Popular music is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget the important role it plays in our individual and collective lives. At the very least, it marks significant events such as weddings, senior trips and political campaigns; at its best, it inspires social and spiritual change. Music critic and Scene music editor Bill Friskics-Warren’s new book, I’ll Take You There, not only sheds light on pop’s significance to culture, it also points to the music’s transformative power as a part of shared human experience.
In writing I’ll Take You There, Friskics-Warren explains, his purpose is to “broaden or push back the horizon of what people commonly view as spirituality”; in that sense, the book is a work of theology as much as it is music writing. For Friskics-Warren, spirituality isn’t necessarily found in institutional religion or belief systems. Rather, it’s located in the sense of restlessness common to our culture, a universal desire for “something more” that, especially in the case of artists, demands a response. Such responses offer transcendence when they articulate a need for “something deeper and more abiding than the everyday [that] breaks into and, if only fleetingly, transforms the present.”
Friskics-Warren maintains that pop music is rife with these urges. The work of Van Morrison, Sleater-Kinney and Eminem, he says, consistently points outward, whether that’s to a better future, a deeper connection or the painful lack of either. P.J. Harvey, Moby, Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash and Sly & The Family Stone are among the other artists Friskics-Warren singles out as particularly adept at expressing a yearning for transcendence. These he groups according to three typologies: Mystics, who, like Morrison, seek a “higher spiritual union”; Naysayers like Eminem and Nine Inch Nails, whose expressions of transcendence are couched in antipathy; and Prophets like Cash, whose restlessness gears into larger social concerns like prison reform or AIDS.
Friskics-Warren readily admits that transcendence is a murky phenomenon, and that artists themselves aren’t necessarily aware of their transcendent urges. As an example, he points to the unabashedly dark work of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. On songs such as “Hurt,” Friskics-Warren asserts, “Reznor flirts with self-annihilation in his lyrics, [even though] he has yet to exercise that option. Instead he continues to exist in order to make records, and this will to survive, this impulse to live and to speak his piece, however aggrieved that it might be, reveals a hunger for something better, something beyond malice and self-loathing.”
Other artists express their urges more directly, or even transparently. Madonna, Friskics-Warren says, espouses a relationship between erotic and divine union that, though occasionally pedestrian, is nothing if not clear. Her song “Ray of Light,” he writes, “articulat[es] a sense of connection that encompasses spiritual illumination and carnal ecstasy, in effect erasing the distinctions between the two.” Bruce Springsteen, too, has based his whole artistic identity around a longing for transcendence. Songs like “Born to Run,” Friskics-Warren says, “testified to [Springsteen’s] commitment to creating something that transcended [brokenness], even if he knew that any hope of doing so was tempered by the realization that transcendence is partial or fleeting at best.” The experience of connectedness is transitory, it seems, not unlike abstract expressionist painter Willem DeKooning’s famous description of artistic content as “a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.”
Friskics-Warren acknowledges that transcendent encounters don’t depend exclusively on lyrical content, which is privileged in Western society. Rather, they hinge on an artist’s “way of orienting [him or herself] to the world, about cultivating a posture of openness…that persistently seeks windows to something more.” In this way, Joy Division’s pessimistic “Love Will Tear Us Apart” exhibits transcendence as much for “its churning dance rhythms and intoxicating, if dissonant, synthesizer lines” as it does in singer Ian Curtis’ “haunted droning.”
I’ll Take You There exists in the awkward neutral ground between journalism and academic writing, and Friskics-Warren often has to make esoteric points while simultaneously keeping his readers engaged. Like an academic work, the book repeats its thesis while progressively moving toward more nuanced concepts. Such a format might wear out less invested readers, who, having gotten the point, may be tempted to skip to the epilogue. There’s a payoff for those who hang with the book’s intricacies. In addition to some provocative claims—that negation can equal transcendence, for example—Friskics-Warren delivers his carefully laid-out ideas in colorful prose. “Much as Johnny Cash did by donning a mourner’s black,” he writes in the book’s latter third, “[U2’s] Bono is struggling, as a person of an Easter faith, with how to live in a Good Friday world.”
Behind I’ll Take You There’s arguments is Friskics-Warren’s understanding of transcendence as an inter-subjective phenomenon. Like the Rastafarian colloquialism “I and I,” the “I” in the book’s title (borrowed from the Staple Singers’ 1972 hit) is a collective pronoun referring to “commonly held, though not identical, human experiences,” as he puts it, “a transcendental ‘we’ that embodies and participates in something greater than the sum of its parts.”
More than just an artist’s intent or a listener’s reaction, the experience of transcendence in pop music is a shared phenomenon with enough commonality to resonate in the everyday even while it points to a profound human connectedness. In this way, I’ll Take You There provides a corrective to commonly assumed notions of pop music as mere entertainment. More important than rock ’n’ roll’s rebelliousness or pop’s escapism is the possibility that such music, though often taken for granted, can enable the sacred (broadly defined) to transform the everyday.
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