"music is fundamentally connected to habits of mind, to social organisation, and to modes of subjectivity" (Partridge 2012, 185)
I've been listening to a lot of extraordinarily bad pop music for the past week. I'd like to say it was practice-led research inspired by this weeks reading on popular music and religion. But it wasn't. I just have really terrible taste in music and recently got one of those fancy phones that doubles as an Ipod. Nevertheless, my recent listening habits have inadvertently been acting as empirical evidence of the "narcotic effects" of popular music vis-a-vis Adorno.
Take, for example this:
I recently broke off a romantic relationship. My cathartic exercise in this time (as for many in the throes of heartache) has been been listening to an emotive break-up song on repeat. I will be walking past his office, I'll turn on the song, and I will feel sad and that will feel good. I'll turn on the song, scroll through old text messages, and I will feel sad and it will feel good. I'll think about calling him, turn on the song, I'll feel good and sad. In performing this ritual, I am as Frith explains "absorb[ing] the song into [my] own life." (in Partridge 185) I am using it to affect a space of catharsis.
But the problem of placing myself in an emotional alliance with an object of popular culture is forgoing ultimate control over the affective space. Music, as Adorno notes, "trains the unconscious for conditioned reflexes" (In Partridge, 184) The nostalgia and unresolved grief I have trained myself to associate with a certain song can be enjoyed as catharsis where I have control over it. Where I lose control over the time and place the song is played it loses cathartic power. For example, I'll be out shopping or at a friend's place; and I'll be thinking thoughts like 'shall i get eucalypt-scented tissues, or regular ones?' and the song will come on and I will think of him and I will feel sad. It will happen, it is a reflex. But it will not be a cathartic experience. There will not be good-sad feelings, just sad feeling. Inside the ritual practice, the song has a purpose: I desire to feel a certain way, and the song helps to produce and satisfy that feeling. Outside of the ritual practice, the song still provokes that same sad-nostalgia-grief, but it is unanticipated, undesired and therefore not productive in the cathartic sense. The feelings lack resolution.
In the essay 'Upon this Rock', John Jeremiah Sullivan writes of the time he attended Creation, the largest evangelical music festival in the U.S. Having passed through a high school 'Jesus phase', Sullivan attends the festival not entirely as an outsider looking in; he is still familiar with all the trappings of the culture: the language, the rituals, the music, but no longer immersed in their way of being. He describes an experience from a night at the festival:
"I was a ways from the stage, but I could see well enough. Something started to happen to me. The guys in the band were middle-aged. They had blousy shirts and halfhearted arena-rock moves fro the mid-eighties. What was…this feeling? The singer was grinning between lines, like if he stopped, he might collapse…The straw slipped from my mouth "Oh, shit, it's Petra." (2011, 26)
Whether it's a literary device or the conditioned reflex of the unconscious, or a little of both, Sullivan jettisons from this moment to an explanation of his "bout with Evangelicalism," (2011, 32) which ended about 13 years earlier at a Petra concert. Describing his 'falling away', Sullivan summarises unresolved feelings surrounding his loss of faith saying, "and one has doubts about one's doubts." (2011, 33) The ritual of the concert in this context provokes an unsettling feeling of doubt: and causes its subject to re-experience unresolved emotions relating to his religious experiences. It's a little like hearing your break-up song in the supermarket. The song (or the band) become, as Partridge suggests, sites of regression. (2012, 184) In that moment, you seem to lose your agency. It is a reminder that as much as one can ritualise popular culture for one's own uses, it has its own ways of using/constructing us.
References
Partridge, C. 2012. Popular Music, Affective Space and Meaning. In G. Lynch, J Mitchell and A. Srhan. Eds. Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader. 182 - 193. London and New York: Routledge
Sullivan, J.J. 2011. Upon This Rock. In Pulphead. 3-42. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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