Gods and Guitars: Seeking the Sacred in Post-1960s Popular Music

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Introduction: Spirituality in Post-1960s Lyrics
Track 1: Religion on Record: Popular Music's Anxiety of Influence
Track 2: Church in a Guitar Case: Comfort and Compassion in Popular Music
Track 3: Outrageous Religion: Sex, Defiance, and Obsession with the Sacred
Track 4: Looking Beyond the Steeple and Menorah
Track 5: Fade Out: Stealing from the Sacred and Rewriting Religion

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Though American attitudes toward religion changed dramatically during the 1960s, interest in spirituality itself never diminished. If we listen closely, Michael Gilmour contends, we can hear an extensive religious vocabulary in the popular music of the decades that followed—articulating each generation's spiritual quest, a yearning for social justice, and the emotional highs of love and sex.

Probing the lyrical canons of seminal artists including Cat Stevens, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, Pearl Jam, Madonna, and Kanye West, Gilmour considers the ways—and reasons why—pop music's secular poets and prophets adopted religious phrases, motifs, and sacred texts.

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What do Salman Rushdie and literary criticism have to do with rock music? For Gilmour (Call Me the Seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music), these things are very much related. The author believes that song lyrics can sometimes stand on their own apart from music, and moreover, they can reveal something about an artist's religious and spiritual views. This may not appear at first to be an enlightened perspective, but the author's artful use of Rushdie's fiction clearly shows how it is possible. The usual suspects in the religion and rock conversation (U2, Springsteen) are not as prominent, leaving room for more obscure but equally vital musicians like Daniel Lanois and Burton Cummings. Especially constructive is the chapter Outrageous Religion, about the influence of sexuality and the occult on some styles of rock music, such as heavy metal. The author also ventures into Hindu and Muslim influences on rock music, a foray that few scholars have attempted. His treatment enriches the dialogue between religion and rock well beyond the usual Judeo-Christian interpretations. Tune in, read on and enjoy

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