my nervous system is to produce a lift, a somatic levity that sends me at once deeply within and outside my body, spacing me in three simultaneous modes: as embodied spirit, as disembodied spirit, and as a spirit ecstatically holding them bound. Playing electric bass in rock bands for the past 15 years has induced similar effects. Occasionally the music, without premeditation, achieves a viscous density like the Catholic oil of chrism at baptism. The resulting lift paralyzes both of my hands, and as they hang in suspended animation for a few beats or a fragment of a beat, I am already recovering them and the lift has passed.

The digital environment of the CD is the plastic, virtual "enclosure" today in which younger generations taste and hear—however briefly and unconsciously—the goodness of life, the grandeur and intimacy of God. As anonymous monastics experiencing culture in solitude, we drown in these acoustic aquariums. But we are rarely forced to make these experiences explicit, to consider thoughtfully and make judgments about them. In such a cultural environment, wherein rock's meaning is too often left to the private individual, James Miller's new book makes a very welcome contribution. Flowers in the Dustbin forces a more public consideration of rock's influence as both an economic and spiritual medium. Although the book attractively sketches a cultural history of rock and roll, Flowers also suggests that rock's rise and decline is directly tied to the development of, and eventual abuse of, its religious power.

In this critically sympathetic look, Miller—who spent decades as a rock journalist—tells the story of a mongrel music. Rock was born of the awkward and uneven marriage of elements of country, rhythm and blues, gospel, and jazz woven together at critical junctures by talented (or at least passionate) musicians, as well as their business associates and disc jockeys. The contribution of black America to this most American of musical hybrids was nothing less than foundational, and Miller gives particular attention to the complex racial dynamics at the heart of rock and roll.

Instrumental in defining the medium were Wynonie Harris's "Good Rockin' Tonight" in the late 1940s, the Chords's "Sh-Boom," Fats Domino's "Ain't It a Shame," Chuck Berry's "Maybellene," and Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" in the '50s, and Jimi Hendrix's legendary persona in the '60s. Though each of these artists and songs receives loving and witty journalistic treatment, Miller's discussion of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson is particularly smart writing.

Miller contrasts the way in which, on the one hand, Johnson's otherworldly musicianship was reincarnated by Eric Clapton, with the way in which, on the other hand, the Rolling Stones, Van Halen, and Metallica cheaply, if unwittingly, recycled Johnson's diabolical mystique. Johnson's relative anonymity, however, was (and is) only too typical: while several black artists achieved prominence in their own right early in rock's heyday (such as the Platters and Johnny Mathis), their influence was nowhere near that of white rockers, from the Beatles to Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan to Elvis Presley, who freely borrowed (or stole) from black musical traditions in both content and style. It is one of the achievements of Flowers that the black character of rock is foregrounded and shown to be indispensible for rock acts down to the present day.

"Mainstream" rock music remained largely white until the last decade, when rock's fracturing into rap and hip-hop created arenas where mostly black artists could rise to prominence with de creased interracial competition and discrimination. If rock's musical debt to black musicians is deep, white rock artists' psychological debt to black musicians is at least as significant. What is at stake here is an old white fantasy about the gritty taboo-breaking character of black musicality, in its footloose freedom, its sensuality (always with the promise of sexual release), and its constant threat of violence. Music by black artists fed what became mainstream rock through what appeared to be its terrifying and alluring excessiveness, breaking through the barriers of mainstream white normality.

Miller borrows from Norman Mailer to argue that what rock had become by the 1950s was "white Negro" music, a white arrangement of music that was fantasized as a royal road to authenticity, beyond all taboos and limits. In short, the music promised "a ritual representation of potentially unruly impulses." The first definitive example here was Elvis, who, in the words of one music industry employee, was "a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel." In his recording of Harris's "Good Rockin'," Presley sings like a "Pentecostal enthusiast bursting with the spirit … trembling in ecstasy and speaking in tongues." Elvis, Miller recounts, displayed "soul"—"a certain spiritual vitality, a spark of spontaneous feeling."

But the influence of race on rock's identity is only one thread through Miller's history. Through dozens of five-page excursions on pivotal personalities, events, and songs, his portraits are rendered in a casually readable style of cultural criticism. These portraits are stitched together to serve Miller's larger argument about the "cultural essence" of rock: that it is a hybrid, raucous music, maintained on complicated and sometimes disturbing racial assumptions, made by and for people more interested in passion and authenticity than in musical sophistication, a music promising transcendence of sexual, racial, and cultural barriers—in short, promising absolute freedom. Rock at its best, for Miller, is a unifying and empowering force for the breaking down of needless cultural restrictions and inspiration for personal liberation.

Alas, for Miller, rock's best days are behind it: the fragmentation of the genre, a widespread lapse into worn-out musical formulas, and an indulgence in hedonistic impulses—not to mention a dearth of real musicianship—leave him convinced that Elvis's death in 1977 was only the most dramatic evidence that a musical genre, several years in decline, was itself, for all intents and purposes, dead. But to understand rock's death, one must attend to the religious subtext of Miller's book.

The prevalence of religious language in the book is striking. The dance hall culture of the '40s is described by one observer as "sacramental strutting and swinging." According to Mailer, rock's white hipster imagines that a proximity to black music will take him "nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his body." The roots of Elvis Presley's style were in his Assembly of God adolescence in Memphis, a world of "sacred singers, gospel divas, spiritual quartets, heavenly choirs," augmented by Presley's attendance at black services at his own and a nearby Baptist church. His early songs, like "That's When Your Heartaches Begin," reveal, writes Miller, a "scarcely veiled fear and trembling, like a sinner starving for absolution." The Beatles lived within a "pseudo-religious aura" during their glory years, eroding class circumscriptions in England and an insidious "timid conformism" in America. Bob Dylan's "disembodied" and "vehement" voice made his music "seem like a revelation that could only be received by the most faithful and fervent of disciples," bestowing on them a "shock of conversion." In 1974, Bruce Springsteen's "advent," ac cording to one critic, "seemed nothing short of a miracle."

When the book's scattered religious hints finally are given more direct attention, in a snowballing of religious cues in the last 50 pages, the effect is more than we expect, but less than we need. Miller argues that rock's promise was squandered by a gang of false messiahs in the late 1960s and 1970s. For Miller, Jim Morrison, the "holy fool" of The Doors, confused embarrassing hedonistic excess with the liberation of perception; Springsteen's much-heralded salvific presence was largely a product of the self-fulfilling prophecies of some influential cultural commentators, abetted by Springsteen's disingenuous, churlishly scripted presentation of himself and his sound; and David Bowie's liturgical rock dramas were merely hype for hype's sake, cynically manipulated by "the fake messiah with the flame red hair and the ghostly white face." Springsteen and Bowie, in particular, were traitors to rock's inherent religiousness, turning "the public image of themselves, and their music, into fetishized commodities, prefab tokens of a rapturous transcendence, producing a variety of goods that could be purchased and (for the truly idolatrous) reverently collected."

What killed rock, then, was idolatry, the sin that haunts every experience of rapturous (or even mundane) self-transcendence. Music is second only to sex as the leading "limit experience" of our age, bringing us up against the limits of human knowledge and offering access to the self-release that is part of every human encounter with God. Musical and sexual experiences are also our occasions of idolatry par excellence.

The religious peak evidenced in the Beatles' "spirit—of creativity, of play, of blissful joy"—domesticated itself into an autoerotic, self-congratulatory maintenance of poses, having succumbed to a bland consumerism. Rock succeeded in becoming the lingua franca of youth, but at the cost of its truth. In a discussion of Marvin Gaye's "Flyin' High," Miller sums up rock's post-1977 problem in religious terms: "The song's protagonist worries about his lusts, but he's helpless to control them; earnestly seeking salvation, he's settling, one more time, for a counterfeit of transcendence." Miller concludes that "The music I once found fraught with strange, even subversive meanings now often seems to mean nothing at all. Its essential possibilities have been thoroughly explored, its limits more or less clearly established." Rock music is left with "no future."

Even if Miller is right, the death of radical rock innovation does not necessarily indicate its demise as a spiritually meaningful form. Indeed, from a Catholic perspective, ornamentation, stylization, and the stability of form—in a word, ritualization—may aid rock in continuing to function religiously. The Catholic Mass has not necessarily forfeited its spiritual power because it has lost the degree of innovation it may have had in the early churches. We must resist the temptation to equate stylization and ritualization with a lack of religious power.

If rock music has indeed had the religious power that Miller attributes to it, then the problem is deep indeed: both rock itself and religious experience may yet be open to further transformation. Or did rock's period of revelation cease with the 30th birthday of the last Baby Boomer? And yet this is the point beyond which Flowers cannot go, for to do so would risk articulating what in Christian terms would be called a theology of the Holy Spirit—an accounting of God's presence in and through "secular" experience, whether explicitly named by the recipient as religious or not.

Miller's resort to religious language to explain rock's influence (and its betrayal) is far from unusual. The employment of such metaphors is a common practice of "secular" rock writing and is, among other things, an almost palpable grasping for a language that can express the richness of experience, the claim to attention, and the sounding of human depths that rock music can and does still provide.

Often these religious metaphors are deployed irreverently, as in a recent article in Spin magazine, which described a moment in the Beastie Boys' song "Sabotage," wherein bass player Adam "Yauch's fuzzed-up bass line drives you to the edge of the cliff and [rapper] Ad-Rock free-falls for all your sins." The same article asserts that in the latest album by rap-rock act Rage Against the Machine, this salvific experience takes place "about a half-dozen times."1 Rock music neither preaches nor practices a "once-saved-always-saved" doctrine. It makes no difference whether you are alone in your room in an existential crisis with headphones on; amidst 20,000 people at a concert; or simply in a car with the stereo blaring between points a and b: events of joy, generosity, and love, which Paul called the "fruit of the Spirit" (Gal. 5:22), are often experienced through rock music as gift but yet shown to be merely momentary. At their worst, they are latched onto as idols, attempting to exhaust all that can be known of God's reign. At their best, they are accepted as promise and taste of eternal joy, generosity, and love.

And so the fact that an experience of redemption must continually be appropriated and re-appropriated by rock fans, and that rock can obviously offer no decisive, final experience of salvation itself, is no charge against rock music or its religiousness. To be sure, caution is called for when confronted with rock's religious power to offer tastes of redemption; the line between a font of renewal and an addiction is a hazy one, especially given rock promoters' interest in making money from the spiritual needs of its audiences. But is the fundamental caution needed here any different in quality from the caution that any adult person of faith must exercise with respect to his or her religious institution?

This is not to equate the institution of the Church with the institutions of rock. But it is to suggest that there is a similarity in struggle between being a creative and mature member of a religious denomination, on the one hand, and of a popular music genre, on the other. Similar processes of discernment, sifting experiences of sin and grace, are at work in each domain.

On another level, Flowers confirms what I see in ministerial work around the country: how difficult it is for much of the wider culture, including church leadership, to take seriously the possibilities and realities of post-1970s rock music as a form of religious experience. The music of the 1960s may be parodied occasionally in the media, but it retains a certain hallowed aura that makes its parody that much more biting. Rarely would a cultural critic or church leader pause to consider '80s or '90s music a serious candidate for mediating religious experience and knowledge. Thus do generational politics silently work themselves out in American religion.

But those of us post-Baby Boomers who grew up with rock and continue to listen to it into adulthood do not necessarily find it, as Miller does, "all about being young." It is also now about having children, about maturing. It is this development within rock that Miller does not take into account. That so many of Miller's friends listen to "almost anything … but the once beloved soundtrack of their adolescence and early adulthood" may be a testimony not so much to the exhaustion of rock as to the profound mix of ambivalence, wistfulness, and rue with which many Baby Boomers think of the 1960s. The music of the post-Boomer generations, for better or worse, is not so closely bonded to such a turbulent passage in American life. It is the difference between rock's identity being closely tied to dramatic cultural upheaval, on the one hand, and rock as an entire economy, a way of life, the soundtrack for a generation throughout its life cycle, on the other.

As an "economy" for a generation, the importance of attending to the religious meanings of rock music be comes apparent: not because rock is in itself a wholly "good" or wholly "bad" form of music but because it has played and continues to play a mediating role for the spiritual life of American generations. Rock music both fosters and blocks self-transcendence by helping to produce limit experiences. If rock music, both by its unique musical styles, and by its sheer predominance in the market, is one major worldly avenue for self-transcendence, then what rock means religiously has importance for who we are as political, social, economic people, because our capability to live justly with ourselves and others is a result of our openness to self-transcendence.

What is it then about rock and roll that still evokes this limit experience—this experience so intrinsic to Christian faith in particular? What is happening when Tori Amos, in the attitude of Bernini's Teresa, straddles a piano bench, and tosses her head backward in ecstatic abandon while singing—singing anything; when Alanis Morrisette, like some modern-day hesychast, hunches over while breathing in pace with her rapid-fire words, then stands straight up, her whole affect inward-turned and threatened to be swallowed by her huge mouth, yawning a tense tangle of vocal cords teasing the limits of orality, her arched eyebrows stretching tight over closed eyelids while her head gently swivels on her neck as if on a spring, her fingers spontaneously making odd shapes in some primitive digital rendering of the spirit of her voice; when even now on 25-year-old videotapes we see Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, two hours into a concert, inhaling deeply with his whole body while his sweat-soaked hair swings back and forth and he turns, in real time, in slow motion, in silent cue to guitarist Jimmy Page, music having momentarily incarnated itself in his body; when Lauryn Hill redescribes the cosmic christological language of the New Testament (such as Eph. 1:23; Col. 1:17) by leading a chorus of "Everything is everything" from her rap song of the same name. Whatever is happening in each of these cases, they are not reducible to narcissism, delusion, or manipulation. It is the surrender of self-consciousness in the drama of the rock performance that leads to the heavy-breathing Amos, the hunching Morrisette, the floating Plant, the transcending Hill.

And yet the self-transcendence of rock is always intermixed, in contemporary consumer capitalism, with self-absorption. The younger American generations live within a complex and widespread economy of rock, from the boombox to the Walkman, to MTV and VH1 to Rolling Stone and Spin, to concert tours, to rock radio, to MP3s on the Internet. The Catholic tradition has known for a long time that liturgy is able to communicate theologically be cause, at its best, it immerses the participant bodily in a multisensory symbol system, which then is taken by the participant out to reinterpret the wider world. Theologically, what we have in the lived experience of many young adults today is a bodily participation in a multisensory rock and roll symbol system which is a motley admixture of sin and grace—an ambiguous liturgy not of the word but of the world.

As Steven Connor has observed, rock music participates in a wider system of consumer culture that makes all of popular culture "simultaneously … subversive and … [an] official mode of postmodern capitalism."2 The impulse to contest my list of spiritually suggestive movements in rock—an impulse and a defense of consumerist identity: my CDs are an expression of who I am.

And we not only pay for this religious experience by purchasing $20 CDs. Many of us feel the cost even more intimately: in our ears. While I know that the rest of my life in Catholic liturgies would never damage my hearing one iota, I have already suffered some upper-frequency hearing loss due to too many club gigs standing by the amplifiers, too many garage rehearsals cranked up to 11, too many rock concerts that left me deaf for 48 hours afterward. Many in my generation will pay the bill for plugging the stadium into our skulls, cranking music in our headphones for the past 20 years.

I'm not too young to wonder what I might be missing. At the monastery, should I have put my headphones aside and joined the monks?

Tom Beaudoin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Religion and Education at Boston College. He is the author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (Jossey-Bass, 1998).

Footnotes

1. Charles Aaron, "The Art of War." Spin, Vol. 16, No. 3 (March 2000), p. 93.

2. Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Blackwell, 1997), p. 217.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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