Interview with Ken Myers (Part I)
In March 2013, Welch College hosted its Forum13 conference. Among their impressive speakers included Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio, an audio journal that seeks to aid Christians through thoughtful, theological engagement. Jesse Owens of the Helwys Society Forum had opportunity to conduct an hour-long interview with Ken Myers.
Throughout the course of this week, we’re going to post this interview in approximate, twenty-minute segments. The first segment is posting today, the second segment will post on Wednesday, and the third segment will post on Thursday.
Readers may listen to the first segment here, or they may read a transcript of it below. We begin by discussing Johnny Cash, then by moving to music, and then by asking him about his book. Check it out!
(You may also listen to Parts II here and III here.)
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Ken Meyers (KM): [mid-sentence] with me, who spent a lot of time on the phone talking to his agent, and he was doing a concert up in Northern Virginia as a Summer music festival thing, and he got us back stage. And we talked about his faith and we talked about the incarnation.
Jesse Owens (JO): Wow!
KM: Yeah in fact, when Cash died, what five years ago or so, I resurrected… I had this old recording on quarter inch reel-to-reel tape…and I resurrected and put it on the audio journal.
I was kind of shocked at how much theology he had. And then he sang a song for me… totally out of the blue; which I have a one of a kind recording of him singing [laughter]. I will not sing for you tonight.
JO: But for a fee? [laughter]
KM: Well… but it will probably be from a motet by Giovanni Palestrina.
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JO: What artifacts of culture do you really enjoy—what music or certain things? I discussed with Chris earlier about how you distinguish between high culture, folk culture, and pop culture.
KM: Yeah well… I mean it’s a distinction more for analytic, cause it’s hard… you can’t say this just belongs in this category. But, I was a film studies major as an undergraduate, so I was watching two or three movies a week—excuse me two or three movies a day. And I worked in a film library, repairing prints of films, classic films
So I’ve always been fond of film as a medium, and on my iPod it’s mostly classical music with some Celtic folk music and some bluegrass. I actually had a bluegrass radio program once called Unsquare Roots [laughter]. It was bluegrass and country on a Christian radio station, stuff that normally they didn’t play. This was back in the 70’s. I was actually fired from that station. I was told I was too creative to work in Christian radio [laughter]. I ended up going to work for NPR.
In fact I have been doing a lot of lecturing lately on music. I just gave a series of four lectures at a church up in Idaho on the nature and meaning of music, and I’ve given similar lectures in other places. I really think that one of the sad disorders of our cultural moment is that people think that music is just an expression of individual, subjective interest or internal expression.
Whereas, historically, music was understood to reveal something about the nature of reality. Music was a science. The idea of personal taste in music just didn’t matter that much. And I really think that the total subjectivity of music, where we think that all musical meaning is arbitrarily assigned by individuals or societies rather than there being some actual inherit kind of meaning resonate in music, is a big problem. And I think that the church has largely bought into that. I think that actually it has consequences that go far beyond music, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
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JO: Along those lines I do have one other question about that. What do you think about the more mainstream rise of the genre that people call folk music that’s maybe a combination of rock and roll and some folk sounds?
KM: It’s similar to, and even less authentic than, the “folk revival” (so-called) of the 60’s. I mean, I was old enough to watch Peter, Paul, and Mary. Of course Bob Dylan and a lot of other bands. And then the kind of English folk thing that was going on too, and folk rock.
I read something recently that pointed out that real folk music (and I kind of talk about this in All God’s Children) is tied to a community of people with a sense of their own historical identity, which is tied to their moral lives. And that’s part of what I was getting at in the book when I distinguish between folk and pop. The folk music isn’t just another consumer good. It’s not just another style of consumer good. But that real folk music was like folk dances or folk tales—embedded in the whole life of a people and expressed the deep convictions of a people. So, first of all, it was something you learned from your grandfather. It wasn’t something passed on by a paid entertainer, or that you bought on your iTunes. It wasn’t principally a commodity you selected for yourself. It was something you inherited.
In fact, I think the thing I’ve learned most about culture that I kind of didn’t quite understand when I wrote All God’s Children is that the biggest shift that has occurred in modern culture is the shift of a model or an experience of culture as an inheritance to culture as a set of freely chosen commodities. Culture was always an intergenerational entity that was received by one generation and then passed onto the next generation. Today when we talk about, when we think about our culture, we think largely in terms of commodities that are freely chosen by an individual. And that’s a hugely different status for culture.
So in a sense what we call “folk” is really just elements of actual folk music. Often one of the elements that emerges, which I applaud, is a recovery of narrative ballad, or narrative texts, which often means the recovery of melody. One of the things that I find is appalling in a lot of pop music (and I actually think it’s gotten worse in the last 20 or 30 years)—if you go back and listen to the pop music of the 60’s, anything by Lennon and McCartney (well, almost anything), Michelle for instance, or Eleanor Rigby, or Norwegian Wood, it has a pretty complicated melodic line, and a pretty complicated harmonic sequence that goes with the complicated melodic line. Disco started screwing things up [laughter].
It only recently occurred to me that when I call up the mp3 tags on iTunes, there’s a beat-per-minute tag. Now, why would beats-per-minute matter? Now beats-per-minute doesn’t matter to me since most of my collection is classical music, and it varies from minute to minute—how many beats-per-minute there are. But I think that’s a signal of the fact that—I’ll cut to the chase, I think we tend to think of music more as pleasant sound (as pleasant noise) than as the kind of structure and form that both folk music and in classical music, that the interaction between rhythm, melody, and harmony usually provide.
And the sub-woofer is another great demonstration of that fact. The sub-woofer is a non-musical resource. It’s like the cannons at the performance of the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. But it’s like all cannons all the time (laugh). It’s something that’s basically intended to speak to your body directly and bypass the mind. Whereas, I think, historically, you know, music was understood to be a mathematical and scientific [endeavor]. You know music is called a science until relatively recently, and it had a lot to do with perception of numeric order.
Part of this is because we experience music in the background very often. Very few people sit and listen to a piece of music and attend to its structure. They’d go crazy if they had to do that with a lot of music (laugh).
So, back to your question about the revival of folk in Great Britain and here. I’m familiar with some groups who claim this. It has folkish elements, and the elements that are there, which one could applaud, some of it’s just instrumental—using acoustic instruments instead of amplified instruments.
In fact I’m thinking of doing some writing on the way in which technologies have changed our perception of and use of music. Both recording technologies, which enable detached—well, it enables us to consume music rather than to participate in a musical culture, with our neighbors and the people who happen to be around us, which has good sides, but it also has bad sides.
But also, just amplification—the almost addictive quality of really powerful sonic processing and volume. You listen to most radio stations—the sounds you hear are more processed than Wonderbread on most radio stations. They’re doing a lot to compress the sound, boost certain frequencies, and to kind of give you a highly condensed aural experience. It sounds like nothing in nature, except maybe a cannon [laughter]. And people become used to that. In fact (you know I worked in public radio for years), and some people say, you know, NPR sounds so different. One of the reasons is that they usually don’t compress their air signal. That is, they don’t usually add heavy compression, which doesn’t just make things sound lower and louder, but it actually (it’s hard to explain what the different in the sound is), but there’s a clarity when you don’t, and natural sound, when you don’t have that kind of compression.
A lot of people now listen to music more for the interesting color or texture of the sound (the shear acoustic sound), and not for the structure of the melody or the meaning that can be conveyed through harmonic development. Which, I think, is actually making music much more primitive. It’s actually a step backwards; it’s actually not an advance or progression, but it’s actually more stupid, if I may say [laughter].
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JO: I would agree with that. For our listeners who may not have read All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, can you give us the major thesis or premise of the book, maybe how you arrived at that point?
KM: Sure. Well, in 1984 I started working at a monthly evangelical magazine called Eternity magazine. But, shortly after I got there, there was a book published called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Of course I had been involved in media and journalism. I was a film studies major in undergraduate. So I was really interested in entertainment media, but also journalistic media.
But I’d never given (well, I’d given some) thought, but not as deliberate or sustained as Postman really encourages at what happens in a culture when entertainment becomes much more central and a more focusing activity that begins to influence all sorts of institutionss. And particularly, he’s interested in what happens to civic culture when things have to be entertaining. I think before that I had read an article about Sesame Street. In one of the media magazines I was reading, someone had written an article for a Sesame Street anniversary. They said that the most important thing Sesame Street had taught was not letters or counting, but the fact that education had to be fun. And that’s kind of what I was getting at—the ideas that the insistence on the necessity of fun was culturally weakening and debilitating in significant ways, and bad for democracy.
I’d worked in public radio and secular institutions. Here I was now editing an evangelical periodical, trying to figure out, “What are the important editorial issues I should be focusing attention on?” And I was watching, again this is the mid-80’s, as Christians seemed to be imitating the rush to entertainment culture that the rest of the culture was doing. Rather than asking, as Neil Postman and a lot of other people did, “Is this a good thing for culture?” Christians were basically saying “It’s a good thing for evangelism, because we can reach people where they are. This is what people expect.”
And I began to realize that evangelicals really don’t take culture seriously as culture. I’ve watched in my life-time as evangelicals typically move from not taking culture seriously and hence avoiding participation in mainstream culture to not taking culture seriously and hence being captive to a lot of mainstream culture and participating uncritically. So part of what I wanted to do when I wrote that book [All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes] was to basically make the argument that it’s not good for the church, and it’s not really good for our neighbors just in terms of the civic life of American culture for the church to emulate what I think is a culturally disordered concern for fun and everything being entertainment.
I was actually asked to write that book because of my background in film. And I originally thought that I was going to do a series of genre studies: a chapter on western film, a chapter on comic books, a chapter on soap operas, and a chapter on country-western music. I was going to look at these specific genres of popular culture and write world-view studies on them. For example, what kind of world-view themes might emerge in mystery novels or westerns or something? But the more I read to prepare for writing that book, I realized that the very phenomenon of popular culture, the fact that so much of our culture was tied to, no just to entertainment, but to things that we consume individualistically rather than receive as a part of a cultural tradition, that this was a new thing. People would talk about the popular culture of Shakespeare’s day, for instance. They would say, “Well, Shakespeare was part of the popular culture.” No! It was a totally different thing.
Popular culture as we know it is, first of all, mass mediated, and it’s largely for commercial reasons. But also, it has virtually no accountability to moral communities of any kind. It’s autonomous in its production. It’s autonomous in its consumption. And that is a very, very new thing. Particularly with regard to younger people, but not just with younger people, the access to an amazing array, a virtually infinite array of cultural experiences without the supervision of a community, without accountability and the responsibility within a community, is a totally, totally new thing.
So, I began to realize there’s something here (I wrote the book in 1989), there’s something here really new. I’ve spent almost every day since I wrote that book discovering more about the novelty of it. And it was a way of getting me to think about the culture more generally—how cultures work, what they can do, what they should do in God’s providence (in the way He’s made us as creatures who exist in time, who exist in families, who in communities).
So anyway, I was concerned about the uncritical jumping on the bandwagon of an entertainment culture, which I think has only gotten worse, if anything, since I wrote the book in ’89. That is, it’s harder to even raise the question now. It’s now so much a part of the landscape in most churches, that to the raise the question is like asking, “Why do you wear clothes?” [laughter] It’s just hard, hard, hard to get even any kind of discussion going.
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Stay tuned for Part II of this interview: to post Wednesday.
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