Since the release of Taylor Swift’s new album, some Catholics online have been discussing its quality and content, including a range of reactions to the very suggestive lyrics featured on one particular track. Observing the discussions which ensued is truly eye-opening, as one sees everything from condemnatory parents who seem to echo the 80’s Satanic panic in their performative outrage, to Catholic Moms twisting themselves into emotional pretzels to justify allowing their daughters to listen to this fluff.
Both sides, of course, are generally wrong. The knee-jerk rejection crowd generally offers no real alternative to the powerful lure of expertly crafted pop culture. Meanwhile the pro-Swift crowd really possesses no concept of the purpose of music (and culture in general) in their ferocious defense of aesthetic drivel. Neither side has any real concept of musical quality. Indeed, while the discussion of lyrical content is robust (as it always is), the question of musical craft and quality is conspicuously absent (as it always is). That Swift’s voice is mediocre and her arrangements generally thin and pedestrian – that her music is interminably dull and a real insult to the intelligence – none of this even occurs to them. It’s all about the lyrics, even among well-educated Catholics who should know better.
While normally I do not shrink from online pugilism, I have so far refrained from commenting. Hell hath no scorn, after all, like a challenged Swifty. (Indeed, merely suggesting that such adulation of pop culture was troubling had a Catholic influencer accuse me of “misunderstanding what it means to be an embodied being.”)
One can easily observe that the prolonged decline of popular culture has spiraled into a dirty ditch and has been bottom-bouncing ever since, while what we are witnessing is a continued addiction to an aural drug. Indeed, popular culture is a hard vice to kick, more akin to an addiction (there is science here and here, while the formulaic manipulation in this music is old news) than a carefully considered aesthetic position.
There is always the spiritual side of this as well. One is always reminded of Plato’s famous quote from Book 3 of the Republic:
And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten …
Musical training – and exposure to music in general – fastens itself to the soul. Whether it elevates the soul or drags it down further is another matter, and one in need of real discussion.
I recall having lunch with a philosophy professor at a small traditional Catholic College. He said:
My students are truly the best. They are largely home-schooled, well-raised, relatively well-read, and always ready to have challenging and penetrating discussions on any topic under the sun. Save one topic, of course: music. They are already so entrenched in their personal musical preferences, that they take any attempt to critically assess their taste as a personal attack.
Indeed, this is hardly surprising: the music we imbibe as adolescents can make a deep and lasting impression upon us. To this day, if I hear the songs that were popular in the 90’s, I am transported to the tumultuous emotional and physical sensations of being a teenager. Indeed, our foundational music is not unlike unresolved trauma: when a person experiences a large trauma and does not heal from it, then whatever triggers that trauma essentially returns them to the place and age that they were when they experienced it. Anyone who has suffered from depression, for instance, will likely avoid the music that accompanied this period of their life. Anyone who wishes to feel younger again, in the age of streaming, is one click away from doing so.
Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I took a film-making class. As part of a major project I created a visual collage that transitioned between imagery of the most popular pop starlet at the time – and the scenes of intense adulation given to her – and scenes of intense religious worship from various traditions. The musical backdrop was a cloying repetition of one of her more annoying choruses, mixed cleverly (if I must say so) with Gregorian chant.
When the small film ended and the lights came up, like a scene out of a 90’s comedy, one girl said in exaggerated upspeak: “I don’t get it.”
Of course she didn’t. But you should.
Music is exceptionally powerful inthe narcotic qualities and sense of religious adulation that a well-produced and catchy song can create. The music industry has known this since at least the mass hysteria inspired by the Beatles. Christians also reacted badly when John Lennon said that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” instead of taking this as the accurate criticism and warning that it was. His words are still true.
Since those heady days of shrieking Beatle-mania, the industry has refined its production techniques to a fine science, and have made billions in the process. Your captured attention is their specialty, and you can be assured that any concern for your emotional or spiritual health is of no concern.
Everything that Plato warned us about music has taken place 2,400 years later. One can only wonder what he would have written had he witnessed Lollapalooza.
Some years ago as I wrote my first OnePeterFive articles, I created part one and part two of a series titled “Listening like a Catholic.” While I still think these articles a good starting point, it strikes me now that an updated discussion on what we can do about the musical health of our families is in order, as well as how to re-engage in authentic culture as part of our rebuilding of civilization. There has been what many call a “vibe shift” in our culture in the past year, and Catholics have a responsibility to help lead this potential time of change culturally as well as spiritually. In the end, if the cultural component of this potential social shift is not adequate, what good it builds will not last long. As a professor of mine once said about politics: “Usually, the side with the better music wins.” We already have the better music: we’d best put it forward again.
There are a myriad of ways to approach the issue, and we will discuss as many of them as possible in forthcoming writing. Meanwhile, if you find yourself a die-hard Swifty or would rather add 300 years to your sentence in purgatory than listen to her music, I encourage you to turn off all of the music you are listening to, and first engage with a prolonged silence. Do not break the silence: let it make you uncomfortable, and use it to consider the words of the modern master, composer Arvo Pärt, who said:
The silence must be longer. This music is about the silence. The sounds are there to surround the silence.
Uncertainty can be met with silence. Humility requires silence. We will continue from here.
Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash
