In the past year, I have repeatedly reached the same paradoxical conclusion: 1) I need to blog as a creative outlet from all of the academic dribble that takes up all of my time, but 2) I don't have the motivation. Writing daily is a rhythm that requires time and commitment. Anyway, I'm going to give it a shot over the summer. There are things that are worth thinking about, mostly (but not exclusively) related to rock 'n' roll.

U2, War
When I was a high school freshman, I listened to some very shitty music. My favorite artist: Bryan Adams. I also didn't have many friends, and I think these two phenomena are related. I bought U2's War because I loved "New Years Day" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday." I think War was the first record that ever gave me the sense that rock music could say important things, and that iconic lyrics could capture more than just a passing emotion. Stuff like:

"And it's true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality..."

"A generation without name, ripped and torn..."

I mean, these guys gave a shit--they made Bryan sound like the glossy commercial buffoon he is.

Rush, Counterparts
A gateway drug to so many musical worlds. Buying Rush's second-rate 1990s album opened up their less second-rate 70s material to me, which in turn opened up the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Cream, Zep, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Deep Purple, Queensryche, Iron Maiden, etc etc etc. It also led to a lot of social ostracization when I was in high school, which is why...

Toad the Wet Sprocket, Dulcinea
...is such an important record to me. I met my oldest friend, and the best man at my wedding, through it. This record was all about personal connections for me. I remember arguing with a friend about whether it was too commercial to be relevant. I remember playing it pretty much every time I had friends over to my house.

Pearl Jam, Ten
One of those records I keep coming back to. In high school, I felt the same way that most kids in my generation did about it: it communicated my feelings of adolescent alienation from my family and my skepticism about society as a whole. But I rediscovered it my senior year of college, after I'd discovered Fight Club and existentialism. I remember listening to "Alive" and thinking about Tyler Durden's line about how a fatherless generation has no idea how to conceptualize God and realizing that Eddie Vedder's howl "I'm still alive...." represented an entire worldview in microcosm.

Dime Store Prophets, Love is Against the Grain
The first Christian record I ever fell in love with. I still think it's pretty damn good. And it probably helped me develop better taste in music later on. I was listening to a lot of metal and prog at the time, and it helped me see the deep merit in short, catchy tunes.

Stavesacre, Absolutes
Probably the record that makes me like myself the least. It reflects a time when I was a bona fide fundamentalist. I listen to it now and it sounds utterly absurd: Mark Saloman daring a concert promoter to martyr him, or proposing that we solve the problem of injustice by turning all the telephone poles in America into gallows, or vilifying female sexuality. It's Christianity through the lens of male pathology.

Rich Mullins, A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band
The best CCM record ever made. I loved it back in the day, and it has helped me, in the intervening years, to make peace with Christianity. Rich Mullins' faith is transparent yet sophisticated, both when he talks about the Church and when he talks about America. His ability to find Christ in the world without romanticizing the world gives me a lot of hope.

The Juliana Theory, Emotion is Dead
My senior year of college, I was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, and I wrote a weekly column called "My New Disposition." The title was drawn from this record. This album helped introduce me to postmodernism, which in turn helped me find a way forward from rigid fundamentalism into...well, whatever it is that I'm still working on.

Bill Mallonee and the Vigilantes of Love, Audible Sigh
I got into this record the year after I finished college, when I was exploring the implications of losing a lot of my faith. I loved the way he used irony and wit to communicate the depths of his own frustration and bitterness. I still do. One line, in particular, has always resonated with me, and has helped shape how I approach the world as an adult:

"Make your smile a different way to cry,
When the truth that they've been selling you is just another fine lie..."

Radiohead, Ok Computer
Here is something I wrote about Ok Computer a couple of years ago:

I remember knowing innately that these were rock songs, but reacting almost viscerally to the way that they sounded--all the whirring and buzzing and hissing, all the mechanical coldness. I later came to recognize this dissonance as the source of Ok Computer's genius: it pushes the rock song format to the very edge and holds it there, right on the cusp, without pushing it over the edge into electronica or noise.

The best metaphor I can think of is the hour-long flogging scene in Mad Mel's The Passion of the Christ, where the Roman torturers expertly whip their victim to within an inch of his life, and then continue to torture him just enough so that he stays just barely alive. Radiohead applies this same kind of genius to rock music on Ok Computer, which is why some people think it's really just an exercise in technological butchery. They don't appreciate the brilliance that it takes to deconstruct something--a living being, an aesthetic genre--to the precise point where you can observe its internal structures while they are still in action.

R.E.M., Murmur
I have undergone several conversions in my adult life, few of them as profound as converting from U2 to R.E.M. To me, U2 will always feel sort of adolescent, particularly the way that they perpetually insist upon their own importance. R.E.M., by contrast, feels grown up, even on Murmur, which they made when they were still teenagers. It took me a good year to get into Murmur, but once I had it took over my imagination.

Wilco, Being There
The record that introduced me to country music. I realize it's not really a country record, but the few songs on it that explore country styles helped me understand what country music does. I remember sitting on the L in Chicago one day, listening to "Far, Far Away," and realizing that only a country song could capture the particular kind of loneliness you feel in a city: three million people around you, and none of them are the person you want to be with.

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
This record will always remind me of my Chicago years, both because it is so quintessentially Chicago and because it is so full of the very sort of existential hand-wringing I was doing at the time.

The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
The Yankee Hotel Foxtrot of my Madison years: all substance abuse and exultation, all integrated seamlessly with Christian images and motifs.

Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
I got this one just last summer on a lark from the local library. I had no idea how quickly I'd fall in love with it. Springsteen is the Walt Whitman of the 20th century. This is not to say that Springsteen is a poet, per se; rather, it is to say that Whitman, had he lived after 1950, wouldn't have been a poet, he'd have been a rock star. Either way, Springsteen makes me love America. He captures what is best about America: we are brash, passionate, full of unfounded optimism, always looking ahead. If I were beamed to another galaxy, and I had five minutes to explain America to an alien race, I'd just play them "Thunder Road." I think that if you boiled America down to its essence, all you'd have left in the pot is the song's best line:

"What else can we do now except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair..."

I was sitting on the bus today, listening to The Mekons' Rock 'n' Roll and reading Catherine Bell's densely-theoretical but much-heralded book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, which I read for the first time as a first-year seminarian back in 2004 and did not understand in the slightest. I'm rereading it now because I discovered my class notes from the day that we discussed it, and frankly I was disgusted by the fact that I didn't even know enough to take any decent notes on the book. No work of religious studies theory is going to call me a chump.

I didn't get too far because I got to thinking about how The Mekons construct a whole ideology around rock 'n' roll on the album I was listening to, and that (somehow) got me to thinking about the purpose of theory. Here at UW Madison's Dept of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, we are hesitant about theory. There are good reasons for this: theory often causes sloppy, uninformed scholars to think that, by applying a theoretical model to a phenomenon they otherwise do not understand, they can say something radical about it.

My favorite example of this is the "peasant revolt" model for the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Recall that, according to the Book of Joshua, the Israelites came up from Egypt and massacred the whole population of the Promised Land, sans a few tricky hangers-on. Judges, by contrast, depicts a more piecemeal settlement. Neither model accords perfectly with the extant historical evidence, and this led some scholars to use a mixture of Marxist political theories and 60s-era Zeitgeist to posit that the "conquest" of Canaan was actually a peasant uprising, spurred by a ragtag bunch of renegade Egyptian Yahwists, that led to the overthrow of the local Canaanite despots and the creation of an egalitarian commonwealth that became the political model for later Israelite covenant ideology.

There is no direct evidence that overtly contradicts this theory, though the Bible certainly does not present it in this way. But there is also scant evidence that supports it. The main reason it caught on was because it had theoretical underpinings and a connection to the fashionable contemporaneous political ideologies of the late 60s.

This is not how theory should work. Theory, on a cognative level, seems to operate in the same way that metaphor does. Metaphor works by allowing  you to "map" your knowledge of something you actually do know onto something that you do not know. Take death, for instance. Death is the cessation of all life. But since we have no direct experience of that, we understand death in terms of other things: it is a journey from which you do not return, or a sleep from which you do not wake, or a thief that comes upon you suddenly and takes your most valuable possession (your life).

Theory ought to work in the same way in biblical studies. One of the most persistent problems in studying ancient texts is the lack of evidence. We have the texts themselves, we have some extant inscriptions, and we have some physical evidence. This does not, in itself, add up to a systematic understanding of the ancient world. Theory becomes useful because it allows us to observe human communities and political structures that are available to us, abstract certain general principles from them, and apply these principles to what evidence we do have from the ancient world.

Coming up: a review of Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.

I worry sometimes that maturity has smoothed out the rough edges of my passionate nature--that I don't care enough about anything anymore to write about it the way I used to. It's not an overriding or thematic concern; it's just something that I could imagine happening to me while I'm busy doing other things (like grad school).

I thought about this while I was reading excerpts from Lester Bangs' work. Reading Bangs' writing is like freebasing the essence of life. He writes about rock 'n' roll like it's a matter of life and death, and in so doing he's able to use the record-review genre to write about life and death and everything else that matters. He encapsulates what I love about rock 'n' roll: the way it can, on occasion, bypass every mechanism for smoothing out, touching up, honing, fine-tuning and give you direct access to raw human talent.

And, like it or not, talent is the x-factor that distinguishes shit from gold. It's not passion, though that helps, and it's indispensable to the truly talented--the history of rock 'n' roll is awash with monuments to antiseptic artisanship But passion by itself is absurd. Nothing is less cool than trying too hard (and this, incidentally, is why The Killers remain the Worst Band In The World).

There is a conclusion to this post somewhere, but I think I've lost interest. Also, I have to 1) lesson-plan for Monday, 2) come up with several potential paper prompts for my students to write about, 3) figure out what the hell I'm going to write my rabbinics paper on, and 4) do all this before tonight's Over the Rhine concert at 7.

First of all: this video is pretty exceptional for its era (early 80s). It's very artfully constructed. Notice how the shots are timed to the lyrics and to the cadence of the piano--lots of little, subtle touches.

But it's the song that I've always been taken with. There simply isn't another pop song I can think of that sounds like this. On the surface it's not all that unique--simple verse/chorus structure, fairly standard pop music themes, etc. The hook in the verses is pretty fantastic, which helps make it an unusually good pop song. But really, the magic of this song is in the combination of a classic pop piano lead with a driving post-punk bass line.

Fun facts: it peaked at #6 in the U.S.. It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Pop Song, but lost to Toto's "Rosanna." Makes you wonder if the Academy wishes they could have that one back. I mean, not that "Rosanna" is such a bad song, but really, come on.