Zachary R. Smith
Abstract
The secular experience of Sunday in the rhetoric of rock ’n’
roll (sex, drugs and subversion) proves Eliade’s formulation of the profane
readily encapsulates with the term’s popular understanding. As David Chidester
articulates, rock ’n’ roll is often viewed as “the antithesis of religion, not
merely an offensive art form, but a blasphemous, sacrilegious, and
antireligious force in society.” In the same way that Christianity sought to
differentiate itself from Judaism, so too does rock ’n’ roll seek to make
ground from the traditional terms and Puritanical values with which
Christianity regularly deals. As in most attempts at differentiation, the
differentiator can never escape those fundamental commonalities it shares with
the differentiated. Judaism and Christianity, for instance, differ most
dramatically in practice and belief, but share a similar discourse. Despite the
concerted efforts of some to categorically separate the two into diametric oppositions,
Christianity and rock ’n’ roll share certain fundamental qualities which, as
Chidester advances, ultimately render the relationship between the two
ambivalent; “rock ’n’ roll has appropriated some of the elementary forms of
religious life,” and so has religion, particularly Christianity, appropriated
some of the elementary forms of rock ’n’ roll. The relationship between the
two, then, will prove as complicated and as strained as the relationship
between Christianity and its antecedent, Judaism. Just as Sunday stands out as
a site of differentiation between Christianity and Judaism, a battleground upon
which claims to religious meaning are contested, so does Sunday serve as an
access point into the nexus of Christianity and rock ’n’ roll, where the
significance of the day, and by extension the legitimacy of the respective
traditions, is alternately contested, conferred, and confirmed.
[1] An Amazon.com
“Song Title” search of the “Popular Music” category reveals that, within the
parameters of the site’s searchable stock, the titles of 9161 songs contain the
word “Sunday.” The combined total of song titles containing other days of the
week amounts to 15321, with Saturday, weighing in at 5857, as the leading
contender for Sunday’s reign. Sunday, therefore, represents over a third of all
songs titled after days of the week within the Amazon database. While there is
little scientific soundness about this method of inquiry, it is more than
adequate to demonstrate the overwhelming presence of Sunday, above all other
days, in pop music. Despite its preeminence, the contemporary significance of
Sunday does not originate within the sphere of popular music but rather within
the annals of early Christianity. In Christianity, Sunday observance has
accrued a mythological, ahistorical quality, positioning its origins in a
nebulous eternity outside of ordinary time, and by extension beyond scrutiny.
However, as Samuele Bocchiocchi elucidates in his From Sabbath to Sunday, the origins of Sunday observance in the Christian
tradition are entirely temporal, and furthermore political; immanent rather
than transcendent. An examination of the interplay between secular and sacred
conceptions of Sunday will reveal that the pop cultural significance of Sunday
is in large part a reaction to its uniquely political and frequently unexamined
meaning for the Christian tradition.
[2] In The
Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade pays
incomparable amounts of attention to the notion of “sacred time,” the necessary
counterpart to the more regularly discussed notion of “sacred space.” For
Eliade, sacred time is functional; an exercise in world-making. Sacred time, as
constituted by ritual and liturgy, marks the reactualization of those processes
that occurred ab origine, those
divine irruptions of creativity which are both responsible for constructing
existence and imbuing being with
meaning. Sacred time is less a commemoration of those primordial processes as
it is a return to them, a plunging of existential meaning into the Lazarus pit
of atemporality, at once recreating the world, reforging time, and rendering humanity
reborn. In Eliade’s own words, “religious man thirsts for the real. By every
means at his disposal, he seeks to reside at the very source of primordial
reality, when the world was in statu nascendi.”[1] “Religious man” quenches his thirst,
Eliade continues, by periodically returning to this original time, breaking
with the profane time which characterizes nonreligious existence. Sacred time,
in contradistinction to profane time, exists outside of the linear duration of
temporality; it is a “reintegration” of the present with the primordial, and
therefore is “indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable” and
“homologized to eternity.”[2]
[3] The specific
quality of that sacred time is coloured by the “divine gesta” from which it originally springs forth, and to
which it seeks to return through ritualized symbolic reenactment of that
paradigmatic cosmogonic myth.[3] In Eliade’s formulation, time and space
are irresistible correlatives; inevitably coupled with the cosmogony
reactualized in sacred time comes the constitution of time itself. Further,
“just as the cosmogony is the archetype of all creation, cosmic time, which the
cosmogony brings forth, is the paradigmatic model for all other times.”[4] To this effect, Eliade concludes, the reactualization of cosmogony recovers the
sanctity of both templum and tempus, the spatial and the temporal; the world and the
year are not only metaphors for each other but symbiotic entities that religious
“man” periodically seeks to simultaneously renew, as “for him it is sacred time
that makes possible the other time, ordinary time, the profane duration in
which every human life takes its course.”[5]
[4] In
Christianity, Sundays and the corresponding services constitute a regularized
sacred time to which the devout return on a weekly basis. Paradoxically, Eliade
both normatizes and exceptionalizes Christianity and its conception of time.
Unlike other “world religions,” there is a historicity to the Christian
tradition; Jesus Christ existed not ab origine, but rather in time, an immanency which Eliade would characterize as
profane. Here Eliade introduces the notion of theophany, a “transhistorical” conception of time in which
“everything that has happened in history had to happen as it did, because the
universal spirit so willed it.”[6] The mythologies of Christianity do not
take place outside of time, or even at the beginning of time, but rather serve
to sanctify all of time; “history becomes sacred history.”[7] While
abandoning the notion of cyclical time, Christianity maintains the necessity of
the rehearsal of those historical events surrounding the life of Christ; the
sanctification of time standing in for an inability to return to it,
effectively capturing both the ontological potency of eternity with the
legitimacy of historicity.
[5]
Not surprisingly, these two forces can oftentimes contradict or even oppose one
another, as seen in the origins of Sunday observance. The alpha-Sunday of the
Christian calendar is Easter Sunday, marking Christ’s resurrection. Although it
generally goes uninterrogated, the logical inference is that Easter Sunday
commemorates the Resurrection, and every other Sunday commemorates Easter, a
prismatic diffusion of worship and remembrance spread across the entire year.
The reason Sunday became that day privileged over all others is due in part to
the Jewish eschatology which places the Sabbath on the first day of the seven
day planetary week; under Jewish influence, the second day of this planetary
week, which by popular Greco-Roman astrological belief and practice had been
devoted to the sun, eventually became the first.[8] For the Jews, the week
served as a timeline which encapsulated the entirety of history, the final
Sabbath marking the last millennium preceding the eternity of the “eighth day,”
Sunday. As Willy Rordorf asserts, “Christians did not only use the Jewish
designation of Sunday: they found a rich symbolic signification in it with
reference to the apocalyptic speculations on the eschatological ‘eighth day.’”[9] This synergy of millenarian and resurrection mythology bestowed upon Sunday an
incalculable religious significance within Christianity. Echoing Eliade’s
functionalist analysis of sacred time, Rordorf concludes that
Sunday by Sunday the main events of the
history of Salvation are recalled, particularly the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ, Sunday by Sunday the experience is renewed of the risen Lord’s
coming among his disciples; and Sunday by Sunday, through that very experience,
the expectation is renewed of the final advent of the Son of Man in glory.[10]
Rordorf’s survey is not altogether
incorrect, but, as Samuele Bocchiocchi illumines, ultimately historically
neglectful. Bocchiocchi’s thoroughly researched claim maintains that the
origins of Sunday observance are less apostolic and biblical than they are
secular and political. The institution of Sunday observance, he argues,
originated in Rome, where the Christian population was most concentrated and
the Church most authoritative. It was also here in the capital city where
Christians most sought differentiation from the Jews, their neighbouring, and
increasingly persecuted, religious forebears. In Bocchiocchi’s words, “the
introduction of Sunday worship in place of ‘Jewish’ Sabbath keeping—the
latter being particularly derided by several Roman writers of the
time—could well represent a measure taken by the leaders of the Church of
Rome to evidence their severance from Judaism and thereby also avoid the payment
of a discriminatory tax.”[11] By shifting from the Sabbath to
Sunday, early Christians would not only be evading a financial nuisance, but
also the anti-Semitism that catalyzed its implementation.
[6] Not only did
Christians abandon Sabbath-keeping in favour of a new day of worship,
Bocchiocchi argues, they in fact began to fast on the Jewish day of revelry, as
mandated originally by Marcion, and eventually adopted by Pope Sylvester and
the Church of Rome: “If every Sunday is to be observed joyfully by the Christians
on account of the resurrection, then every Sabbath on account of the burial is
to be regarded in execration of the Jews.”[12] The reformulation of
Saturday from a joyful day of remembrance to a solemn elegy served to both
simultaneously differentiate the Christians from the Jews and politically align
them with anti-Semitism that characterized Roman leadership.
[7]
Politically, Sunday does not seem to carry any notable weight or
significance—any day of the week could have been used by the early Christians
in their aims of differentiation. Rordorf’s exegesis notwithstanding,
Bocchiocchi deftly infers that the majority of Sunday’s religious significance
was not garnered by its own right but heaped upon it after the fact; Jesus’
resurrection and sacrifice “was not celebrated, according to the New Testament,
on a specific weekly day.”[13] The question then is, why Sunday?
Rordorf rightly, yet somewhat naively, asserts that “Christians exploited the
coincidence of their Sunday with the day of the sun. The early missionaries
used the clever evangelistic method of ‘baptizing’ as far as possible the
customs and practices of their converts,” who, particularly in proximity to
Rome, were largely Pagan.[14] Bocchiocchi would for the most part
agree with Rordorf’s assessment, differing only with the coincidental terms in
which he spoke; for Bocchiocchi, the institution of Sunday-keeping was not the
result of a string of fortunate coincidences but a deliberate and calculated
evangelical and political tactic: the existing veneration for the day of the sun
oriented Christians toward such a day both to evidence their sharp distinction
from the Jews and to facilitate the acceptance of the Christian faith by the
pagans,”[15] as well as “to draw the Christians
closer to the Roman customs”[16] (as Bocchiocchi later expands,
“sun-worship was ‘one of the oldest components of the Roman religion.’”).[17] Along with borrowing the totemic potency of Sun imagery from Pagan religions,
Christianity constructed its own web of solar signification which identified
Jesus Christ with the sun, as evidenced in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue: “For His word of truth and wisdom is more blazing
and bright than the might of the sun …”[18] According to Justin, the
first day marked the creation of light, and as such it was only appropriate
that the first day of the week, that which is named after the sun, become
commemorative of this godly innovation. As Bocchiocchi advances, the symbology
which links the sun with Jesus is attributable to the coincidence of His
resurrection occurring on this same day, citing Jerome; “it is on this day that
the Light of the World has appeared and on this day that the Sun of Justice has
risen."[19]
[8]
The contemporary significance of Sunday, that which distinguishes it from the
other days of the week, finds its origins in the politics and liturgy of early
Christianity, as delineated above. Sunday-keeping, despite what a number of
apologists may be inclined to believe and argue, is not a biblical mandate nor
is it an apostolic tradition; rather it finds its roots in the worldly affairs
of antiquity. The motivations for its implementation pertain to religion, but are
not altogether religious, which is to
say that while Sunday service may constitute the majority of what Eliade
qualifies as the “sacred time” experienced by church-going Christians, the
tradition does not hail from on high. The origin of Sunday observance has
garnered the same sort of paradoxical timeless historicity as the event which
it is commonly held to commemorate; the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In terms
established by Kierkegaard and later articulated by Peter Manchester, “the
Christian experience of Christ as revealed is temporal, which is to say that it
is shaped as a synthesis of time and eternity”; just as the historic Jesus has been glorified as
Christ, so has Sunday worship accrued sacred origins which place it both in and
outside of time.[20] The timelessness that has been tacitly
attributed to Sunday by its sacrosanct processes of “formalization and
ritualization” leads contemporary Christians to the logical inference that this
sort of Christ-like atemporality implies that Sunday is a divinely sanctioned
day of worship.[21] In Eric Hobsbawn's formulation,
Sunday-keeping is an “invented tradition”: “a set of practices, normally
governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic
nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by
repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past”—a
“continuity,” Hobsbawm continues, “... that is largely facetious.”[22] Sunday-keeping problematizes Hobsbawm's categorization to a certain extent,
though, maintaining a continuity not with an ancient past, but instead with the
exceedingly more potent legitimizing power of divine atemporality, one “automatically
implied” by the sacrosanct nature of the rituals it encourages. However, as
Bocchiocchi elucidates, Sunday observance was not born outside of time, or even
at the beginning of time; quite to the contrary, its origin is very much
situated within time. Its development is an immanent part of history, a latent
innovation of a burgeoning tradition seeking to assert individuality, escape
political persecution, and augment its constituency and sphere of influence.
[9] There exists
an inverse relationship of sorts between the vast numbers who regularly take
part in, or are affected by, Sunday observance and the relative few who are
familiar with the tradition's history; Sunday-keeping’s preeminence in
contemporary American culture (to which I will generally limit my discussion)
instills apathy regarding its origins. Certain phenomena evade examination by
representing themselves as axiomatic truths, facts of reality unworthy of
investigation. In this regard, observance on Sunday has become as instinctive
as the “God bless you” which necessarily follows a sneeze, a reaction which has
become as involuntary as the ejaculation it follows; the history of Sundays, as
Roland Barthes would have it, has been privatized.[23] This
formulation of “observance” extends beyond its liturgical implications, as
Sunday is “observed” by the secular quarters of the population as well, though
perhaps not by choice. In many states, liquor cannot be sold on Sunday;
oftentimes, shopping malls and retail shops close early, if they open at all.
As Witold Rybczynski observes, “every Sunday, somewhere in the United States,
it is illegal to barber; bowl; play billiards, bingo, polo, or cards; gamble;
race horses; hunt; go to the movies; sell cars, fresh meat or alcohol; organize
boxing or wrestling matches; hold public dances or sporting events; or dig
oysters.”[24] But less apparent than the intrusion of
the religious sphere on the commercial (a courtesy which the corporate world
less and less frequently extends to the devout) is the popular experience of
Sunday found in the feeling the day elicits.[25]
[10] In the early
20th century, Sándor Ferenczi, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud,
published a piece entitled “Sunday Neuroses” which described an intense anxiety
some of his clients felt exclusively on Sundays.[26] Some
seventy years later, the New York Times printed an article citing the psychoanalyst’s work, attributing the “empty
feeling” Ferenczi observed to a host of explanations, ranging from
chronobiology (the weekend’s late hours disrupting the body’s natural rhythms)
to the existential angst which sets in whenever there is enough free time to
ponder the preceding week’s decisions.[27] An article in The
Guardian explores the same issues at
length, concluding, just as the Times had fifteen years earlier, with first-person accounts relating the
“torpor and melancholy” of Sundays.[28] These first person accounts serve to
both individualize and universalize the experience of Sunday, demonstrating the
day’s unique personal relevance while confirming its ubiquity.
[11] The
prevailing secular mood of Sunday is further substantiated by the art dedicated
to it, as various forms of media have assumed responsibility for the
articulation and espousal of the despondency the day evokes. While a
familiarity with the historical origins of Sunday observance is not a
precondition to the popular experience of Sunday, it is integral to the
interpretation of that experience. Experience is not readily reducible to text,
as articulated by Robert Sharf along with countless others.[29] Contrary to Sharf’s position, this does not mean that the academic
investigation of experience should be abandoned altogether. However
unverifiable, the widely-corroborated description of some phenomena confirms a
ubiquity of experience demanding of attention—artistic, scientific,
philosophic, and otherwise. Sunday is one phenomenon deserving of such
attention. While enmeshed in religious implications, there is a secular Sunday
experience that literally and figuratively takes place outside the hallowed
walls of the church, disassociated from (though perhaps not independent of) the
religious discourse which dictates the mood of the day for the devout. Plainly,
for religious and nonreligious people alike, every day is not like Sunday.
Evidence for the significance of the secular (or profane, as Eliade would have
it) experience of Sunday lies in art; superficial investigations akin to the
one which opened this article reveal Sundays to be a theme prevalent in recent
poetry, paintings, prose, theater, film and, the category with which this
article is most crucially concerned, pop music lyrics. While this discussion
will be limited to pop music, the impression the ethos of Sunday has left on
the artistic sphere is sizeable and worthy of some recognition, providing some
precedent for the modern rock ’n’ roll which I seek to analyze. That set of
moods and motivations which has become literally synonymous with Sunday escapes
definition, but not conveyance, as the sentiment behind the majority of
artistic works which revolve around Sunday are located in roughly the same blue
area of the emotional gradient. As Jimmy Porter, the protagonist of John
Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger, verbalizes: “God, how I hate Sundays! It's always so
depressing, always the same. We never seem to get any further, do we? Always
the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing. A few more hours,
and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away ... Oh heavens, how I long
for a little ordinary enthusiasm ... I've an idea. Why don't we have a little
game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.” In
his Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell observes through his protagonist, Gordon
Cornstock, “that strange listless feeling of Sunday night when people are more
tired after a day of idleness than after a day of work.” The titles of 1948’s It
Always Rains on Sunday and 1971’s Sunday
Bloody Sunday both speak to the
melancholic banality the day has accrued (examples drawn from The Guardian, April 1st, 2006). Edward Hopper’s 1930
painting Early Sunday Morning presents
an empty street, a characteristic experience of the day which contributes to
the sense of desolation and lonesomeness it has come to represent. F.W.
Dillistone notes that “four of the major poets of this century have each
written a poem, using ‘Sunday Morning’ in the title (Wallace Stevens, Louis
MacNeice, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell). In his analysis of Lowell’s Waking
Early Sunday Morning, Dillistone channels
Patrick Cosgrave, asserting that
‘The tragedy
consists in the statement of man’s capacity to see into, to seek out, and
define his predicament, to sense an absolute canon of judgment, an ultimate
moral order, but to be unable to channel his emotion, conviction and life-force
into the service of this intellectual comprehension’ … There is the tragic
sense that neither natural religion nor the religion of the traditional
churches can any longer give the freedom and the power to fulfill our
potentialities. Sunday Morning has become the symbol of yearning rather than of
comfort, of death-in-life rather than life out of death.[30]
This
hollow sense of unresolved potentiality is echoed in Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday
Morning Coming Down, as illuminated
further in subsequent discussion. Dillistone concludes that Sunday, once an
emblem of control and order in time, is transforming into a symbol of the
chaotic darkness in which modern humanity stumbles in the quest for meaning. Pop music, or more specifically, rock ’n’ roll, provides an avenue (a relatively
wide one in contradistinction to the exclusionary narrows of so-called “high
art”) by which the experience of Sunday can be engaged academically. A close
examination of several paradigmatic examples will reveal the complex network of
relations, and potential causality, between the religious and secular
experiences of Sunday.
[12] As will swiftly
become evident, the conveyance of the secular experience of Sunday in the
rhetoric of rock ’n’ roll (sex, drugs and subversion) proves that Eliade’s
formulation of the profane readily encapsulates with the term’s popular
understanding. As David Chidester articulates, rock ’n’ roll is often viewed as
“the antithesis of religion, not merely an offensive art form, but a
blasphemous, sacrilegious, and antireligious force in society.”[31] In the
same way that Christianity sought to differentiate itself from Judaism, so too
does rock ’n’ roll seek to make ground from the traditional terms and
Puritanical values with which Christianity regularly deals. As in most attempts
at differentiation, the differentiator can never escape those fundamental
commonalities it shares with the differentiated. Judaism and Christianity, for
instance, differ most dramatically in practice and belief, but share a similar
discourse. Despite the concerted efforts of some to categorically separate the
two into diametrical oppositions, Christianity and rock ’n’ roll share certain
fundamental qualities which, as Chidester advances, ultimately render the
relationship between the two ambivalent; “rock ’n’ roll has appropriated some
of the elementary forms of religious life,” and so has religion, particularly
Christianity, appropriated some of the elementary forms of rock ’n’ roll.[32] The relationship between the two, then, will prove to be as complicated and as
strained as the relationship between Christianity and its antecedent, Judaism.
Just as Sunday stands out as a site of differentiation between Christianity and
Judaism, a battleground upon which claims to religious meaning are contested,
so does Sunday serve as an access point into the nexus of Christianity and rock
’n’ roll, where the significance of the day, and by extension the legitimacy of
the respective traditions, is alternately contested, conferred, and confirmed.
The Secular
Reconfiguration of Sunday in American Rock ’n’ Roll
[13] While Lou
Reed is described by Tim Parrish as “insistently anti-Christian,” Parrish
maintains that the Velvet Underground frontman is a “religious writer … obsessed
with communicating through art an experience beyond the sensation of ordinary
life.”[33] Despite relatively frequently employing
Christian images and themes in his songwriting, Reed grew up in a Jewish
household. As a Jewish rock ’n’ roll musician growing up in America (an
expressly Christian society), Reed, in a way, represents the center of the Venn
diagram of these seemingly disparate traditions, the living embodiment of the
futility of differentiation. With respect to the song in question, “Sunday
Morning” (from The Velvet Underground and Nico), Reed was not alone in
the composition process but joined by bandmate John Cale, the collaboration not
undermining the song’s poignancy but rather serving to confirm the transreligious
familiarity of the experience.[34] A cursory glance at the song’s lyrics
will make the emotional thrust of the piece immediately apparent, in that it
juxtaposes pseudo-religious imagery and diction (“praise the dawning”) with
notions of futility (“I’m falling”), regret (“wasted years”), paranoia (“watch
out, the world’s behind you”), and the overall malaise, the “restless feeling,”
that is existential angst. In this sense, Reed and Cale are contributing to the
construction of the ethos of Sunday. Where Christianity markets the day as
commemorative of the resurrection and celebratory of rebirth, the Velvet
Underground paints a picture of “death-in-life,” mocking the praise the devout offer
to the rising sun—an image which Christian literature thoroughly
intertwines with the resurrection of Jesus.[35]
[14] Just as
language exists in a network of meaning, so too is Sunday inextricably
implicated in the syntax of the week, the meaning of the day dictated by its
relation to those calendric bedfellows that precede and follow it. Naturally,
this relationship is coloured differently according to the schema by which it
is interpreted. As previously established, the Christian Sunday was constructed
in opposition to the Jewish Sabbath, which technically begins Friday night and
extends to the whole of Saturday. In a flagrantly anti-Semitic move, those joyous
days which for the Jews constitute the Sabbath became for Christians mirthless
days of somber piety, simultaneously furthering the aim of differentiation and
undermining the religious sanctity and cultural potency of the Jewish Sabbath.
The treatment of the weekend by that “religion of no beliefs” that is rock ’n’
roll marks a popular return to the primacy of Saturday as the day that supplies
the week its momentum.[36] Rather than the pious avoidance of work
in reverence of the sacred, Saturday (and to a greater degree, Saturday night)
expressly demands a degree of moral flexibility and profanity in excess;
Saturday night is, in effect, alright for fighting, along with countless other
debaucheries.[37] It is less likely that the rock music
sphere is inundated with overzealous Jews than it is probable that the
reestablishment of Saturday as a day of revelry is a display of defiance and
indeed differentiation from that Christianity which mandates solemnity. It
would seem more immediately apparent that Saturday has garnered its status as
the most festive day of the week on account of the fact that it is the most
commonly shared leisure time among the populace, and that it allows for later
nights than the rest of the week as Sunday can more readily absorb the consequences
of excess than can Monday with its glum early-morning return to the work week.
However, this is precisely the sort of cultural axiom which requires
interrogation, and that populace which so blindly enjoys its weekend leisure
time should demand that Saturday divulge its most precious secret and ask
“Why?”. Saturday did not become a part of the weekend as it is currently
conceived because it is time that is inherently better suited for relaxation
than any other day, nor was it the product of some sort of under-publicized
union compromise with the corporate world. Sunday defines Saturday just as
Saturday does Sunday; the Christian monopoly on leisure time triggered a
backlash, a reclamation, and a compromise. The weekend would henceforth be
split; a day for humanity, a day for God; a day for profane, and a day for
sacred. Popular music speaks for the populace, and it is in this way that rock
‘n’ roll has come to claim Saturday as its unholy day.
[15] While it goes
unmentioned, the echoes of Saturday night’s cries reverberate throughout Reed
and Cale’s “Sunday Morning,” and indeed rock ’n’ roll’s elegiac treatment of
Sundays on the whole. As decreed by the tradition’s sole commandment, “Sex,
Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll,” the sacraments of rock are comprised of corporeal
excess; as demonstrated by the maxim’s wording, sex and drugs are in fact
privileged over the music itself—the liturgy of the tradition, so to
speak. These excesses constitute one half of a persistent dichotomy within rock
’n’ roll music and lyrics, the simultaneously proverbial and literal “night
before” versus the “morning after”; following from previously established
logic, this dichotomy can be effortlessly reformulated as “Saturday” versus
“Sunday.” While the subject of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” is,
clearly, the morning after, it is the relation of the morning after, the
Sunday, to the night before, the Saturday, which ascribes to the morning its
significance. The rock ’n’ roll musician’s overextension into the world of instant
gratification marks for many a neglect of long-term spiritual investment. The
overtones of mortality that resonate in Sunday’s church bells serve to remind
Saturday night’s revelers of their spiritual drought, a deficit sapping meaning
from life. This sentiment can be noted in the entire breadth of the emotional
gestalt that Reed and Cale invoke in both lyrics and melody; the insignificance
of the past, the monotony of the present, and the futility of the future
referenced throughout the song coalesce in the purposefully vague “I’ve got a
feeling I don’t want to know.” In its attempts to resist and defy its
puritanical predecessor, it seems that rock ultimately renders itself
spiritually void, its lyrics positioning sympathizers in a melancholic constellation
of guilt and regret, and in doing so transforming an attempt at dissent into
the very force that perpetuates Christianity’s spiritual monopoly. But out of
this void, this nothingness, is an actively secular piece of art, a work which,
by virtue of the experiential commonalities it confirms, has its own
spiritually regenerative quality. By eliciting a sense of a postmodern
ontological truth, this explicitly profane song serves to unify humanity in a
way that is paradoxically akin to the religion it opposes.
[16] Rock ’n’ roll
music and religion are not systems of meaning that are closed to one another,
and, more often than the purists of each tradition would like to admit, there
is a good deal of overlap between the two. Often, the ways of thinking and
being offered up by each are structurally similar while qualitatively opposed,
particularly as American Christianity increasingly accommodates to the
mainstream via pop cultural touchstones. Perhaps the most notable accommodation
(or appropriation, depending on perspective) is the entrance of the electric
guitar—rock ’n’ roll's most immediate and incendiary metonym—into
the church. The debate as to whether such moves serve to make profane all that
traditionally has been held sacred or to augment the breadth and influence of
the term's meaning, is not one that this paper is intended to house, but merely
visit. That said, the collusion of Christianity and pop culture, with rock ’n’
roll as its most pervasive delegate, is incontrovertible. Despite the thrusts
for differentiation taken up by both traditions, space has been made for rock ’n’
roll in religion, and for the religious in rock ’n’ roll.
Kris
Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is a key commentary on the
friction between religion and rock, offering further testimony to rock ’n’
roll’s Saturday-Sunday dichotomy, and to the spiritual anguish of the morning
after a night of indulgence in the profane. The genealogy of “Sunday Morning
Coming Down” is equally as intriguing as “Sunday Morning,” though in very
different ways. While the words are Kristofferson’s, the song has been
popularized by Johnny Cash to the extent that Cash is commonly mistaken for the
sole author of the work. The song as it is popularly known today is, in
essence, a collaboration; where the partnership of Reed and Cale under the
auspices of a single band and producer seems to lend itself to a presumed
simultaneity of artistic input, Kristofferson and Cash’s collaboration is of a
different sort, one that is more retroactive than contemporaneous. Although
both Kristofferson and Cash are artists are traditionally considered as
working in the “country music” idiom, country can arguably be classified as a
regional aesthetic variant of rock, or even a subgenre, one which may be distinct
in some ways, but possessing of many of the same origins and influences. More
important than country music's relation to rock 'n' roll is the rebellious
nature of both of the personalities in question, embodying what has become
familiar to the American public as an ethos characterized by rock ’n’ roll.
While Kristofferson’s religious background remains private, Cash was a
self-proclaimed devout Christian, holding religion and spirituality in the
highest regard. “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” then, is a different sort of
rock song. Here, Christianity is not
being rebuked so much as it has been forgotten, the differentiation
begrudgingly accrued rather than fervently pursued. Unlike “Sunday Morning,”
which is largely abstract and oscillates between the first and second-person,
“Sunday Morning Coming Down” provides listeners with a narrative that is
consistently first-person. This narrator can be arguably reduced to either
Kristofferson or Cash, or perhaps neither, occupying a negligible space between
the two. In the same way that the collaborative nature of the Velvet
Underground lent itself to a confirmation of the commonalities of Sunday
experience, a similar sort of testament is evident here; by choosing to cover
the song, Cash is aligning himself with Kristofferson’s sentiments, but he is
also detaching authorship from the lyrics, effectively maintaining the intimacy
of the narrative while establishing the universality of the experience it
describes.
[17] The
transgressions of the night before are made plain in the very first lines of
the song, which allude to the narrator’s hangover. Rather than seeking to bury
the night in memory and renounce those substances that have yielded such
dolorous effects, the narrator instead invokes his poison as remedy, and drinks
a beer for breakfast (and has “one more for dessert”). This central
contradiction encompasses both the lyrics and, it would seem, the narrator’s
life, culminating in the refrain: “Wishin’, Lord, that I was stoned.” This line
is not without some history of its own, as Cash biographer Steve Turner
elucidates in Cash’s authorized biography, “The Man Called Cash”:
When he performed Kris Kristofferson’s
‘Sunday Morning Coming Down,’ the network wanted him to leave out the reference
to being ‘stoned.’ Someone suggested that instead of singing the line ‘wishin’,
Lord, that I was stoned’ he could sing 'wishin’, Lord, that I was home.’ ‘John
didn’t know what he was going to do with it,’ says Kristofferson. ‘When he sang
it that night he looked right up at me in the balcony and sang ‘wishin’, Lord,
that I was stoned’ and, to me that saved the song. I don’t think it ever would
have been that big if it had not had that word in it. He fought to preserve the
integrity of the song. And he won.’[38]
This line is most emblematic of the
paradoxical experience of the religious individual in rock ’n’ roll, as it
would seem that the narrator is beseeching God to grant him the means to that
which has been his most efficacious method of ignoring his faith. As evidenced
by his insistence on performing the song as it was written rather than yielding
to the network censors, it is likely this contradictory sentiment drew Cash to
the song. In reference to Cash, Kristofferson later sings, “He’s a pilgrim and
a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned— / He’s a walkin’ contradiction
…”[39] As Kristofferson implies, Cash’s strained relationship with religion mirrored
his struggles with amphetamine addiction; rather than the drugs that he
alternately indulged and resisted, Christianity was for Cash a conviction that
he intermittently sought to maintain and succeeded in upholding. As Turner
further articulates,
His … acts of spiritual rededication
often appeared more motivated by a need to survive than an unselfish desire to
serve God. When his life was falling apart, it seemed that, as a last resort,
he would turn to the teachings of Christ in the hope that he could be restored.
Yet, when his situation improved, he would gradually forget his commitments to
Christ and would soon find himself back where he started.[40]
The personal hypocrisy of being a
rock ’n’ roll musician on Saturday night and a devout Christian on Sunday
morning taxed Cash’s psyche in such a way that, as demonstrated by “Sunday
Morning Coming Down,” he saw it fit to demand narcotics from the same God who
forbids them. The effect of such an ignoble importunity combined with the
realization of the inescapability of such a contradictory cycle creates in the
narrator, and by extension in Cash and Kristofferson, an elegiac despondency, a
nostalgic longing for a purer time when faith was not obscured by addiction:
“And it took me back to something / That I’d lost somewhere, somehow along the
way.”
[18] Unlike the
Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” presents a
narrative in which time elapses; Sunday morning is not only the subject of the
song but also the period during which its events are set. There is, then, the
implicit yet plain guilt associated with the fact that after a night of profane
excess, the narrator opts to walk around and observe the happenings of the
morning instead of actually going to church. Perhaps for the narrator the sting
of hypocrisy is lessened by avoiding formal liturgy, but this attitude only
aids in the perpetuation of the lonesome cycle in which he is entangled. While
the song provides a sensory barrage of familiar Sunday phenomena, the central
image/sound of the song resides in the far-off ringing of a “lonely bell.” As
Dillistone observes in Louis MacNeice’s “Sunday Morning”:
It is the sound of church bells which
challenges the all-absorbing now of a Fate-determined existence. Though they
ring on Sunday, their rhythm and regularity are the same as that of “weekday
time.” No music or movement secures escape from that time which “deadens and
endures”… the clanging reminder even in the Now that time goes on regularly and
evenly toward death.[41]
Seeing as Kristofferson and Cash’s
narrator “stopped beside a Sunday school,” which would likely be held in a
church, it is doubtful that the ringing of the bell is genuinely as far off as
he perceives. Rather, the sound is as distant as the faith he “lost somewhere,
somehow along the way.” While the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” lacks
Kristofferson and Cash’s material protagonist, here too is the significance of
the chiming amplified, as a xylophonic rendering of a church bell’s ringing
spans the entire song. For Reed, Cale, Kristofferson and Cash, crafting a song
may have been an attempt to drown out the all-pervasive sound of church bells,
but ultimately the sound of the bell proved inescapable. For them, the
ceaseless ringing has become nothing more than a dirge, keeping rhythm in the
procession towards a meaningless death, the end of a life defined not by the
one day a week that counts, the sacred time, the real time, but rather by the
hollow profanity of the remaining six.
Sunday
and the Irreconcilable Collusion of Christianity and Rock ‘n’ Roll
[19] The
discursive measures taken by the Christian church in asserting the exclusively
religious significance of Sunday has left the nonreligious person stranded with
the residual woe that lack of faith necessarily entails. The day has been
forcibly maintained as empty, an open wound on the calendar that persistently
aggrieves secular America, a psychic infirmity which, as mandated by the
Christian church, can only be healed through religious piety. For the
nonreligious, as evidenced in “Sunday Morning” and “Sunday Morning Coming
Down,” the church bells offer no relief but rather, as Eliade advances, their
“repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic
vision of existence.”[42] Whenever taking on Sunday as its
subject, it is this vision of existence to which popular rock ’n’ roll music
continually returns. As evidenced by Reed, Cale, Kristofferson and Cash, the
sound of the church bells, and by implication the wasting of one’s life, is
presented as entirely inevitable, not only incorporated into the lyrics but
into sonic landscape of the songs themselves.
[20] Sunday was
once a day reserved for religious celebration and the veneration of God, a day
upon which one’s life mission was assigned and affirmed. However, the
reservation of Sunday has persisted for secular America without its religious
impetus, imbuing the day with a sense of the hollow potentiality of
unfulfilled, and moreover unknown, obligations. For secular America, lacking
the existential specifics religion once supplied, this empty time is filled
pondering such monolithically nebulous concepts as mortality and morality, the
previously accounted for inestimabilities of existence. There is something to
be said, too, for the terms upon which the exceptionalism of Sunday was first
constructed. Sunday is not an inherently, or even scripturally, holy day. The
political motivations behind the Sunday-keeping institution smack of a futile
immanence rather than the transcendence with which its history has been
festooned, an inconsistency which, as reflected in the melancholy of
contemporary pop music, continues to reverberate in the contemporary experience
of the day. While Christianity and rock ’n’ roll offer conflicting conceptions
of Sunday, the two are joined by their shared presence on the contentious plane
of significance the day provides, simultaneously constructing Sunday’s popular
relevance while confirming their own. Despite their ideological incongruities,
Christianity and rock ‘n’ roll are inexorably mired in a single web of cultural
meaning, their respective attempts at differentiation serving to, as in
quicksand, further their descent into conflation. Increasingly has rock ‘n’
roll become a religion whose idols preach conformity over dissent, Christianity
a spectacle whose touring superstars sell out stadiums; both have become
exaggerated shadows of their former selves, a development due in part to the
confluence Sunday’s nexus has wrought.
Just as
anachronistic sediment collects over eons where tectonic plates collide, so
does Sunday gradually and irreversibly accrue a litany of meanings, “the sad
detritus of time,”[43] as history trudges forward and as the
sacred and the profane persist in their own slow, unremitting collision. Where
the time once served as a slate upon which Christianity could inscribe
significance, secular America has, as demonstrated by Sunday’s prevalence in
popular rock ’n’ roll, negotiated, mediated, reconstructed this meaning in an
attempt to lay its own claim on the day, however reactionary it may be. While
the religious formulation of the day espouses the more directly appealing
sentiments of togetherness and mirth, Sunday’s pensive secular conception is
not without merit, providing at the very least a critical vantage point from
which the historical incongruities of American Christian Churches can be
recognized, addressed, and, ideally, incorporated into their contemporary
teachings. Coming clean in this way will not only serve to allay the
despondence of all those sulking under Sunday's clouds, but will also allow the
Church to recover a certain amount of its cultural authenticity, authority and
relevance. A tall order, perhaps, but not entirely out of reach. Monday may be
lost, but for Sunday there is still some hope.
Notes
