Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention

1 The Songwriter

13 1 THE SONGWRITER INVENTION IN AND OUT OF A THEOLOGICAL TRADITION When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; . . . experiences are always forming new wholes. —T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” 1921 Any musicologist, neatly tracing the development of music, can tell us that rock ’n’ roll did not come out of nowhere. But it sounded as if it did. —Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music The first stage of the song-making process to investigate for the purposes of theological invention is songwriting. Most songs begin with a fairly traditional songwriting process, in which the songwriter sits with guitar, keyboard, or some other instrument, with pen or word processor close at hand, and crafts music out of sound and lyrics. Popular songwriters are today’s poets for the common folk, writers who mirror for us our foibles and graces and help us to see ourselves more clearly. In reaction to the disenchantment with religion as a result of the Enlightenment, the Romantic literary movement 14 — Mashup Religion elevated the artist to a stature not unlike that of prophet or holy fool. The Romantic poet was imagined as someone who suffered in selfimposed isolation and estrangement in order to give birth to images that would plumb the depths of reality on behalf of others. Within the bohemian tradition, a development paralleling the Romantic movement, the artist often embraced poverty and sometimes immorality and eccentricity of behavior and fashion.1 The mantle of the artist as prophetic mediator of truth in a postEnlightenment world has been placed by many enthusiasts of popular culture onto the shoulders of the popular songwriter. This idea is easily stereotyped and commodified, as theologian of music Jeremy Begbie observes in his complaint about the typical CD cover picturing a singer-songwriter “a step apart from the ordinary, staring away from the camera in a misty wash.”2 On the whole, however, interviews with songwriters show them to be very aware of the power of this Romantic archetype and the need not to abuse the privileges it affords them within the larger culture. I speak here, of course, of successful, working songwriters, those who cannot exist in the misty wash of the isolated bohemian, but have actually experienced their music connecting deeply with a broader community of listeners and sense some responsibility toward that audience. Unlike the high artists of the Romantic period, reverenced in the works of Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Emerson, who may indeed spend an entire lifetime writing only for themselves and for other artists and critics, the popular songwriter is never dissociated from a public.3 This public can only come into being and survive if the writer’s lyrics and music are understandable and connected to the realities of everyday life. To use the language of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the popular songwriter does not have the “interest in disinterestedness ” that characterizes the bohemian or Romantic artist.4 It is true that belief in the authenticity of the popular songwriter is to some extent predicated on the artist communicating disinterest in success. This disinterest is usually expressed through the use of poetic elements (ambiguity, symbolism, irony, mythmaking, etc.) and prophetic distance or critique, which give voice to what music critic and theologian Bill Friskics-Warren calls an “urge for transcendence.”5 The urge for transcendence expressed by the popular songwriter, The Songwriter — 15 however, must connect with the same urge as it is expressed within the experiences of ordinary folk. The popular song must provide poetic and prophetic images that are nonesoteric, accessible, and, in fact, obvious. Instead of presenting disinterested, isolated, and aloof individuals focused entirely on prophetic distance, interviews with songwriters yield a portrait of profoundly communal, connected, collaborative, and tradition-bearing writers who are beholden to those who have gone before and aware of those around them who are good at writing similar material. In the end, songwriters seem to be striving to develop what John Henry Newman once called the “illative sense,” or good judgment within a tradition of ideas, experiences, and practices.6 Songwriters Write In and Out of Traditions There is perhaps no more striking refutation of the stereotype of popular songwriters as individualistic, Romantic visionaries than the deep witness to tradition-building and collaboration that pervades all published interviews with songwriters. Writing within a tradition is deeply hermeneutic in...