Gnostic History of Rock 'n' Roll
07/31/2012
The orthodox history of the rock era is a story of fall and redemption. In that account, rock ‘n’ roll was created sometime in the early fifties, out of the primordial chaos of rhythm and blues. This began the era of the Patriarchs, who proclaimed the Word from their tabernacle beside the river in Memphis, until the Captivity, when rock & roll languished in the hands of Paul Anka. (There was no “king” in Israel, so to speak.) However, after a period of wandering, it was finally liberated, when the British came and led it into the promised land. Indeed, in the orthodox account, rock ‘n’ roll reached its zenith when the Messiah came from across the sea to die for America’s sins. It is because of his immense impact that the western world now divides history into the periods B.S.P. and A.S.P. (“Before Sgt. Pepper’s” and “After Sgt. Pepper’s,” respectively).
In spite of potential charges of heresy, I would like to propose an alternate history, with a radically different set of cosmological presuppositions.
The divine spark of rock ‘n’ roll first appeared in the world in the 1940s, awakened from its aeons-long slumber by the deep yearning and clarity in the hearts of certain rhythm and blues musicians, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as scattered gospel, blues and country artists. Undoubtedly, the spark was already corrupted and dimmed, for such is the influence of this unholy world of darkness. But so powerful, so full of life and light was this presence, the heart of man brightened and felt new hope, if only for a few short years.
It is when rock ‘n’ roll first changed hands, from its emanation by black musicians to that of whites, that we see the first clear evidence of its degradation. From oppressed to oppressor, rock ‘n’ roll took on a more polished, aristocratic air. It became, tragically, more at home in the world. A side-by-side listen to Big Joe Turner’s and then Bill Haley’s versions of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” illustrates this point with stark, distressing clarity. In Turner’s version, we hear urgency, the desperate shout of a man wide awake, agonizingly aware that he is in the margins of American society, stranded in this God-bereft world of death. By contrast, in Haley’s version, recorded just a few months later, we hear the chipper voice of a man ready to let the good times roll. Sound asleep is he to his soul’s alienation. The world is his oyster, and what should he care if it has clamped its maw down around him, encasing him in darkness? Given the clear superiority of Turner’s performance, it seems germane to ask, why did the world need a Bill Haley when it already had a Joe Turner? Of course, to anyone with a gnostic understanding of the nature of the world, the answer is obvious: Because it is precisely the world’s purpose to imprison the divine light and submerge it in darkness. Such was the demiurge’s program in creating the world, and such is the world’s effect on all that enters it. (We just can’t have nice things.) Still, even in the early white rock ‘n’ roll records, we hear vitality and enthusiasm, a child’s joy of discovery, the excitement of working in a medium the boundaries of which had not yet been negotiated. This was to change in the ensuing years.
From southern blacks to southern whites to northern whites, rock ‘n’ roll passed through the successively paler and paler hands of each archon, growing more degenerate and corrupt as it became further alienated from its source, until at last it fell into the whitest hands of all, the British. (In gnostic circles, this event became known as “the outsourcing of American popular music.”) At first it seemed that the British would liberate the spark from the prison of darkness in which the demiurge had incarcerated it. But, alas, the flurry of supposed innovations they brought to the music, and the apparent renaissance of the late sixties, ultimately crippled it with preciousness and theoretical preoccupations. Sgt. Pepper’s dealt the most devastating blow, setting as it did a new precedent for the devitalization of the music, miring it in over-conceptualization, self-reflexivity and “production.” The early rock ‘n’ roll had been raw, earthy (contradistinct from “worldly”) and vital, a music in which the soul could revel in the elation and agony of the body’s passions, ecstatic in its longing to break free from the prison of the world. It was wild and furious, a gleeful massacre of energy. But now the world had mastered it, intellectualized it, abstracted it into a set of recording techniques. It was now a producer’s game. And what were the producers producing? Product.
By the 1970s, rock ‘n’ roll (now simply called “rock,” no longer a verb, but a noun evoking the stultified inertia of mineral existence) had become utterly estranged from the light, fully incarcerated in darkness, cynicism, expertise, predictability, the boredom of a game that the industry had learned how to win. Tour busses revved. Stadiums filled. Performers became glitzy and inflated. Unprecedented amounts of money poured into the pockets of rock music. Rock diversified, creating a bevy of new product lines: glam rock, art rock, progressive rock, each one slicker and more overproduced than the last. One had only to behold the countenance of Walter Becker, his taxidermied corpse haunting the stage on Night Train, to know that he was the enemy of life.
Certain heretical sects – the punk rockers, mostly – sought to reconnect with the original spark. They developed rigorous ascetic practices, both musical and bodily, in hopes of attaining gnosis, the direct, lived knowledge of the divine light. And, if in so doing, they could destroy the world that had imprisoned it, so much the better. But they too succumbed to the undertow of darkness. In an entropic series of compromises, their stance softened, from nihilist to anarchist to socialist, until at last the industry embraced them and they became capitalists.
Both the orthodox and the gnostic traditions acknowledge the degeneracy of today’s rock ‘n’ roll. The orthodox look for the return of the Messiah, believing that he will usher in an age of peace and progressive politics, a perfected world (“if you want it”) for all who have accepted him as their personal savior. But the gnostics (those of us left) anticipate no such golden age, for the perfection of the world is tantamount to the completion of darkness, the sovereignty of death. The gnostic answer is, as it has always been, resistance. The divine light will only reawaken and shine again when rock ‘n’ roll remembers how to sing the deepest agony of existence, furiously awake in its captivity. None of the prescribed postures will do, not the practiced angst of emo, nor the sanctioned insurgency of contemporary punk. It must be the true song of the heart’s longing, of homesickness, of a soul shipwrecked on the shore of the world.
Best of luck,
Daryl
In spite of potential charges of heresy, I would like to propose an alternate history, with a radically different set of cosmological presuppositions.
The divine spark of rock ‘n’ roll first appeared in the world in the 1940s, awakened from its aeons-long slumber by the deep yearning and clarity in the hearts of certain rhythm and blues musicians, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as scattered gospel, blues and country artists. Undoubtedly, the spark was already corrupted and dimmed, for such is the influence of this unholy world of darkness. But so powerful, so full of life and light was this presence, the heart of man brightened and felt new hope, if only for a few short years.
It is when rock ‘n’ roll first changed hands, from its emanation by black musicians to that of whites, that we see the first clear evidence of its degradation. From oppressed to oppressor, rock ‘n’ roll took on a more polished, aristocratic air. It became, tragically, more at home in the world. A side-by-side listen to Big Joe Turner’s and then Bill Haley’s versions of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” illustrates this point with stark, distressing clarity. In Turner’s version, we hear urgency, the desperate shout of a man wide awake, agonizingly aware that he is in the margins of American society, stranded in this God-bereft world of death. By contrast, in Haley’s version, recorded just a few months later, we hear the chipper voice of a man ready to let the good times roll. Sound asleep is he to his soul’s alienation. The world is his oyster, and what should he care if it has clamped its maw down around him, encasing him in darkness? Given the clear superiority of Turner’s performance, it seems germane to ask, why did the world need a Bill Haley when it already had a Joe Turner? Of course, to anyone with a gnostic understanding of the nature of the world, the answer is obvious: Because it is precisely the world’s purpose to imprison the divine light and submerge it in darkness. Such was the demiurge’s program in creating the world, and such is the world’s effect on all that enters it. (We just can’t have nice things.) Still, even in the early white rock ‘n’ roll records, we hear vitality and enthusiasm, a child’s joy of discovery, the excitement of working in a medium the boundaries of which had not yet been negotiated. This was to change in the ensuing years.
From southern blacks to southern whites to northern whites, rock ‘n’ roll passed through the successively paler and paler hands of each archon, growing more degenerate and corrupt as it became further alienated from its source, until at last it fell into the whitest hands of all, the British. (In gnostic circles, this event became known as “the outsourcing of American popular music.”) At first it seemed that the British would liberate the spark from the prison of darkness in which the demiurge had incarcerated it. But, alas, the flurry of supposed innovations they brought to the music, and the apparent renaissance of the late sixties, ultimately crippled it with preciousness and theoretical preoccupations. Sgt. Pepper’s dealt the most devastating blow, setting as it did a new precedent for the devitalization of the music, miring it in over-conceptualization, self-reflexivity and “production.” The early rock ‘n’ roll had been raw, earthy (contradistinct from “worldly”) and vital, a music in which the soul could revel in the elation and agony of the body’s passions, ecstatic in its longing to break free from the prison of the world. It was wild and furious, a gleeful massacre of energy. But now the world had mastered it, intellectualized it, abstracted it into a set of recording techniques. It was now a producer’s game. And what were the producers producing? Product.
By the 1970s, rock ‘n’ roll (now simply called “rock,” no longer a verb, but a noun evoking the stultified inertia of mineral existence) had become utterly estranged from the light, fully incarcerated in darkness, cynicism, expertise, predictability, the boredom of a game that the industry had learned how to win. Tour busses revved. Stadiums filled. Performers became glitzy and inflated. Unprecedented amounts of money poured into the pockets of rock music. Rock diversified, creating a bevy of new product lines: glam rock, art rock, progressive rock, each one slicker and more overproduced than the last. One had only to behold the countenance of Walter Becker, his taxidermied corpse haunting the stage on Night Train, to know that he was the enemy of life.
Certain heretical sects – the punk rockers, mostly – sought to reconnect with the original spark. They developed rigorous ascetic practices, both musical and bodily, in hopes of attaining gnosis, the direct, lived knowledge of the divine light. And, if in so doing, they could destroy the world that had imprisoned it, so much the better. But they too succumbed to the undertow of darkness. In an entropic series of compromises, their stance softened, from nihilist to anarchist to socialist, until at last the industry embraced them and they became capitalists.
Both the orthodox and the gnostic traditions acknowledge the degeneracy of today’s rock ‘n’ roll. The orthodox look for the return of the Messiah, believing that he will usher in an age of peace and progressive politics, a perfected world (“if you want it”) for all who have accepted him as their personal savior. But the gnostics (those of us left) anticipate no such golden age, for the perfection of the world is tantamount to the completion of darkness, the sovereignty of death. The gnostic answer is, as it has always been, resistance. The divine light will only reawaken and shine again when rock ‘n’ roll remembers how to sing the deepest agony of existence, furiously awake in its captivity. None of the prescribed postures will do, not the practiced angst of emo, nor the sanctioned insurgency of contemporary punk. It must be the true song of the heart’s longing, of homesickness, of a soul shipwrecked on the shore of the world.
Best of luck,
Daryl
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