Sylvan, Robin. New York: New York University Press, 2002. viii + 291 pages, $19.00 (USD).  ISBN 0-8147-9809-8.  

[1]  This book could well be renamed Varieties of Musical-Religious Experience, or at least understood as key chapters in this necessary sequel to William James.  Robin Sylvan has written an account of the religious dimensions - both conscious and unconscious, cultivated and accidental - found within four distinct late twentieth-century popular music subcultures: Deadheads, participants in Raves, Metalheads, and Hip-Hop afficianados.  To establish a theoretical basis for exploring these cryptic modes of religious practice, Sylvan effectively writes a defense for blurring the boundary between what is commonly recognized as religion and what some scholars have termed "para-religious" phenomena.  In doing so, Sylvan has performed a positive service for all - be they scholars, practitioners, or fans - who are willing to contemplate the possibility of the numinous in popular culture.  

[2]  The book is neatly divided into two sections.  The first, titled "Theoretical, Structural, and Historical Background," sets the context for thinking about music and religion, and ensures that such thinking remains grounded in history rather than floating amidst an abstract harmony of the spheres.  Sylvan is particularly interested in the West African roots of musical spiritual practices, following Michael Ventura's work (but without losing his own voice). 

[3]  The second section, "Popular Music Subcultures as Religion: A Comparative Analysis Based on Ethnographic Research," spends one chapter on each of the four popular music genres.  While these chapters make some cross-references to each other, they are essentially free standing, and readers interested in only one of these musics could easily limit themselves to the relevant chapter.  The ethnographic material comes from Sylvan's fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1990s; he includes his open-ended interview questions and brief biographies of his interviewees as an appendix. 

[4]  The comparison to William James with which I began was not unintended.  Throughout the book Sylvan openly acknowledges his teachers and influences (an echo of this book's past life as a dissertation), including James, Rudolph Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Mircea Eliade, Victor Turner, and his advisors Charles Long and Catherine Albanese.  Those who dislike this strand of religious studies will be inimical to this book, because Sylvan's style employs both the best traits of these authors and their most criticized tendencies, such as an acceptance of the centrality of subjectivity (for both author and subject), and a generally positive valuation of religion as an element of human existence.  At the same time, though, Sylvan's attentiveness to issues of race and historic situatedness are excellent, constituting the best political tools with which to adapt a phenomenological approach to the contemporary situation.

[5]  By virtue of his age, training, and musical abilities, Sylvan is in an excellent position to articulate insights of the late-baby-boomer generation concerning music and religion.  He mentions how spiritual experiences in popular culture strike members of the post-World War II generation as "natural and obvious" (9).  I can corroborate his claim here, from both my teaching and research in this field.  A former Deadhead discussing this book with me said that he and his friends had openly discussed the religious dimensions of the concert experience, and that, for him, the religious experiences he had in that setting are still the benchmark by which he evaluates the depth dimension of any spiritual experience.  In the classroom, I find that this book liberates students to share their musical heirophanies; it especially gives musicians a vocabulary for sharing their insights.

[6]  One of the easily overlooked facets of Traces of the Spirit which I appreciate is Sylvan's insistence on keeping the musical experience primary, rather than privileging lyrical content, as is so often done in studies of popular music.  In addition to focusing attention on the oft-ignored dimension of sound, it also enables him to highlight the somatic aspects of experience.  This simultaneously deflects attention from arid debates over lyrical content and helps Sylvan to establish a West African/African-American religious sensibility as the norm.  In the only place where he mentions lyrics explicitly, in the chapter on the Grateful Dead, it works as a Q.E.D.: the lyrics reinforce his interpretation of the musical-religious culture (114-116).

[7]  The thorniest chapter in the book covers heavy metal music and culture: "Stairway to Heaven, Highway to Hell: Heavy Metal and Metalheads" (152-181).  Here Sylvan's marked dislike of the music gets in his way, and his hostility becomes obvious.  For instance, he refers to this subculture as having "a surrogate religiosity if you will," a language of distance that he doesn't use for other genres (163).  While he entertains the idea suggested by other scholars of heavy metal - such as Rob Walser and Deena Weinstein - that the music channels violence rather than encourages it, while fostering a sense of catharsis, Sylvan remains uneasy.  Eventually he breaks with previous scholarship on a key issue: the meaning and intentionality of Satanic imagery in heavy metal.  Saying that Satanic imagery is "too pervasive to ignore," he notes the rise of Black metal and death metal in Northern Europe with apprehension (178-179).  This is an important debate that needs more intervention from religious studies scholars; it deserved more space than Sylvan could give it here.  Finally, in what is a key category for phenomenologists of religious experience, Sylvan suggests that the religious experience for heavy metal fans does not normally involve the loss of ego boundaries (165).  If such categorical differences do exist, that is an interesting area for further study; however, because of Sylvan's (self-confessed) bias against this music, it is difficult uncritically  to accept his conclusions.

[8]  These concerns about the heavy metal chapter are, however, an isolated case in what is an excellent and significant book.  Sylvan was fortunate to find informants who were articulate, reflective, and passionate about their musical-religious experiences.  I'll follow Sylvan's lead from Traces of the Spirit, and let one of those voices (my personal favorite, the rave fan Bahar Badizadegan) articulate the wisp of the ineffable:

The feeling that music gave me was higher than anything.Things that words could never say, music can.  Music can be anywhere, anytime in that same form, and fill the entire atmosphere and bring what it needs to bring, and connect people.To me, that's the ultimate bliss, is music.  Everything is music.  If we really said what we really wanted to say, if we really said everything that is our deepest feeling within our soul, we'd actually be singing to each other. (148).

Jennifer Rycenga
San José State University
San José, California
jrycenga@earthlink.net