blissblogger

Well-known member
yet overtly religious music is usually - not always but usually - devoid of this mystical feeling

like, i get more of that feeling off of soul than from the gospel that it is a secularized version of

thinking also of an Uber ride i took the other week where the lady driver was born again - Christian paraphernalia all over the dashboard, radio tuned to Christian rock, awful pallid stuff

she told me about her past life "on the dark side" - meaning rock + drugs - and how she knew first hand how powerful it was, how alluring, and had been alarmed because her grand kid had got into going to see bands

but i bet those bands, whoever they are, transmitted more "religiosity" (however you want to define that) than the insipid Christian pop she currently was listening to - so she would be right to ascribe dangerous seductive power to the devil's tunes

she was incidentally one of the least Christian in spirit and manner people i've encountered for a while, going on about being a hustler and the importance of making money etc
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
well yeah nasheeds are mostly shit, i like some ssouth eastern kurdish ones recorded to tape in shit quality with a daff but the maher zane and sami yusuf stuff is so execrable it's mad. I prefer the religious symbolism in folk or soul or jazz as blissblogger says.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
In fact, what music would you say doesn't come from religion?


pre-neolithic/hunter gatherer trance. it comes from animism most probably but not religion as we understand it. more an occult thing, summoning the chponic spirits.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Reverence. Devotion. Praise.

All these things just a breath away from worship.


No, because the truly devoted are simultaneously the most orthodox and the most heretical.

Worship is the rule of law, essentially. a power over you that you are compelled to obey. in communion with the divine is different imo.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
And the trumpet shall be blown, so all those that are in the heavens and all those that are in the earth shall swoon, except him whom Allah will ; then it shall be blown again, then they shall stand up awaiting
Tho I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as a resounding gong
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
yet overtly religious music is usually - not always but usually - devoid of this mystical feeling
it's about spiritual ecstasy innit

what people describe chasing - especially in a dance music context - via music/crowd/drugs

something beyond yourself ("transcendent")

whereas religious music is about religion (dogma, belief) and not necessarily spiritual ecstasy
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I had a moment of what I can only describe as spiritual ecstasy while staring (while on drugs, yes) at a Rothko at the Art Institute a few years ago

I still can't and probably won't ever to be able to properly articulate it but I know what it was

there's a line in one of the Hilary Mantel novels about Thomas Cromwell where he thinks something like (paraphrasing)

"how he could explain it? that he'd gazed upon frescoes in Tuscan sunlight, and found a different, easier way to be in the world?"

that I identify with. something just clicked in my head and I found a different, easier way to be in the world.

which I assume is the ultimate goal of art, including music, in some way or another, directly stated or otherwise.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I think droid, and third, are on a right track

I imagine devotion specifically in the process of artistic creation

you literally have to be devoted to this task. it's hard and mostly thankless. making music is logistically difficult (at least, I find it to be).

as well as devotion to the creative urge. idk, it's one of those unquantifiable things. I guess it shares that with religious belief. you have it or you don't.

and early religion, as I understand it, much closer to spiritual ecstasy. the Pythia at Delphi, mystery cults, and going further back animism, shamanism.

this really gets into history of religion and comparative religion beyond I'm sure any of our expertise

but something about scriptures (dogma), religious infrastructure, etc getting away from pure worship
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm not sure if that's right. anti-state communism, for instance, is a belief because it's unlikely to happen, but that doesn't make it a religion, you could argue that about state communism convincingly, or politics. similarly shamanism is such a loose term does it even make sense to call it a religion? I really don't think so.

Something like sufism is part of the organised islamic religion, in that the truly mavric
sufis would not be considered sufis by the majority of the populous or the ruling classes.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I think droid, and third, are on a right track

I imagine devotion specifically in the process of artistic creation

you literally have to be devoted to this task. it's hard and mostly thankless. making music is logistically difficult (at least, I find it to be).

as well as devotion to the creative urge. idk, it's one of those unquantifiable things. I guess it shares that with religious belief. you have it or you don't.

and early religion, as I understand it, much closer to spiritual ecstasy. the Pythia at Delphi, mystery cults, and going further back animism, shamanism.

this really gets into history of religion and comparative religion beyond I'm sure any of our expertise

but something about scriptures (dogma), religious infrastructure, etc getting away from pure worship


oops i think we posted at the same time. yeah agreed with this.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I might flip barty's initial premise around, and posit:

the initial religious and artistic impulses come from a similar place (to explain the unexplainable/articulate the unarticulable, find something beyond one's own finite existence, etc)

then I would be interested, I guess, in where and how the religious and artistic impulses

at some point they were mostly one and the same

that spins off in like a million potential interesting directions
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
seeking, reaching, wanting to transcend. religion is based on these notions. all twisted now, of course. but that's the roots of the good shit for sure. was trying to get at that in the depths thread. "easier way to be in the world" is a good shout. if existence is suffering, art and music more than any for me, is a way to explore it and try to find ways to deal with it. whether it be embracing the storm, seeking solace or whatever floats your boat.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
one we've discussed (or I've discussed, anyway) here before is the transposition of a specific spiritual ecstasy from religious (gospel) to secular (soul, disco, house)

i.e. (these are all I think well-known and/or reposts but whatever they're all amazing tunes)



Engineer: GOD


etc ad inf
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
or going the other way my personal fave Spacemen 3 with their gospel influences and endless references to Jesus, the lord, etc

in this case both literal and doubling as a metaphor for drugs (the ecstasy and agony of heroin), i.e. gospel as filtered thru The Velvet Underground

their best record - Perfect Prescription - being essentially a pure distillation of that concept
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
"easier way to be in the world"
it surely is

to maintain some kernel of that moment of spiritual ecstasy in every moment that follows, in the course of the unrelenting drudgery of life

it's hard to hold onto but if it shines bright enough I find I mostly can

I might call it the ecstasy of ambiguity, to paraphrase de Beauvoir
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
is it really a perversion though? in the UK our masjids are all very masculine and patriarchal. like we don't have something equivalent to women empowerment through the black church in our communities. There are outliers but that's all they are. 99% of masjids are very very conservative.

Is this a perversion or more the idea that we have to relive the premodern past, which, by way of its very impossibility means an orthodoxy has to be codified and nuance erased? I don't think perversion is quite right here, something like Stalinism as it later developed would be a perversion (not that im a leninist but you know...) Even in the original edition of foundations of Leninism big moustache claimed that socialism in one country was not possible, that was later redacted. ISIS is also a perversion. Hamas? They are reactionary for sure but can you use the same term?
 
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