This weeks reading on religion, music and culture highlighted how music can evoke spiritual feelings in the maker or listener groups. Christopher Partridge uses the example of listening to the King's College Chapel at Cambridge and how the feelings the music evokes can make you feel 'a refreshing withdrawal and escape from the everyday pressures of things' (Partridge 2012, p. 183).
Throughout the article, Partridge examines how music embodies listening, feeling, identity and the transcendent. It could be argued that popular night clubbing or bush doof culture is the religion of disenchanted or subcultural youth. Weekend after weekend participants line up to go into small clubs just for a few hours, to 'lose subjective belief in their self and merge into a collective body' (Tramacchi 2000, p. 201). Many weekend clubbers or bush doof goers also take illegal drugs or psychedelics to enhance their transcendent experience. These altered states of spiritual consciousness and the events that drive them, could be modernity's ethneogenic ceremonies. These sacralized events 'share many features of mystical states and are not uncommonly interpreted by the experient within an idiosyncratic religious framework' (Tramacchi 2000, p. 202).
In addition, attendees of night clubs often engage in 'sacrificial and pilgrimage behaviors', whereby they become affiliated with a favourite club or haunt and sacrifice time, money and distance to spend their evenings there (St John 2008, p. 150). Clubbers enter a liminal phase as they get ready to go out, by stripping themselves of their mundane attire and proceed to put on clubbers wear. Initiates then enter the clubs, parties and doofs and engage in a collective community, leaving the mundane world behind for the duration of the pseudo-ritual. Night clubbers are now 'standing out from the surface of life's contingencies...[enabling] a more profound contemplation of being' (St John 2008, p. 153). Finally, as the sun begins to awaken, the initiates are reintegrated into mundane society.
Subcultural groups like ravers, hipsters and indie kids, all use the 'aesthetic and mind-body technologies...to produce a particular affective space' (Partridge 2012, p. 187). The problem with these modern rites and rituals is, there is no guide, shaman or sage to demarcate the healthy spiritual path from the overindulgent path.
References
Partridge, C 2012, 'Popular Music, Affective Space and Meaning', in Lynch G, and Mitchell, J with A Strhan (ed.), Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 182-193.
St John, G 2008, 'Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes: Victor Turner and Electronic Dance Music Culture', in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, Berghahan Books, London, pp. 149-173.
Tramacchi, D 2000, 'Field Tripping: Psychedelic communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush', Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 202-213.
Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=937720
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq3m-yR8NQ
Billie,
ReplyDeleteI found your post interesting, I can see how clubbing and doofs (which I had no knowledge of before) could be viewed as a religion or spirituality, as discussed earlier in class about how people can enter a trance whilst the music is loud and the body may or may not be intoxicated by drugs can cause out of body experiences, feelings of submission to a higher power and a sense of community with the group partaking in similar activities.