Post by the Scribe on Jun 10, 2020 6:43:03 GMT
GOD IN POPULAR CULTURE
Ronstadt and
Mellencamp:
The Search for Roots
The air in Centennial Hall was tense with expectation; a current of restlessness swept back and forth among the well-dressed Mexican Americans who were at least half the audience. But it was not an anxious electricity nor an angry one. On the contrary, the anticipation of Los Tucsonenses was joyous. One of their own was coming back to perform in the University's hall- not only a third-generation Tucsonan who had made good in the big world but now someone to sing their own songs, the songs her father taught her.
And she was to sing their songs in the heart of a University that, for all its recent good will and honest effort, has never been able to relate to the Mexican-American middle class that has been in Tucson much longer than the century-old University.
Then the show began, "a romantic evening in Old Mexico" with the Mariachi Vargas; the Ballet Folklorico de la Fonda; and their darling, Linda Ronstadt, a shy, almost frail woman with an enormous voice. Los Tucsonenses cheered wildly after each number. When her father, Gilbert Ronstadt, walking with the help of a cane, joined her on the stage, they all rose in respect to one of their heroes. So did the rest of us.
We Anglos (an appellation bitterly resented by the Celt in me, but, for the moment, let it pass) cheered with them, profoundly moved by the music and by the enthusiam of the Mexican Americans. It was a special night for Tucson and perhaps for the whole country. Linda Ronstadt's search for her roots had offered to the rest of the country a slice of the wonders of Mexican-American culture. The success of her tour and her record "Canciones de mi Padre" indicated that the rest of the country was interested. Mexican Americans were no longer perceived merely as a social problem; they were now seen as what every ethnic group in fact is: a cultural resource.
Frederico Ronstadt, son of a German engineer who had migrated to Mexico, came to Tucson in the eighteen eighties. A successful businessman, he was involved in both politics and music. He and his brother founded the Club Filharmonico- which Tucsonenses will tell you was the first symphony orchestra in the city. His daughter Luisa was a popular singer in the Mexican-American community. The family has kept the traditions alive. His grandson Pete is the chief of police, and his granddaughter is probably the most successful and certainly the most durable and most gifted woman Rock singer of her era.
To reach that success, however, she had to leave behind Tucson and her Mexican-American heritage (though, be it noted, never in opposition to her family, who always supported her). Moreover, as one pieces together from interviews and profiles the story of her life during the two decades after she left Tucson, one is appalled at the physical and emotional toll the Rock music circuit takes from the lives of its celebrities, especially if they are women. Must a person go through such alienation and privation to be a success in American popular music? Is it necessary to leave home?
For Linda Ronstadt it surely was. There was no room for her in the Tucson of twenty years ago. Even though she attended SS. Peter and Paul grade school and her family was close to Bishop Francis Green (to whom Fred Ronstadt left his flute), sixteen-year-old Linda was expelled by the pastor of her parish from a parish high club dance for playing Rock music. It was pagan, evil music, he told her. Once again the Church missed a chance to embrace one of its gifted children.
Is it possible to "go home again"? John Cougar Mellencamp (about whom more shortly) argues that it is. When asked why he lives in Indiana near his home town of Seymour, he replies that he doesn't want to live anywhere else.
For Linda Ronstadt, a permanent return to the Tucson of her youth may be impossible, in part because that Tucson has been overwhelmed by waves of Anglo immigrants and doesn't exist anymore. But in Canciones, she does return to her musical roots and shares them with the rest of the country. At the level of symbol and story, if not of literal history, she has already gone home again.
Theologically, Canciones imposes on us two subjects for reflection- the celebratory nature of the Mexican-American world view and the inescapable importance of roots in our life. I shall atten to the first here and postpone the second until after a consideration of the Hoosier music of John Mellencamp.
Ask a literate Tucsonensis about Mexican-American religion and s/he will tell you about festivals- birthdays, baptisms, name days, rites of passage. The calendar, you will learn, is very important because you need to have available a list of which saints are being honored every week so that you can send presents to those who bear the names of the saints. Press a Mexican American about what all this means and you are likely to hear about yet more festivals and parties. Indeed, you will probably have to ask three or four times before it dawns on your respondent that you are interested in content and not form.
One of my graduate students gave the perfect answer: "Well, I suppose it means that we believed that God is part of our family and that he comes and joins us in all our festivals and celebrates with us like a member of the family."
Then she added, "Of course we don't know all the rules like you Irish do. That's why my children are in Peter and Paul school, so they can learn the rules and grow up to be good American Catholics just like the Irish children."
SS. Peter and Paul, you will remember, is the parish that ejected Linda Ronstadt for playing Rock music. At the time my student spoke those words, the same man was pastor.
I did not plead that there was a time when the Irish knew how to celebrate too. I merely said that the exchange ought to be in both directions and that the Irish could learn from the Tucsonenses the festivity of the Catholic tradition.
I did not even add, for which I expect points from the recording angel, that the pastor of SS. Peter and Paul might especially benefit from a little joy and celebration in his rigid, punitive, shanty-Irish life.
Linda Ronstadt's Canciones are almost all love songs, many of them, Tucsonenses will tell you, sad and melancholy songs. But the Mexican-American culture resolutely refuses to permit melancholy to triumph. With the Mariachi Vargas playing enthusiastically in the background, joy exorcises the melancholy themes every time. Joy- and faith- are victorious even in the beautiful and poignant Dos Arbolitos in which the singer observes sadly that the two trees are inseperable companions but that s/he has no companion. Sitting under the tree at the end of a tiring day, the singer is going to ask God, who makes companions even for the trees, to send a human companion.
It is the resolute joy of her songs, rather than explicit reference to God, which makes them theologically important. In a fascinating interview reported in American Airlines in-flight magazine, however, she shows that she is quite self conscious about the religious function of her music:
"But joy," said Linda Ronstadt, is a combination of
despair, fatalism, anger, triumph- it's all those things.
You know Joseph Campbell, author of Hero With a Thousand Faces?
He was a very good friend of mine, the neatest man I've
ever known. He said to me once, 'Life is basically intolerable.'
He said music is the only way we have of dealing with and
music is myth. Music is oral dream. It's a way of triumphing
over despair. The Catholics [she is one] say, 'life is a vale
of tears. Help me here in this vale of tears.' It's a myth.
The metaphor of life is the vale of tears. So. . ."
She broke into a glorious grin. ". . . if you can triumph
over it, that's cause for joy. This music has got that in it.
It's mythology. It's a triumph over a situation that is
basically intolerable."
Even at their most melancholy, they are joyous. For the Celts, the opposite might be true: even at our most joyous we sound melancholy.
Linda Ronstadt - FATHER GOD -
Those priest and religious who are engaged in "Hispanic work" are often immune to this rich dimension of Mexican-American culture. Indeed the "Hispanic Caucus" of clergy and religious that has appeared in many large dioceses (made up almost entirely, be it noted, of people with Celtic and not Hispanic names) often are the most joyless collection of celebrants that one could possibly imagine. They have "identified" with the Mexican Americans often to impose on them their own political agenda and are outside redeemers who have come to save and not to listen and learn.
They should be made to listen to Linda Ronstadt's Canciones every day and thus perhaps to come to understand that festival and celebration are essential to the Catholic tradition. The Mexican Americans have it and we don't. We must learn joy from them, much more than they must learn political strategy (not to say "liberation") from us.
I'm not saying that the cause of political and social justice is invalid. On the contrary, Mexican Americans have been cheated and continue to be cheated. I am saying, rather, that those who align themselves with La Raza will only be exploiters and manipulators themselves (no better in their own way than the pastor of SS. Peter and Paul) until they are ready to learn as well as teach.
You won't find much joy in John (Cougar) Mellencamp and his return to his small-town, Hoosier roots. You encounter, rather, in his most recent music, especially the two albums Scarecrow and The Lonesome Jubilee, resignation and acceptance. If Linda Ronstadt represents the Catholic imagination (that which David Tracy calls "analogical," the awareness of God everywhere), John Mellencamp represents the Protestant imagination (the dialectical imagination in Tracy's terms which emphasizes the emptiness of creation). While he may not yet attend the Church of the Nazarene regularly as his family did, Mellencamp's search for roots- or more precisely his acceptance of the roots he never really left- requires the absorption of the the stern Protestant theology of his own tradition.
His return also involves the rediscovery of such traditional Hoosier instruments as the penny whistle, the mandolin, the banjo, and the dulcimer- to his work what the mariachi are to Linda Ronstadt. Ronstadt laments publicly that when she was growing up, bilingual education was unthinkable, so she never really learned the language of her father's songs.
The elite society thinks that such critical but sympathetic reexamination of one's origins is both unnecessary and wrong (unless perchance you are a member of one of the fashionable social groups- which middle-class Mexican Americans, German Hoosiers, Italians from Jersey, and West Side Irish Catholics are certainly not). Elite society is wrong. The music of Ronstadt, Springsteen, and Mellencamp tells us how wrong.
Popular culture both shapes society and is shaped by it. The roots-seeking Rock musicians are reflecting a broad cultural discontent as well as articulating and shaping it. If one reads the literature and listens to the music of the two singers discussed in this chapter (and Springsteen), one is almost overwhelmed by their passion for roots. They express one of the most desperate yearnings of modern humankind, a religious and human need which cannot long be denied.
One puts aside the tapes and the compact disks, the articles and the interviews, and wonders how long elite society can continue to pretend that such needs do not exist or are "conservative" and hence can be safely ignored or dismissed as "nostalgia."
And one also wonders how long the Catholic Church and its official theologians (of the right or the left) can continue to be indifferent to the hungers of humankind for responses that it is uniquely equipped to offer.
Probably for a long, long time.
read full article here: www.ronstadt-linda.com/artgod88-1.htm
Ronstadt and
Mellencamp:
The Search for Roots
The air in Centennial Hall was tense with expectation; a current of restlessness swept back and forth among the well-dressed Mexican Americans who were at least half the audience. But it was not an anxious electricity nor an angry one. On the contrary, the anticipation of Los Tucsonenses was joyous. One of their own was coming back to perform in the University's hall- not only a third-generation Tucsonan who had made good in the big world but now someone to sing their own songs, the songs her father taught her.
And she was to sing their songs in the heart of a University that, for all its recent good will and honest effort, has never been able to relate to the Mexican-American middle class that has been in Tucson much longer than the century-old University.
Then the show began, "a romantic evening in Old Mexico" with the Mariachi Vargas; the Ballet Folklorico de la Fonda; and their darling, Linda Ronstadt, a shy, almost frail woman with an enormous voice. Los Tucsonenses cheered wildly after each number. When her father, Gilbert Ronstadt, walking with the help of a cane, joined her on the stage, they all rose in respect to one of their heroes. So did the rest of us.
We Anglos (an appellation bitterly resented by the Celt in me, but, for the moment, let it pass) cheered with them, profoundly moved by the music and by the enthusiam of the Mexican Americans. It was a special night for Tucson and perhaps for the whole country. Linda Ronstadt's search for her roots had offered to the rest of the country a slice of the wonders of Mexican-American culture. The success of her tour and her record "Canciones de mi Padre" indicated that the rest of the country was interested. Mexican Americans were no longer perceived merely as a social problem; they were now seen as what every ethnic group in fact is: a cultural resource.
Frederico Ronstadt, son of a German engineer who had migrated to Mexico, came to Tucson in the eighteen eighties. A successful businessman, he was involved in both politics and music. He and his brother founded the Club Filharmonico- which Tucsonenses will tell you was the first symphony orchestra in the city. His daughter Luisa was a popular singer in the Mexican-American community. The family has kept the traditions alive. His grandson Pete is the chief of police, and his granddaughter is probably the most successful and certainly the most durable and most gifted woman Rock singer of her era.
To reach that success, however, she had to leave behind Tucson and her Mexican-American heritage (though, be it noted, never in opposition to her family, who always supported her). Moreover, as one pieces together from interviews and profiles the story of her life during the two decades after she left Tucson, one is appalled at the physical and emotional toll the Rock music circuit takes from the lives of its celebrities, especially if they are women. Must a person go through such alienation and privation to be a success in American popular music? Is it necessary to leave home?
For Linda Ronstadt it surely was. There was no room for her in the Tucson of twenty years ago. Even though she attended SS. Peter and Paul grade school and her family was close to Bishop Francis Green (to whom Fred Ronstadt left his flute), sixteen-year-old Linda was expelled by the pastor of her parish from a parish high club dance for playing Rock music. It was pagan, evil music, he told her. Once again the Church missed a chance to embrace one of its gifted children.
Is it possible to "go home again"? John Cougar Mellencamp (about whom more shortly) argues that it is. When asked why he lives in Indiana near his home town of Seymour, he replies that he doesn't want to live anywhere else.
For Linda Ronstadt, a permanent return to the Tucson of her youth may be impossible, in part because that Tucson has been overwhelmed by waves of Anglo immigrants and doesn't exist anymore. But in Canciones, she does return to her musical roots and shares them with the rest of the country. At the level of symbol and story, if not of literal history, she has already gone home again.
Theologically, Canciones imposes on us two subjects for reflection- the celebratory nature of the Mexican-American world view and the inescapable importance of roots in our life. I shall atten to the first here and postpone the second until after a consideration of the Hoosier music of John Mellencamp.
Ask a literate Tucsonensis about Mexican-American religion and s/he will tell you about festivals- birthdays, baptisms, name days, rites of passage. The calendar, you will learn, is very important because you need to have available a list of which saints are being honored every week so that you can send presents to those who bear the names of the saints. Press a Mexican American about what all this means and you are likely to hear about yet more festivals and parties. Indeed, you will probably have to ask three or four times before it dawns on your respondent that you are interested in content and not form.
One of my graduate students gave the perfect answer: "Well, I suppose it means that we believed that God is part of our family and that he comes and joins us in all our festivals and celebrates with us like a member of the family."
Then she added, "Of course we don't know all the rules like you Irish do. That's why my children are in Peter and Paul school, so they can learn the rules and grow up to be good American Catholics just like the Irish children."
SS. Peter and Paul, you will remember, is the parish that ejected Linda Ronstadt for playing Rock music. At the time my student spoke those words, the same man was pastor.
I did not plead that there was a time when the Irish knew how to celebrate too. I merely said that the exchange ought to be in both directions and that the Irish could learn from the Tucsonenses the festivity of the Catholic tradition.
I did not even add, for which I expect points from the recording angel, that the pastor of SS. Peter and Paul might especially benefit from a little joy and celebration in his rigid, punitive, shanty-Irish life.
Linda Ronstadt's Canciones are almost all love songs, many of them, Tucsonenses will tell you, sad and melancholy songs. But the Mexican-American culture resolutely refuses to permit melancholy to triumph. With the Mariachi Vargas playing enthusiastically in the background, joy exorcises the melancholy themes every time. Joy- and faith- are victorious even in the beautiful and poignant Dos Arbolitos in which the singer observes sadly that the two trees are inseperable companions but that s/he has no companion. Sitting under the tree at the end of a tiring day, the singer is going to ask God, who makes companions even for the trees, to send a human companion.
It is the resolute joy of her songs, rather than explicit reference to God, which makes them theologically important. In a fascinating interview reported in American Airlines in-flight magazine, however, she shows that she is quite self conscious about the religious function of her music:
"But joy," said Linda Ronstadt, is a combination of
despair, fatalism, anger, triumph- it's all those things.
You know Joseph Campbell, author of Hero With a Thousand Faces?
He was a very good friend of mine, the neatest man I've
ever known. He said to me once, 'Life is basically intolerable.'
He said music is the only way we have of dealing with and
music is myth. Music is oral dream. It's a way of triumphing
over despair. The Catholics [she is one] say, 'life is a vale
of tears. Help me here in this vale of tears.' It's a myth.
The metaphor of life is the vale of tears. So. . ."
She broke into a glorious grin. ". . . if you can triumph
over it, that's cause for joy. This music has got that in it.
It's mythology. It's a triumph over a situation that is
basically intolerable."
Even at their most melancholy, they are joyous. For the Celts, the opposite might be true: even at our most joyous we sound melancholy.
Linda Ronstadt - FATHER GOD -
Those priest and religious who are engaged in "Hispanic work" are often immune to this rich dimension of Mexican-American culture. Indeed the "Hispanic Caucus" of clergy and religious that has appeared in many large dioceses (made up almost entirely, be it noted, of people with Celtic and not Hispanic names) often are the most joyless collection of celebrants that one could possibly imagine. They have "identified" with the Mexican Americans often to impose on them their own political agenda and are outside redeemers who have come to save and not to listen and learn.
They should be made to listen to Linda Ronstadt's Canciones every day and thus perhaps to come to understand that festival and celebration are essential to the Catholic tradition. The Mexican Americans have it and we don't. We must learn joy from them, much more than they must learn political strategy (not to say "liberation") from us.
I'm not saying that the cause of political and social justice is invalid. On the contrary, Mexican Americans have been cheated and continue to be cheated. I am saying, rather, that those who align themselves with La Raza will only be exploiters and manipulators themselves (no better in their own way than the pastor of SS. Peter and Paul) until they are ready to learn as well as teach.
You won't find much joy in John (Cougar) Mellencamp and his return to his small-town, Hoosier roots. You encounter, rather, in his most recent music, especially the two albums Scarecrow and The Lonesome Jubilee, resignation and acceptance. If Linda Ronstadt represents the Catholic imagination (that which David Tracy calls "analogical," the awareness of God everywhere), John Mellencamp represents the Protestant imagination (the dialectical imagination in Tracy's terms which emphasizes the emptiness of creation). While he may not yet attend the Church of the Nazarene regularly as his family did, Mellencamp's search for roots- or more precisely his acceptance of the roots he never really left- requires the absorption of the the stern Protestant theology of his own tradition.
His return also involves the rediscovery of such traditional Hoosier instruments as the penny whistle, the mandolin, the banjo, and the dulcimer- to his work what the mariachi are to Linda Ronstadt. Ronstadt laments publicly that when she was growing up, bilingual education was unthinkable, so she never really learned the language of her father's songs.
The elite society thinks that such critical but sympathetic reexamination of one's origins is both unnecessary and wrong (unless perchance you are a member of one of the fashionable social groups- which middle-class Mexican Americans, German Hoosiers, Italians from Jersey, and West Side Irish Catholics are certainly not). Elite society is wrong. The music of Ronstadt, Springsteen, and Mellencamp tells us how wrong.
Popular culture both shapes society and is shaped by it. The roots-seeking Rock musicians are reflecting a broad cultural discontent as well as articulating and shaping it. If one reads the literature and listens to the music of the two singers discussed in this chapter (and Springsteen), one is almost overwhelmed by their passion for roots. They express one of the most desperate yearnings of modern humankind, a religious and human need which cannot long be denied.
One puts aside the tapes and the compact disks, the articles and the interviews, and wonders how long elite society can continue to pretend that such needs do not exist or are "conservative" and hence can be safely ignored or dismissed as "nostalgia."
And one also wonders how long the Catholic Church and its official theologians (of the right or the left) can continue to be indifferent to the hungers of humankind for responses that it is uniquely equipped to offer.
Probably for a long, long time.
read full article here: www.ronstadt-linda.com/artgod88-1.htm