I have just finished teaching a two-week intensive class on theology and popular music. These classes are demanding, but they also yield fruitful conversations, as the immersion deep into a topic has a different dynamic than a class that stretches out over a regular term. In this class, I was attempting to synthesize meanings in popular music with the intersections, departures, and challenges of theological responses to the world around us. We covered the developmental history of pop music; some of its key genres, artists, and producers; the commerce of the music industry; and the role of technology and culture. It was too much stuff for two weeks, but we did our best to touch on at least some of this meaningfully.
On the final day, I sketched out a beginning posture to initiate a conversation between theology and popular music. Posture is the operative word because, for me, any act of theology first springs from a posture or attitude. This is, first and foremost, listening. If you don’t listen, you can’t hear. And if you can’t hear, you can’t fully understand. All too often, people approach theology with a preformed schema that they impose on any subject. Then what fits into the schema is accepted and the bits around the edges are cut off, dismissed, or negated. My approach—and what I hoped to pass on to my students—is that the bits that don’t fit into our schemas might be the most helpful to us.
One of our key discussions in the class was the role mistakes and failures play in the development of popular music. Take Bill Haley and His Comets’s song “Rock around the Clock.” The song, which arguably launched rock ’n’ roll into the mainstream, was recorded in forty minutes. It was so rushed that sounds levels weren’t properly set, giving it a live sound that made it feel more rebellious and anarchic than it might have been in a more managed setting. The band recorded only two takes, which were spliced together to create the song. The whipcrack snare drum at the start of the song was a mistake they didn’t edit out, and it became the signature sound of rock ’n’ roll.
Or take the Police’s song “Roxanne.” Its opening features an atonal piano clang and a menacing cackle—that was the sound of singer Sting falling onto a piano. Sometimes unplanned moments bring the most creative and transformative elements to art—and to life.
Popular music is innately tied to technology. Record players, cassette machines, electric guitars, amplifiers, synthesizers—there is no pop music without technology, and it is often characterized by the limits of those technologies. Guitar distortion is the sound of something too loud for the medium that is supposed to carry it, but where would rock be without it?
The voice in popular music comes from the throat. Whether it is the falsetto scream of a heavy-metal vocalist, the wail of a blues singer, or the aching cry of a soul singer, it’s the sound of voices releasing emotional cries too strong for the throats that release them. The producer Brian Eno describes this—and other sounds in pop music connected to recording mediums—as the sound of failure, of things going out of control, of mediums being pushed to their limits and breaking apart. These failures give popular music its sense of the transcendent, of things happening beyond perceived limits, and they might just be why popular music makes us feel so many things. Pop music is a vehicle for expressing the inexpressible, for what is beyond the limits in life.
Of course, even when guitar distortion led to the rise of bigger amplifiers, the desire for the sound of distortion didn’t diminish. Instead, it became a defining element of electric guitar playing. With bigger amplification and recording technologies, distortion and other mistakes could be built into the system and thus contained. The sound of things going out of control is the sound of failure. Some try to address the distortion by reducing it, but others hear it as the sound of breakthrough, of new potential, of new iteration. Pop music is about failing in new ways, expanding, evolving, and breaking apart containers that are no longer able to its contain sounds.