When I was a child, I
had a much easier time relating to people of my parents' generation
than my own. Other kids were cruel and demanding, and half the time I
had no idea what they were talking about.
Did you ever read that
book About
A Boy? With the nerdy
twelve-year-old who listened to his mother's records and was isolated
from his peers and their pop culture? When I read that book, also at
age twelve, I identified with the protagonist to a painful
degree. This was a text that
understood how important pop-culture touchstones are: how, if your
touchstones are completely different from those of the people around
you, you might have a very hard time making friends.
The
book ends with the nerdy kid declaring his hatred for his erstwhile
favorite musicians and going off with his friends to, like, listen to
Nirvana or something (it was written in the mid-nineties). I myself
have never reached the point of disavowing the dad rock I grew up on
– I adore the Who and Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel and Rush, and I
have no intention of ever apologizing for that ever – but I have
discovered the value of generational touchstones.
I
embarked on this process maybe seven or eight years ago, when I
relinquished the shackles of parental indoctrination and started to
take television seriously. Since then, I've been an unabashed
pop-culture junkie, and (coincidentally or not) I've also found it a
lot easier to make friends my own age.
Just
because you're compensating for who you used to be, however, doesn't
mean you lose continuity with that person; and sometimes you
experience moments so thoroughly of your past
that you have to pause and take stock of how you got from there to
here.
I
had one of those moments the other day, during a classmate's
presentation on the religious element in Jethro Tull's Aqualung.
This
classmate, being of my parents' age, spoke of the personal resonance
of a record that came out at the very moment when she, as a young
teenager, was beginning to seriously question the faith of her
religious upbringing. At a time in her life when she was querying the
assumptions she'd always taken for granted, and finding the
institutional church frustrating and inadequate for her needs,
Aqualung was a locus
of meaning and a source of spiritual significance.
This
makes perfect sense to me. I too began to question my religious
upbringing at age eleven or twelve, and I too found enormous meaning,
far beyond anything I could have hoped to articulate, in the music I
loved at that age – specifically, in English prog-rock concept
albums of the 60s and 70s:
I
don't know if I consciously made the connection at the time, but all
of these records tackle explicitly religious or existential themes.
They're fundamentally about the Big Questions, and, for a young
teenager obsessed with Big Questions of identity and purpose and the
nature of life, they provided a site of engagement with these
questions in a way that the formal religion in my life at the time
did not.
After
I had spoken up in class to this effect, three other people of my own
generation spoke in turn, and they all said that their experience had
been the exact opposite. Church had been, for them, a haven of
meaning and spiritual nourishment in the face of the relentlessly
superficial pop music of their childhoods.
I
realize that this sample is skewed. I'm studying at a seminary, so
naturally there will be a higher than average proliferation of people
who do ultimately have use for the institutional church. But it's
still interesting to me that the prog-rock concept albums of my dad's
record collection could provide a space for doing theology in a way
that the bubblegum radio pop of the nineties and early aughts
apparently could not.
Awesome article on prog music you have 5 out of 5 sir! congratulation!
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