Ann Powers: My Life in Music
along with theological reflections on Good Booty
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Seven Key Ideas
in the Introduction to Good Booty This is a resource page for those reading Ann Powers' Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street Press: 2017) It consists of excerpts from the Introduction along with additional material related to religious studies, particularly from open and relational (process) theology. Process theology is a way of thinking and outlook on life that thinks of God as having a life of God's own, even as deeply connected with the life of the world. Process theologians further propose that people can and do participate in God's life in those moments when they feel fully alive, even if they are not formally religious. They may or may not understand their experience as religious; they may or may not believe in God; they may or may not be formally religious. Still they are participating in God's life. For process theologians, popular music provides one context in which people can participate in God's life. People can experience "the sacred" in the "secular music." This is where process theology is connected with Ann Powers, who likewise sees something of the "sacred" in the yearnings for joy and justice, freedom and intensity, of popular music She knows that the popular music has its destructive side, too: the exploitation, the patriarchy, the victimization. But she likewise believes that such music can function as a way of connecting with the spirit, however named. The Introduction to Powers' book presents seven ideas which weave themselves through the book. (1) Erotic power as both secular and sacred (Audre Lord) (2) Entrainment as a way that music in general, and rhythm in particular, works in a person's life; (3) Behavioral vortex as a place where different people come together in a spirit of musical and cultural aliveness, such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; (4) Somebodiness -- the sense of selfhood and dignity that nothing in the world can take away -- as purpose and fulfillment of life, from Martin Luther King. Jr. (5) Eroticism is the full experience of somebodiness (6) The ring shout as a place in American history where popular music begins to express this eroticism (7) From the ring shout to twerking: the fact that popular music has become ever more explicit in its eroticism in modern times, as promulgated by the global music industry Excerpts from Good Booty
Erotic power as the joy that comes forth, unnameable, from within: Ann Powers
"As Audre Lorde would later write in her clarifying 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”—a central text of second-wave feminism—eroticism is, in essence, both sensual and sacred, self-fulfilling and interpersonal. Spirit plays a central role in meaningful desire, though it need not be named “god.” One word Lorde connects to the spiritual erotic is joy—the rush that comes forth, unnamable, from within. The shimmy dancers of the Jazz Age had few feminist theorists to make these connections explicit, but they felt them. The spiritual erotic also makes room for sadness that challenges people to grow: the vein that ran from slaves’ laments to the “sorrow all on your mind” of Bessie Smith." Ann Powers: Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street Press: 2017) Somebodiness (sense of dignity and selfhood) as necessary to human existence: Ann Powers
"[Popular music is] a vehicle for what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “somebodiness . . . the sense of selfhood and dignity that nothing in all the world can take away. Music, which runs through the body, has been able to encompass this profound and necessary aspect of human experience. And it gave us a way to bring it out in the open and share it. It’s impossible to talk about American bodies without acknowledging the legacy of gross inequality that begins in the enslavement of Africans. That’s another quality American eroticism shares with American music. It is very difficult to speak of race and sex together in language that’s not corrupted by centuries of violent oppression; terms like miscegenation, conveying legacies of forced unions across color lines, instantly evoke dangerous prejudices. Yet because the struggle to be human together while acknowledging a legacy of wrongdoing—the struggle to absorb the stain of slavery without erasing it, and to fully acknowledge the countless acts of violence that are elemental to our hybrid national character—is central to what it means to be American, it’s no surprise that American eroticism is as much a means to reflect upon these differences, written in the body, as it is a route to the pleasures that can sometimes seem to erase them. This is why Dr. King’s “somebodiness” matters so much: eroticism is the full experience of being human, every inch of flesh and spirit, nothing denied. Ann Powers: Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street Press: 2017) Music grinds pleasure from hardship: Ann Powers
"The vortex abounds with complexities. Music allows people—players, dancers, observers—to ride the storm that arises when desire encounters the roadblocks of prejudice, moral judgment, or cruel circumstance. American eroticism wants to be easy, but for most of history, American life has been hard. Our music grinds pleasure from hardship. It creates whirlwinds but also provides a means to manage them." Ann Powers: Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street Press: 2017) Behavioral Vortices: Ann Powers and Joseph Roach
"Musical rhythms thrive in places where people gather freely—cabarets and dive bars, arenas that rock and festival fields that bloom with a thousand naked flowers. The performance studies scholar Joseph Roach describes such environments as “behavioral vortices”: hot spots occupied by hot bodies where concentrated cultural meanings surface. A vortex is a storm that grabs you, but is also made stronger by the motion you contribute. In such a whorl, overlooked or deliberately unacknowledged realities can come to light. Seemingly improper feelings can flourish. What emerges within the vortex would otherwise have remained in the shadows: not only pleasure and physical pride, but anxiety, fear, repulsion. The everyday experience of American eroticism arises from buried prejudices and violent impulses as well as tender ones. In specific places and times, including within the space of a musical recording or live performance, all that hunger and rage, yearning and hope, become visible and audible. The storm throws open a closet and empties out its contents." Ann Powers: Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street Press: 2017) How music (rhythm) works: Ann Powers on Entrainment
"Music has created the spaces where Americans can publicly share deep experiences of selfhood and connection. Through the drum and the guitar and the electronic thrum, people feel their own physical drives and longings for emotional connection. Rhythm is quite literally the reason. It’s the musical element that guarantees what scientists call “entrainment”—the merging of two ongoing processes, like a heartbeat and a drumbeat. Scientists also call this “coupling”: forgetting where one ends and the other begins. The musical experience of entrainment unites a listener with what is being played, the performers playing it, and everyone around her enjoying it, too; it encourages identification and produces sympathy. Entrainment is the reason people dance and what makes them feel a song speaks for them." Ann Powers: Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street Press: 2017) |
Becoming Our Biggest, Loving, Dreaming, Desiring Selves
I've just finished reading a review in Rolling Stone of Ann Powers' Good Booty in Rolling Stone, written by David Chiu. It's called'Good Booty': 10 Things we Learned about Sex and Music. No need to beat around the bush. Here are the ten things:
Powers teaches us these ten things, not by sheer declaration, but by countless stories illustrating them. Her heart is in storytelling and that fluid space in the heart where stories come alive. Our Biggest Loving, Dreaming, Desiring Selves You might wrongly surmise in reading the review that her purpose in writing the book was to teach us such lessons, offering a somewhat voyeuristic anthology of pop-sex stories. Yes, there is a lot of talk about sex in the book - and books that talk about sex can help us talk about the otherwise unspeakable. Chiu writes:"Sex has always been an awkward and uneasy subject to broach in normal American conversation,. And yet music, on both a physical and emotional level, has served as an expressive art effective art form in expressing sexuality and eroticism. Since the dawn of the rock & roll era, popular music and sex have been and continue to be inextricably linked, accompanied by varying degrees of sensationalism and shock." And Powers' agrees. She tells Rolling Stone: "I've written a lot about women in music. But I've also always been interested in sexuality and eroticism and how that expresses itself through music and how our various debates about that express themselves through music." Still, I am impressed with a Facebook post she offered on the day of the book's release. It's more personal and, I believe, revealing of some alternative intentions: "It's a strange week to release a book about pleasure, music, and dancing, perhaps; but every chapter of the book I've been working on since 2011, which is officially out today, contains a story of someone who resisted oppression by deploying those forces, and who inspired others to believe they could be their biggest loving, dreaming, desiring selves, even in wretched circumstances. Good Booty isn't about me. It's about the dancers in Congo Square; Florence Mills singing "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird" while speaking out for the NAACP; it's about Dorothy Love Coates shouting praise while the struggle for civil rights took place at her church doorstep. It's about Jimi Hendrix smiling that trickster smile, Sylvester lifting us up in San Francisco, Michael Callen at the piano showing that a man could live and love with HIV/AIDS, Kathleen Hanna screaming I WANT TO GO TO THE CARNIVAL. It's about Beyonce making lemonade. And it's about you, that time you listened to records all day in your room, and then went out and found your people and shook your thing. I'm reminding myself why I wrote it here. I hope readers find what I found in these stories: the word I always return to, from MLK, somebodiness." -- Ann Powers Facebook Post, 3/18/2017 after Charlottesville Becoming a Fat Soul This talk about somebodiness suggests to me that part of her intention was, how to say this, pastoral. She wanted to help us understand other people as they search for their "biggest loving, dreaming, desiring selves, even in wretched circumstances," and us to grow into our "biggest loving, dreaming, desiring selves" as well. In the world of process theology we have a name for these kinds of selves. We call them "fat souls." What's a Fat Soul? Here's a philosophical description of a soul with size: "By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature." (Bernard Loomer) If you unpack this paragraph, A Fat Soul has at least six characteristics. (1) Capacity for Loving Relationships: A fat soul enjoys range and depth in its capacity for loving relationships, helping others to become freer in their diversity and uniqueness. It is open-hearted. (2) Open-Mindedness: A fat soul can understand a variety of outlooks on life without feeling defensive and insecure. It is open-minded. (3) Openness to Complexity: A fat soul has the power to sustain complex relationships and enriching tensions. It does not lapse into either-or thinking but is inclined toward both-and thinking. (4) Tolerance for Enriching Tensions: A fat soul can live with enriching tensions without being overwhelmed. It does not flee from constructive conflict. (5) Personal Integrity: A fat soul does all this while maintaining a sense of integrity. It sticks to its principles and enjoys a sense of individual freedom. (6) Individuality: A fat soul does not lose its agency or self-creativity. It celebrates diversity and delights in uniqueness, and it enjoys unique agency itself. I think Ann Powers told her stories, in part, to help us become fat souls just like this. Not disembodied fat souls but embodied fat souls who can dance and shake their things, if not with their booties then at least with their minds and hearts. God and Erotic Power Indeed, deep down, I think she had another intention, too. She wanted us to claim the notion of erotic power and recognize that it lies at the intersection of spirituality and physicality, divine desire and human desire. As a process theologian I believe that erotic power is prompted, not only by the urges of our genes and the desires of our minds, but also by something deep within the universe, indeed something divine. This means that when we see erotic power embodied and expressed in constructive ways, we are seeing it see something like divinity at work in the world. And it means that when we enter into the liberating joy of popular music in ways that widen our souls – helping us better become our biggest, dreaming, desiring selves – we are simultaneously enjoying a touch of transcendence, a taste of that something we call the divine. This something can be envisioned as a force devoid of personality but nevertheless luring us, or as a personal presence who is likewise luring us. It need not be named or believed in to be effective in life, but naming it can help as well. Process theologians imagine it as the Soul of the universe: a vast and inclusive consciousness whose heart includes all lives. Our joys are the joys of God, too. And also our sadness. This God is not all-powerful. Many things can and do happen that even the divine cannot prevent. But this God is indeed on the side of life. Ann Powers knows this and feels this. That is why she wrote Good Booty. She invites us, too, to shake that thing. -- Jay McDaniel 
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Even God Shakes:
A Little Process Theology
Ann Powers shows how America popular music begins with bodily experience: that is, with hearing music and wanting to dance with it and to it, expressing hunger and rage, yearning and hope. In the expression, she says, we feel (at least for the moment) more alive than we might otherwise feel. We experience a satisfaction of desire, a pleasure, that is both spiritual and erotic. The satisfaction includes but is more than sexuality.
She knows that there are some ways of being “religious” that are skeptical of this form of feeling; and she is right. There are forms of religion that emphasize a transcendence of the body and sexuality in the interests of being connected with a divine force and power that is “above” the earthly realm. See the words of John F. Watson, the early nineteenth century Methodist layman whom she quotes on page xv.
But Powers also recognizes that in popular music we are brought down to earth, into our bodies, where, sometimes, we find something sacred in the very dynamism of bodily experience. For those who believe in God, the question might then become: “And can I find God in the body and its expressions? Can I find God in the yearning for intensity and in the pleasure? Is God, too, bodily?
The Universe is God's Body:
God is the Soul of the Universe
Here open and relational (process) theology offers a relevant proposal. It is that the universe as a whole is a communion of bodily subjects, not a mere collection of objects, and that their totality is God’s own body. To say the same thing, we are to our own bodies as God is to the universe as a whole. It’s called Panentheism: The universe as God’s Body. Process theology also proposes that God is present in each and every subject in the universe as a lure to enjoyment, to harmonious and intense relations with others and with oneself. As Whitehead (the philosophical pioneer of process thinking), God is the lure toward intensity of experience, including bodily experience.
God's Presence in the Universe
cnn be understood as Empowering and Liberating energy
Always God’s lure is adjusted to the situation at hand. If you are a slave, the lure is toward being a “somebody” who has dignity and power regardless of the viewpoint of the slaveholder. If you are a slaveowner, the lure is to turn around from the impulse to mastery and become a self among selves, not a self over selves. The inwardly felt lure, adjusted to each situation, can be understood as erotic power, and indeed Whitehead used the word Eros to describe it in his book Adventures of Ideas.
For more see the work of the process theologian Sheri Kling in Eros: Desire and Embodiment in Whitehead, Jung, and Lane.
The door is open for a theological interpretation of popular music as an important way that God is found in the world. Ann Powers helps us open the door.
-- Jay McDaniel
A Little Process Theology
Ann Powers shows how America popular music begins with bodily experience: that is, with hearing music and wanting to dance with it and to it, expressing hunger and rage, yearning and hope. In the expression, she says, we feel (at least for the moment) more alive than we might otherwise feel. We experience a satisfaction of desire, a pleasure, that is both spiritual and erotic. The satisfaction includes but is more than sexuality.
She knows that there are some ways of being “religious” that are skeptical of this form of feeling; and she is right. There are forms of religion that emphasize a transcendence of the body and sexuality in the interests of being connected with a divine force and power that is “above” the earthly realm. See the words of John F. Watson, the early nineteenth century Methodist layman whom she quotes on page xv.
But Powers also recognizes that in popular music we are brought down to earth, into our bodies, where, sometimes, we find something sacred in the very dynamism of bodily experience. For those who believe in God, the question might then become: “And can I find God in the body and its expressions? Can I find God in the yearning for intensity and in the pleasure? Is God, too, bodily?
The Universe is God's Body:
God is the Soul of the Universe
Here open and relational (process) theology offers a relevant proposal. It is that the universe as a whole is a communion of bodily subjects, not a mere collection of objects, and that their totality is God’s own body. To say the same thing, we are to our own bodies as God is to the universe as a whole. It’s called Panentheism: The universe as God’s Body. Process theology also proposes that God is present in each and every subject in the universe as a lure to enjoyment, to harmonious and intense relations with others and with oneself. As Whitehead (the philosophical pioneer of process thinking), God is the lure toward intensity of experience, including bodily experience.
God's Presence in the Universe
cnn be understood as Empowering and Liberating energy
Always God’s lure is adjusted to the situation at hand. If you are a slave, the lure is toward being a “somebody” who has dignity and power regardless of the viewpoint of the slaveholder. If you are a slaveowner, the lure is to turn around from the impulse to mastery and become a self among selves, not a self over selves. The inwardly felt lure, adjusted to each situation, can be understood as erotic power, and indeed Whitehead used the word Eros to describe it in his book Adventures of Ideas.
For more see the work of the process theologian Sheri Kling in Eros: Desire and Embodiment in Whitehead, Jung, and Lane.
The door is open for a theological interpretation of popular music as an important way that God is found in the world. Ann Powers helps us open the door.
-- Jay McDaniel