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5 Fan Cultures
- Baylor University Press
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123 5 FAN CULTURES GETTING THEOLOGICAL INVENTIONS INTO THE DJ’S CRATE The fan’s relation to cultural texts operates in the domain of affect or mood. . . . Affect is not the same as either emotions or desires. Affect is closely tied to what we often describe as the feeling of life. —Lawrence Grossberg, “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom” We use our power as consumers to engage in symbolic sojourns that transcend a consumerist culture. —Roger C. Aden, Popular Stories and Promised Lands: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages No artist can predict, let alone control, what an audience will make of his images; yet no rock ’n’ roller can exist without a relationship with an audience, whether it is the imaginary audience one begins with, or the all-too-real confusion of the audience one wins. —Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music 124 — Mashup Religion When the song leaves the studio, it meets headlong the world of fans and fandom.According to musicologist Antoine Hennion,“pop songs do not create their public, they discover it.”1 A song is not fully made until it is received and appreciated by a fan—someone who identifies with the music and integrates it into his or her life. This amounts to a shift from what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the “material production ” of the work of art to the “symbolic production” of the work of art within the field of “spectators capable of knowing and recognizing ” works of art as such.2 The symbolic production of a work of art is the work done by fans of creating its value as art within a particular fan culture, or within the larger marketplace of fan cultures. To continue our analogy to popular music-making, at this point in the process the fan becomes the DJ or mashup artist, adding a range of religiously attenuated artifacts to crates and placing breaks and beats into their remixes of religion. As we have seen, for DJs and mashup artists, crate-digging, or the archaeological business of connecting with the best truths (breaks or beats) within traditions of music, is important. DJs and mashup artists are not abandoning traditions as resources, or they would have little of value to mash up. The same is true for those who, as fans of religion, are remixing religion today. Traditions and traditional resources remain crucial, and being the best crate-digger, or one who is able to search out the best breaks within available resources to remix, is of increasing importance. In this context, it is important for theologians operating in and out of traditions to rethink the kinds of theological breaks and beats they are providing as resources. They must also begin to think strategically about placing their ideas in the place where crate-digging is currently occurring within popular culture—in fan cultures mediated by the Internet, online social networks, and pilgrimages to concerts and conferences. In this chapter, therefore, we shift to investigate how songs and theological compositions are received and remixed by audiences who produce their value. Then we will consider how the ethnographic analysis of those audiences can help theologians learn the actual shape that religious desire takes within popular culture, and respond to it appropriately. If theologians are to invent theology at [44.212.93.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:16 GMT) Fan Cultures — 125 the intersection of a range of religious desires, it is important to learn what these desires in fact are and how they are mediated. When this is accomplished, theologians can discover how the resources of the traditions they are remixing and mashing up may, in fact, be of some importance in conversation with an audience. Popular Music and Religious Identity In the late 1950s, a dramatic shift emerged in the way popular music was consumed. Prior to that time, popular music was fairly homogeneous , and its distribution, although often locally controlled, was fairly centralized. Most popular music radio stations in the early days of radio played pretty much the same thing. By and large, entire families, communities, and the nation consumed similar programming . Since then, popular music has diversified, and the forms of production and distribution have decentralized to the point of almost complete fragmentation. In the late fifties and on through the sixties and seventies, with the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, soul, Motown, funk, and rock music, radio stations began to fragment along lines...