Correcting Categories, Part 7 – The Nature of Pop

By On April 28, 2009 · 1 Comment

My goal in this series is to help believers apply the Bible to their musical choices in life and worship. My contention is, however, that believers today approach the issue of musical choices with certain errant foundational presuppositions that need to be corrected before they can rightly apply the Bible in this area. So my task in this paper is to address a few categories of thought that inform our approach when applying the Bible to music and suggest a few ways that we may need to correct our thinking.

The nature of Pop

People are drawn to Dionysian art because it creates enjoyable physical feelings that are immediate. No work or effort is required to enjoy the feeling. No mental or spiritual engagement is necessary. It is immediate because it is shallow; it has no depth. However, because of the inherent shallowness of the medium, greater doses are needed to create the same effects as a person becomes more desensitized. Therefore, Dionysian art is intrinsically addictive.

With the creation of mass media as a result of the Industrial Revolution, savvy businessmen soon saw the potential of taking advantage of the power of Dionysian music in order to make money. Certain music, for instance, because it created immediate results and was intrinsically addictive, provided the perfect medium for making a considerable amount of money. They found that it was not difficult to hook the masses on Dionysian forms of music. Then, when the masses inevitably desensitized themselves to the immediate affects of such music, the entrepreneurs were always ready with more novelty and more stimulating forms. Such was the birth of pop music.

Kenneth Myers, in his very influential book, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, provides a very helpful description of the nature of pop music, including a table that compares pop culture to traditional folk or high culture. In essence, this chart compares Dionysian and Appollonian forms of art:

Table 1:
Myers’ Comparison of Popular Culture with Traditional/High Culture1

Popular Culture Traditional and High Culture
Focuses on the new Focuses on the timeless
Discourages reflection Encoruages reflection
Prusued casually to “kill time” Pursued with deliberation
Gives us what we want, tells us
what we already know		 Offers us what we could not have
imagined
Relies on instant accessibility;
encourages impatience		 Requires training; encourages
patience
Emphasizes information and trivia Emphasizes knowledge and wisdom
Encourages quantitative concerns Encourages qualitative concerns
Celebrates fame Celebrates ability
Appeals to sentimentality Appeals to appropriate,
proportioned emotions
Context and form governed by
requirements of the market		 Content and form governed by
requirements of created order
Formulas are the substancw Formulas are the tools
Relies on spectacle, tending to
violence and prurience		 Relies on formal dynamics and
the power of symbols (including language)
Aesthetic power in reminding of
something else		 Aesthetic power in instrisic
attributes
Individualistic Communal
Leaves us where it found us Transforms sensibilities
Incapable of deep or sustained
attention		 Capable of repeated, careful
attention
Lacks ambiguity Allusive, suggests the
transcendent
No discontinuity between life
and art		 Relies on “secondary World”
conventions
Reflects the desires of the slef Encourages understanding of
others
Tends toward relativism Tends toward submission to
standards
Used Received

Conservatives have done themselves a disservice by defining pop music as sex. Certainly some pop music does express sexual passion, but pop music is a broader category encompassing all Dionysian music. Conservatives often describe pop music by certain musical elements such as back beat, vocal sliding, and breathy singing technique. Certainly music characterized by such elements is most likely Dionysian, but there is a whole lot more music that is Dionysian that does not have those elements. This reductionistic description of pop music by many conservatives, I believe, has led to a rejection of some forms of newer pop music that possess such elements while at the same time grasping onto other forms of pop music that don’t express sexual passion, but nevertheless are emotionally manipulative in other ways.



Endnotes:

  1. Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1989), 120. [↩]

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One Response to Correcting Categories, Part 7 – The Nature of Pop

  1. Kent Brandenburg says:
    April 28, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    Scott,

    You understand why men reduce the Dionysian to those elements. They want to provide objective reasons why the music itself is wrong. I recognize that those will get disregarded by someone who doesn’t believe in any inherent evil in music. I agree that there should be more to the description too, but if someone rejects those easily grasped basics—sliding, breathiness, emphatic back beat, etc—where do we go from there. It seems that we really are back to square one, and that is attempting to prove that music itself can even be wrong.

    I think it is obvious when something is emotionally manipulative. I can’t imagine that it isn’t difficult to others, but you may have something when you say that they are way past the affects that some of it has. I hear it in the fundamentalist-acceptable music, especially those songs that become really popular to and resonate with young people, who look for something that influences their feelings first, despite it being less overt perhaps.

    I’ve read several of the Christian Worldview Series, including Kenneth Myers’ book. Quoting him brings in the expert that might seem credible to those who disagree, give them pause. We can both agree with him on what you have quoted, but again, many if not most will say that there is no objective criteria for making those distinctions. So in other words, it’s just Myers’ word (and yours) against theirs. And now you have this “worship movement” among Charismatics and evangelicals, as represented in Bob Kauflin, from which they earn their credentials for concern over shallow worship. And yet the music itself is ungodly.

    I appreciate what you are trying to do.

    Kent Brandenburg’s last blog post: The Erroneous Epistemology of Multiple Version Onlyism part five

    Reply

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