A theologian friend posed some great questions in an e-mail the other day, one that a couple of readers raised in a comments thread. It has to do with God and rock music. From his e-mail:

What is your theology of engagement with rock and rock culture? …

I think you’d a great person to write about this for two complementary reasons.

1) You take seriously the potentially corrosive effects of popular culture on our imaginations. You understand the significance of certain classical asceticism for deepening in prayer. You take things like fasting, cultivating silence, and traditional sexual ethics seriously. You entertain degrees of simply saying “no, thank you” to popular culture when you consider the Benedict Option. If a boy at West Feliciana High School writes love poetry to Nora someday like Mick Jagger speaks to women in his songs, you’d be appalled. I bet you read the Allan Bloom chapter on rock in “Closing of the American Mind” – he was a stick in the mud but he also wasn’t stupid – that you drive Matthew to Baton Rouge to read Homer suggests you take formation in the classics seriously.

2) And you have a robust theology of creation and enjoy all that is good. You like a good time, a good story and a good riff. It’s not a far cry from the sacramentality of a good VFT to a good Lou Reed or Stones song. You are a man of your/my/our generation, and we have many of the same songs on our internal sound track – it is what we are. We saw “Piranha in 3-d” together and had a laugh.

In light of the above, how do we narrate a theology of rock? On what terms – with what sort of prayerful engagement to guys like us engage with this music? When you expose Matthew to both the Divine Liturgy and the Clash, how would you describe what you’re up to?

I have been thinking about this since my friend wrote, but I confess I still haven’t come up with a stance that I find satisfying, morally or intellectually. But maybe if I set down some of the thoughts that went through my head as I pondered these excellent questions, we can have a good discussion about them. If you are not a religious person, these questions still apply to you. For example, no serious feminist can listen to most hip-hop, much less the Rolling Stones, without confronting cognitive dissonance. The basic question my theologian friend asks — and again, this is not strictly a theological question — is how we should properly react when the Devil (so to speak) has the best tunes? Here are my notes toward an answer:

1. In a sense — a limited sense — art is its own justification. Art that is morally (or politically, or theologically, etc.) correct fails if it lacks aesthetic quality. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Artistic giftedness — that is, the ability to create music, writing, or visual art that has that “swing” often has nothing to do with the moral qualities of the artist. Caravaggio was a moral wreck. When it comes to rock, if it sounds good, it is good, aesthetically speaking.

2. But morality cannot be excluded from the issue entirely. The example to which I always return is Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph Of The Will,” her documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. It is a work of astonishing aesthetic power, deployed in the service of absolute evil. A rabbi screened it once when I was in college, because he thought — correctly — that it’s important for us to understand how the Nazis won over the German people. It was, in large part, through a mastery of aesthetics. Just as aesthetic excellence cannot be excluded from an evaluation of art, neither can morality. If you believe beauty is its own justification, how can you condemn Riefenstahl’s beautiful work in the service of evil? On the other hand, to call an artwork ugly because of its repugnant moral content requires us to deny the testimony of our eyes and ears, and just won’t work.

3. The question, therefore, is: how to weigh these things in the balance?

4. We have to consider what the purpose of art is. Is art meant to express thoughts, emotions, and modes of being? Or is art supposed to reflect ideals, and to harmonize with them? The answer, I think, is that both are legitimate functions of art. We seek both things in our art: representation and idealization — or, to put it in another way, the Real (the way thing are) and the True (the way things should be).

5. So, when I listen to the Rolling Stones sing in “Sister Morphine” about the desperate haze of drug addiction, I don’t take it as a recommendation to inject morphine, or to introduce myself to “sweet cousin cocaine,” but rather as a darkly potent representation of the power of drug addiction to consume a life — something that Keith Richards knew about. Similarly with the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” Neither are moralizing songs; they just describe the experience, and draw a kind of beauty from the bleakness. I can’t imagine listening to either song and wanting to partake of the experiences they represent.

6. To stick with the Stones, the narrator in “Under My Thumb” is a sexist pig who celebrates his piggishness towards women — specifically, in his domination of a pushy woman. This is part of the Stones’ bad-boy shtick. It’s a great rock song, but really, should we be taking pleasure in a narrator singing about his woman as a “squirming dog”? It ought to make us squeamish. Yet as Camille Paglia once said:

So by the time the women’s movement broke forth in 1969, it was practically impossible for me to be reconciled with my “sisters.” And there were, like, screaming fights. The big one was about the Rolling Stones. This was where I realized–this was 1969–boy, I was bounced, fast, right out of the movement. And I had this huge argument. Because I said you cannot apply a political agenda to art. When it comes to art, we have to make other distinctions. We had this huge fight about the song “Under My Thumb.” I said it was a great song, not only a great song but I said it was a work of art. And these feminists of the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band went into a rage, surrounded me, practically spat in my face, literally my back was to the wall. They’re screaming in my face, “Art? Art? Nothing that demeans women can be art!” There it is. There it is! Right from the start. The fascism of the contemporary women’s movement.

OK, “fascism” is typical Paglian overstatement, but she’s right: this is subjecting art to a strict moral agenda that is inappropriate to the nature of art itself. Why is “Under My Thumb,” as offensive as the lyrics are to many, a great song, and maybe even a work of art? Because, in my view, it expresses with feral seductiveness the mindset of a misogynist. The lyrics themselves are repugnant, but set to that particular music, the ideas take on life. You are able to feel what the narrator expresses. The “truth” of his experience has become incarnated in words, rhythm, and melody, and has been communicated with unusual power because of the rhythm and melody. You may find the moral sentiment hateful, and I wouldn’t disagree with you, but you would be lying to yourself to deny the aesthetic power of that song.

7. The danger here is that you might also come to sympathize with the sentiment, seduced by aesthetics, and thereby be corrupted. There is no way around this risk, not with real art. It is also possible that genuine art that embodies and communicates the Good could “corrupt” a soul, and lead them toward goodness and light. That’s what the art of the Chartres cathedral did for me. So, when I consider what my “theology” of engaging with rock music might be, or ought to be, I consider that to encounter true art always involves the possibility of conversion, one way or another.

8. I find much hip-hop music to be aesthetically ugly and morally revolting. But if it were aesthetically pleasing to me, would I find the brutality, the greed, the misogyny and the macho posturing easier to take? Probably so. What is the difference between my finding some way to abstract, or to ironically distance myself from, the offensive lyrical content in rock songs I like, but in those songs whose rhythm and melody I do not like, I take the lyrics concretely? Is this not hypocrisy? Maybe. And yet, I cannot imagine a musical setting that would make the crude animality of, say, Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin'” — which is by not remotely the worst of the genre. This stuff is pornographic.

But more pornographic than the Stones line, “You, you, you make a dead man come”?

9. W.H. Auden’s poem “Atlantis” is helpful in providing a framework for thinking through this problem. It’s a poem about the quest for paradise:

Atlantis