Comments on: Carl’s Rock Songbook #26: The Three Stages of Modernity

By: Revolution’s Year Zero: 1962, 1966, or 1968? » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things Blog

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:15:14 +0000

[...] understand that second point particularly if they read my cinema-and-song-studded posts on Three Stages of Modernity and Intermediate Modernity. The framework I provide in those essays allow one to admit the [...]

By: Carl’s Rock Songbook #28: Intermediate Modernity » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things Blog

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:04:37 +0000

[...] Here’s the basic schema I laid out in #26: [...]

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:54:52 +0000

Thanks Carl, actually I’m very much looking forward to your next installment. My own position, biased of course, is that there are few (Dylan being an exception probably predicated on his Jewishness, and only in his “Christian” albums) if any rock artists who were ever aware of the horror of the egophanic revolt, the movement away from God, that their music represents.
However, with that said, your inquiry is singularly important and invites a critique of its own. It should be presented in book form, of course.

By: Carl Eric Scott

Carl Eric Scott — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:14:47 +0000

Robert, thanks…if you say Voegelin would be impressed, that’s very encouraging! All I really am doing is trying to remain true to the fact that most of the good cultural and social historians I know of say that something changes big-time somewhere around 1890-1925; and likewise say so regarding 1960s/1970s.

My semi-quasi-sort-of defense of some rock does rest upon this idea of its resistance to modernity, or at least, its trying to make sense of modernity.

I’m not saying that it usually does such a good job of doing so… …a lot of rock, such as “Sounds of Silence” is like the utterly depressing and navel-gazing parts of a Walker Percy novel, without any of the self-deprecating humor, and without any longing for or pointers toward the Christian hope. But as you’ll see as the Songbook unfolds, there are exceptions. There are bands who realized that the whole hippie/rock “solution” didn’t work…and who even understand the (modernity-rooted) kinship between what rock said it was against and what it turned out to be.

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:50:34 +0000

Your project didn’t capture me until this blog.

It strikes me that once you get beyond Dylan and a couple of his epigones (John Prine for example) there is a dearth of interesting or penetrating critiques of modernity.

You write: “The Songbook inevitably has to analyze modernity, precisely because it is interested more in what rock reveals about our overall sociological and spiritual situation than it is in rock itself.”
I have always thought that ‘rock’ was deeply committed to the “immanentization” of society in modernity, to the glorification/gratification of the (self)individual in egophanic revolt against God? Which begs the question, is your project an analysis of ‘rock’s’ efforts to define or move modernity, or is rock-in-modernity an eschatology?

You write, “Insofar as modern life becomes dehumanizing and isolating, rock has sung about this, tried to carve out artistic refuge from it, or otherwise sought to explore how one must deal with it. At its best, this is what rock has attempted.”
As far as I know, the ‘rock artist’s’ desire to critique, for example, abortion, is nonexistent. Given your theory shouldn’t we at least have a few famous/popular artists ‘protesting’ abortion? Does this failure of rock artists to address the question of abortion represent the final stage of collapse in Christian morals and ethics or, that these ‘values’ are no longer pertinent in a society that has become almost completely immanentized?

BTW, I’m sure Voegelin would have been very much impressed with your ‘stages of modernity’ analysis.