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A dull and garbled murmur teases my ears, snug in the embrace of my headphones, as if I were floating at the bottom of a pool, half aware of the conversation above. In these moments, outside sounds are summertime icicles, their sharp tips of detail quickly melting into acoustic puddles, and only a diffuse, frothy awareness of a world outside remains.
Down the red stone hallway, in the bomb shelter-sturdy chapel, Mary's forlornly open arms receive the chanting of two dozen brown-smocked monks. While they intone Psalms, I lie in my room here in the monastery where I am on retreat, the light of my laptop shining in the darkness.
There's nothing particularly original about Creed, whose music I'm soaking in, but at ear-damaging levels they are a guilty pleasure, with lyrics elliptically Christian enough to sustain crossover listeners who like their music loud, their doctrine grated through refrigerator-sized amplifiers, their spiritual sentiments unvarnished, and their piety vaguely evangelical.
The effect of the music coursing through my nervous system is to produce a lift, a somatic levity that sends me at once deeply within and outside my body, spacing me in three simultaneous modes: as embodied spirit, as disembodied spirit, and as a spirit ecstatically holding them bound. Playing electric bass in rock bands for the past 15 years has induced similar effects. Occasionally the music, without premeditation, achieves a viscous density like the Catholic oil of chrism at baptism. The resulting lift paralyzes both of my hands, and as they hang in suspended animation for a few beats or a fragment of a beat, I am already recovering them and the lift has passed.
The digital environment of the CD is the plastic, virtual "enclosure" today in which younger generations taste and hear—however briefly and unconsciously—the goodness of life, the grandeur and intimacy of God. As anonymous monastics experiencing culture in solitude, we drown in these acoustic aquariums. But we are rarely forced to make these experiences explicit, to consider thoughtfully and make judgments about them. In such a cultural environment, wherein rock's meaning is too often left to the private individual, James Miller's new book makes a very welcome contribution. Flowers in the Dustbin forces a more public consideration of rock's influence as both an economic and spiritual medium. Although the book attractively sketches a cultural history of rock and roll, Flowers also suggests that rock's rise and decline is directly tied to the development of, and eventual abuse of, its religious power.
In this critically sympathetic look, Miller—who spent decades as a rock journalist—tells the story of a mongrel music. Rock was born of the awkward and uneven marriage of elements of country, rhythm and blues, gospel, and jazz woven together at critical junctures by talented (or at least passionate) musicians, as well as their business associates and disc jockeys. The contribution of black America to this most American of musical hybrids was nothing less than foundational, and Miller gives particular attention to the complex racial dynamics at the heart of rock and roll.
Instrumental in defining the medium were Wynonie Harris's "Good Rockin' Tonight" in the late 1940s, the Chords's "Sh-Boom," Fats Domino's "Ain't It a Shame," Chuck Berry's "Maybellene," and Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" in the '50s, and Jimi Hendrix's legendary persona in the '60s. Though each of these artists and songs receives loving and witty journalistic treatment, Miller's discussion of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson is particularly smart writing.
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