Abstract
But is this the destruction of the temple? Does the DJ set us free or keep us in chains? Music, as Adorno puts it, “represents at once the manifestation of impulse and the locus of its taming.”2 The collective euphoria of the masses as appropriated by capitalism thus seems to constitute the exact opposite of a radical form of existence. Shackled, enslaved, we find ourselves marching in time to the drum and the bass. We are unable to sleep without the static, white noise of the television set.
Worship at the church of hiphop. Thousands of fevered bodies raising their hands to the sky in unison. Bass. Pulsating through our veins, our hearts beat as one under a strobe-lit sky.
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Notes
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2001), p. 29.
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 26.
Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), p. 88.
Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2009), pp. 81ff.
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 99.
Grace Jones, “Don’t Cry It’s Only the Rhythm” (Universal Music Division AZ, 2003).
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 191.
Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 57.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 171.
See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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© 2014 Mike Grimshaw
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Fuggle, S. (2014). Sonic Stigmatas. In: Grimshaw, M. (eds) The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394118_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394118_4
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