II

The Orthodoxy of Music

Of all the components of culture, music is perhaps most vital.  When it is threatened with change, it is often fiercely defended, and this orthodoxy of music makes it ideal for conveying spiritual values.  Music has maintained a sacred quality all its own through the centuries.  Of course, for music to convey anything concrete, it must be accompanied by lyric poetry, so poetry often shares this quality by association.  Despite the fact that cultures have developed and spirituality has taken many forms, music always maintains its place in both culture and worship, making it the ideal way to bridge gaps.

Broadly speaking, there are two main forms of lyrical music: music meant to convey an understanding or worship, and popular music.  These two are tied to the spiritual and the cultural respectively and, as such, popular music is subject to rapidly changing styles, and can quickly lose its significance.  Lines between the two forms should not be drawn too strictly, though.  The bards that passed down epics like the Iliad recited them as popular tales, even though they also have a spiritual importance.  Any song can have a similar dual nature, especially to the individual who sees meaning or understanding that the songwriter did not intend.  This can function in the opposite direction as well – for instance, Bach wrote most of his pieces as part of religious worship, but people today predominantly listen to his work for enjoyment, not for any message the lyrics might convey.  Still, most songs fit in one category or the other, and the division between the two can be considered conceptual or convenient rather than absolute.  The concept is important primarily because popular music has become incredibly dominant over, and much more numerous than, deliberately meaningful music.  It is impossible to say whether the overwhelming presence of popular music has encouraged people to find their meaning in it, or whether people first starting finding new understanding in popular music, and subsequently increased its prevalence.  Quite likely, it is a feedback loop, and it is one that has affected the way we live and comprehend the world around us.

The best recorded development of music is that of twentieth century music in the United States.  Not only is this due to the information kept about musicians, or the ability to record music at all, but also the speed of development and the spread of music around the world.  By the end of the century, people were able share music from opposite sides of the world with minimal effort.  There have been many significant shifts in American music in this century, each of which inspired some controversy.  In each case we can see some attempts to censor the music, essentially to defend musical traditions and norms.

While much can be said of the last gasps of classical innovation and the ire it drew from fans of symphonic music, the first musical revolution in America came with jazz in the twenties.  The debate around jazz was more muted than later struggles over music would be, but it set the standard for what issues the debate would revolve around.  Jazz challenged the Victorian morality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was supported by religious rhetoric and undertones.  One reason for the formation of the Victorian era was the emergence of the middle and upper-middle class, the new rich, who sought to prove they were every bit as cultured as established families with old money.  They needed to prove that they were not simply upstarts from the lower class.  This differentiation was increasingly necessary because all the classes were mixed and aware of each other in the cities, and by 1920 the urban population of the United States had exceeded the rural. 

Another reason for Victorianism was an increasing consciousness around the idea of civilization and how a civilized person should act, all of which came thanks to the imperialism of the late nineteenth century.   Especially for the English, the establishment and renewed involvement in colonies around the world meant contact with subjugated people.  This led to a need to justify the widespread conquests and colonization, which the idea of a civilizing mission provided.  Imperial powers convinced themselves that they were benevolently bringing something valuable to the supposedly uncivilized people, and had to establish norms to prove how superior they were. 

All of the hypocrisy and questionable purposes behind Victorianism led to a backlash from the next generation, and that backlash took the form of the Jazz Age.  It was not a deliberate response to the restrictions of the previous era, instead occurring spontaneously, starting in the colleges.  As many future musical innovations would be, jazz was created by America’s Black population.  Never accepted by white culture, and in fact portrayed to represent the opposite of all the behaviors the Victorian morality valued, African-Americans naturally eschewed norms and created their own culture.  When white college goers sought to create their own unique identity, they found this alternative ready and waiting.  For the next half century, black artists would often find themselves welcome in college fraternities while being barred from other white establishments.  Especially in the cities, and in no place more obviously than New York’s Harlem, cultures had the opportunity to mix.

The resultant Jazz Age was accompanied by a turn away from other conventions of the previous generation, especially clothing.  This created the first consumer culture, which will be discussed in greater detail later.    The twenties set the stage for everything to come.  Since the old definitions were being rejected, eastern philosophy and spirituality could be introduced to the west without having to contend with the notions of civilization.  New forms of music could be developed, and the gaps between whites and blacks could be bridged through the music.  But the twenties did not actually change anything – it only set the stage.  While Paramhansa Yogananda and perhaps a few other sages from the east came to the United States before the Second World War, it was not nearly on the scale that the postwar era would witness.  White attitudes toward blacks changed little, if at all, and segregation would still remain strong until the Sixties.  The basic reason for this was that the Jazz Age was simply generational rebellion – which the Sixties were not.  The twenties were also the first time anything like this had ever occurred, at least in known history, so people had no idea what to do about it.  More importantly for race relations, though, jazz did not reach the Deep South, where segregation reigned.

The music defined the decade, though.  It is called the Jazz Age for a reason – the music was central to the spark that was lit.  It created a culture around it, just as other music forms would, in a way that no other art can.  And if it had little real effect on the society, that may have been due to the Great Depression, which closed the decade and would continue through the thirties up till the Second World War.  Nevertheless, there was no return to Victorian standards, as the old morality’s fate was sealed by the Depression.

  Jazz only represents a preface to the main musical controversy to strike the United States, not to mention the world, when blues was introduced to the country’s white population in the form of rock and roll.  Rock and roll began simply because people started to defy color lines using radios – tuning into stations broadcasting the blues and gospel.  This spontaneity would continue to characterize the development of the music, as it took numerous twists.  That was its strength – it blossomed into so many different forms and different sounds that it quickly sparked interest around the world.  In the south, interest in radio broadcasts of black music quickly resulted in Sun Records producing the first Elvis Presley records.  Elvis had no intention to challenge anything – he had simply been exposed to a variety of music, and it was reflected in what he sang.  The music itself was not developed as a deliberately rebellious act, but the response to it made it into one.

Rock and roll became the music of youth rebellion and social change when harsh attacks were made against it.  The initial attacks came from all over, but especially in the south where the music blurred the color lines at a time when segregation was being challenged in the Supreme Court.  The rhetoric against rock and roll was bitter, and incorporated two main arguments – the “devil’s music” argument, and the segregationist argument.  For the purpose of examining the interaction of spirituality and culture, the former is the one that interests us.

It is a consistent trend throughout history that anything that seems to be in opposition to a culture can be declared “evil” by that culture.  Other words are sometimes used – unclean, for instance – but the sense of it is the same.  Spirituality is being brought in to defend the culture, and things that were not prohibited by a belief system become prohibited because the fading culture demands it.  In the modern era, though, the novelty both appears quickly and is reinforced, as the old is quickly abandoned, so the opposition to rock music was doomed from the start.  One new dimension in the 1950s, a new word used in place of “evil”, was “communist.”  Almost everytime something was accused of being communist – especially if it was film, art, music, or writing – the reason was not that it was actually propounding communist doctrine, but rather because it was new to the culture.  Communism was not only considered evil because Marx explicitly rejected God and religion, but because it was the other side of the new duality that dominated the world.  The logic of the time was simply that, if our side is good, and they are opposite us, then they’re evil.  Dualities oversimplify situations to make them easier to understand, and are resorted to often because of their convenience.  When rock and roll was introduced, it came right against this dualistic cutting edge and, for some, fell on the wrong side.

The orthodox resistance faced by rock and roll made the music rebellious.  Teens had to rebel in order to listen to the music – and as the rhetoric became more heated, the rebelliousness gained momentum.  There are a hundred reasons for rock’s success – television, growing affluence, the suitability of the music for dancing, the ease with which a band could be formed, and specific regional factors.  But no reason is more important than the attitude that the new is good, and the old is passing away.  Jazz also benefited from this idea of progress decades earlier.  This modern attitude will be discussed in the chapter on the attraction of the new, but without it the arguments of the traditionalists would have been successful.  After all, they represented the dominant culture, the culture appreciated by the generation in power, and could bring to bear overwhelming pressure.  The problem was the fact that their dominant culture included the idea that the new was inherently good and represented another step in the inevitable march of progress.  That gave the music enough room to maneuver, though not without censorship, investigations, and open hostility.

At the same time as the emergence of rock, another musical form was being developed out of the blues and gospel – rhythm and blues.  R&B was created when Ray Charles mixed gospel with the blues in the song “I Got a Woman.”  This was keenly criticized within the African-American community, where the division between religious and popular music had been strong thanks to the long-standing gospel tradition.  Gospel had come out of the days of slavery and, with segregation still heavily enforced, continued to be relied on to give strength and hope to the community and to individuals.  Gospel singers who decided to turn pop, like Sam Cooke, generated mixed feelings.  But because of gospel’s importance to the community, it was not really threatened by R&B or any other music.  This made the secularization Charles and Cooke represented more acceptable.  Nevertheless, they were both forced to answer a great deal of criticism and accusations that they had sold out the culture.

In America, the Sixties more than any other time showed music’s central position in the conveying of values, the nature of spirituality, and the creation of culture.  The hippie counterculture established for itself a unique set of values, and a distinctly open spirituality.  It conveyed itself most clearly through music, and between 1967 and 1969, music with a purpose and conveying ideas was regularly played on radio channels than would normally have only played pop songs.  Ideas had temporarily become more popular than the mundane pop topics, as the nation faced its most tumultuous time.  The countertrend was also produced, though, as corporations saw the opportunity for profits in the new music, and began manipulating the new culture.

After the 1970s, America saw the invention of only one new meaningful musical genre, and it was quickly diluted into the pop music world.  Rap started with heavy emphasis on poetics in a distant imitation of Dylan.  Its goal was to speak to the concerns of urban blacks, who found themselves without a voice after the decline of funk.  Rap was allowed to develop in a vacuum – with minimal manipulation from corporations – because many companies simply would not agree to deal with the new music.  In fact, until Michael Jackson’s landmark videos forced its hand, MTV (Music Television) refused to show black stars, in what was by that time a very arcane attitude to race relations.  However, this vacuum would not last long.  Starting in the early 90s, the potential market for Rap drew attention.  With its increase in popularity, it also drew hostile attention, and the defenders of music once again rose up to maintain what orthodoxy the art could still claim. 

Being of the rock generation, the nation’s leaders in the 1980s and 1990s could not accuse rap and other problematic music of being the devil’s music.  Not only would it be hypocritical, but it was also proved to be completely ineffective.  But the impulse to somehow defend against innovations was strong, even as people were not entirely sure why.  Showing that hypocrisy was not a problem, the defenders of orthodoxy used decency standards, which had also been used against rock music in the Sixties, to combat the new music.  Accusations of indecency had been used to cause trouble for such icons as Bob Dylan and comedian Lenny Bruce, and now similar standards were being revived to attack not only Rap, but also any other innovation that could be considered threatening.  In its mildest form, this resulted in the “Parental Advisory” labels on music and comedy records.  The importance of bringing parents in on the mass censorship is constantly discussed, and parents have been convinced that it is their duty as parents to prevent this material from reaching their children, even though there is no basis in fact that it has any effect.  And again, this is the same generation that most opposed such censorship in its own youth.  The net result has actually been to make the defense of orthodoxy more intricate, dynamic, and powerful.  If the twentieth century was a success for the attraction of the new, and the blind march of progress, the end of that century start of the twenty-first has shown every sign that traditionalists have finally adapted, and have developed tactics to make their opposition heard.

The multiple forces facing Rap were ultimately successful in reducing or even eliminating its social relevance and confining it to the realm of popular music.  This was not a difficult accomplishment, since the sacred nature of music had become increasingly muddled by record contracts and the massive amount of money involved in the art.  Rap was never sacred in any sense, but it was certainly meaningful in those ways pop music could never be.  But pop music sells in all but the most divisive times, so those interested in making money have an interest only in relatively meaningless songs.

Music has power with or without meaning, but a void of deep meaning, beyond what the listener reads into the song, makes the music less threatening to cultural norms.  Pop music can spread around the world like lightning, and serves a constructive purpose by acting as a bridge between cultures – so that two people from different sides of the globe who meet for the first time can take some comfort when they find they both like The Beatles.  Perhaps the more spiritual the music, the more it can bridge time rather than space, but that would be difficult to prove.  It is still an interesting possibility to think about.

If a person hopes for some broad social change, it would not be a waste of time to first look into the state of music within the society to gauge the temperament of the times.  Similarly, if personal change is desired, there are few things that could be a better aid than appropriate music.  Whether the need is a bit of cheering up, a call to action, or another step on the path to spiritual enlightenment, the soundtrack of a person’s life has enough of an impact to require consideration, just as that of the nation has regularly forced historical changes to revolve around it.