DAN GRAHAM – ROCK MY RELIGION

From Electronic Arts Intermix:

"Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in
contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early
religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling
and rocking" of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyses the emergence of
rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s,
locating rock's sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and
philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This
complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on
the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock `n'
roll music.

Original Music: Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth. Sound: Ian Murray, Wharton Tiers. Narrators:
Johanna Cypis, Dan Graham. Editors: Matt Danowski, Derek Graham, Ian Murray, Tony
Oursler. Produced by Dan Graham and the Moderna Museet."

It goes without saying that reading the unaltered text of Rock My Religion without the sounds
and images presented in the video does not do justice to the original. The only reason for me
to transcribe Dan Graham's video was to offer those who have difficulties reading the on-
screen texts or hearing the spoken narration a companion towards a better understanding and
appreciation of this influential and important work.
I am aware of the fact that Rock My Religion has been published as an essay in Graham's
currently out-of-print 1994 'collection of writings and projects' of the same name. (See MIT
press for further reference) This transcript has been a labour of love and I very much welcome
any corrections or additions, such as a timeline, or descriptions of sound and images.

- fh

DAN GRAHAM – ROCK MY RELIGION

(Transcript from video)

TXT (scrolling on-screen text)

DG (voice-over narrated by Dan Graham)
JC (voice-over narrated by Johanna Cypis)
PS (Voice of Patti Smith)

TXT: The dominant religion in America was Puritanism. Prosecuted in England for their
demands
for radical moral discipline, Puritans believed each man alone to be responsible for his
individual salvation. The mind was to control the body.

TXT: Rock My Religion

DG: Ann Lee, an illiterate blacksmith's daughter of Manchester, England, at the beginning of
the industrial revolution had founded the shakers. She worked in the cotton mills at fourteen,
married to a man she disdained. Four children she bore died in infancy. She joined a sect who
taught that Christ's Second Coming could be experienced in a trance produced by the
rhythmical recitation of biblical phrases this trembling also cured the body of ills. Peasants
families were forcibly removed from their land in the country. There, reproduction of children
had been an asset. But as workers in the city, starving children were exploited by factory
owners as cheap labour.
TXT: “16 and time to pay off. I get this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe. 40 hours, 36
Dollars a week. But it's a paycheck jack. It's so hot in here, hot like sahara. I couldn't think for
the heat. But these bitches are too lame to understand, too goddamn grateful to get this job
to real size. They're getting screwed up the ass.“ (Piss factory, Patti Smith)

JC: Ann Lee saw the heterosexual marriage since Adam's sin in the garden, was responsible
for the curse of alienated work and the burden of childbirth for the woman.

TXT: Ann Lee chose to become a quaker, a sect that taught christ's return could be perceived
by shaking the body as one recited biblical texts. This produced an ecstatic trance, wherein
it was revealed to Ann that she was God. The male, Christ, had been god's first human
incarnation
and she, a female, was Christ's second coming. Ann began to preach a new message derived
from the bible's account of the fall. Sexually based marriage was unnatural, it was clearly the
cause of the oppression of the working class and of women. Because of Adam's sin, man had
been punished by unfruitful labour and women by childbearing.

DG: “To the woman He said, I will multiply your pains in child bearing, you shall give birth to
your children in pain. To the man he said with sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread.”

TXT: Rimbaud writes this letter and says... 'In the future when women get away from their
long servitude to men... they're going to have the new music, new sensations, and new
horrors, new spurts... Now... I've found this new toy'.

PS: “The histories of the universe lie in the sleeping sex of a woman. Now back in Egypt,
the Egyptian Book of the Dead was written because they got these women who were like, you
know, that were before the time after 1852.
So, like
They got these women and they
Like put them in these tomb shapes
Like mummy shapes
Only they didn’t mummyize them
What they do is
They made this mixture up
Of opium and salad oil and henna
And they put it all over them
(first they’d knock ‘em out with a sledgehammer)
then they’d lay them in there and they’d wipe them all over
with this opiate henna oil
(maybe throw a little merc in, anything they could get in there)
...
Anyway, she’d do this and the scribes would be standing around with their papyrus,
or papyrus or peanut butter bag wrappers-
no.
forget that one.
They’re sitting around with their scrolls and anyway,
She’d start babbling…
…and she’d start babbling…
They’d write this stuff… “

DG: She saw that the language of the egyptian priestesses could be merged with the religious
revivalists' talking in tongues to produce a new rock language, Babylog, neither male or
female.

DG: Ann Lee and a few followers left for America, a virginal garden of Eden, in 1774. In
America, the Shakers would construct a society which would resurrect the pre-industrial family
but in a utopian form. The coming of Ann Lee meant the beginning of the millennium. Based
on sexual equality and sexual abstinence the patriarchal family was now to be replaced by co-
equal 'brothers' and 'sisters'. The economy was craft based with common ownership of goods.
Men and women met two times a week in meetings and sat 5 feet apart from their partners, to
discuss theological and practical matters. Men and women worked in different spheres. After a
cerebral work week, the Shakers met on Sundays, to worship. In a circle dance, lines of men
and women formed concentric moving circles. The dance liberated the group from individual
sin and helped them achieve a collective purity.

TXT: The group rhythmically chanted from the bible and marched in circles stomping their feet,
and they shouted, “stomp the devil!” Sisters and brothers began whirling in place. The group
cried “Shake! Shake! Shake! Christ is with you!” There is a noise like, 'Whoosh!' which means
the devil is present. People clapped. They leaped up and down. Some removed their outer
clothes. A fit of shaking passed over the group. Some shakers bowed down. Others were
doubled over, feet and hands linked, as they rolled on the floor. They rolled over and over, like
wheels, or like rolling logs. Some got down on four legs, like dogs, growled and barked. Carnal
mortification freed the shaker from false pride. Singing began after a violent jerking of head
side to side. Some droned fragments from the bible, others joined in with unknown tongues or
indian communications. Indian spirits entering the meeting, 'possessed' the bodies of the
shakers, as women and men squatted indian-style together on the floor, elder and eldress
would have to pull squaws and warriors apart. Through this ritual, the devil was snared from
his hiding places within the group and cast out.

TXT: The Puritans

DG: The first religious dissidents to arrive in America were the puritans. More middle class and
individualistic than the proletarian, communal Shakers, they believed that a man stood a good
chance of going to hell, as all men inevitably were born evil.

TXT: “Men are held... over the pit of hell: they have deserved the fiery pit and are already
sentenced to it... Held captive by satan... (they are) under the power... of their lusts, and
though they have many struggles of conscience about their sins, yet never wholly escaped
them. Thus are all... that never... were born again.” (Jonathan Edwards)

DG: Shaking, reciting biblical phrases, people reeled and rocked and talked in tongues.

TXT: Secular puritanism led to capitalism. But backwoods prophets warned that the united
states was serving the devil in its new commercialism. At the “great religious revival of 1801”,
preachers pitched tents on the edges of pioneer settlements. They spoke of the need for
salvation, mortification, and of america's need for a spiritual mission. In tent meetings rural
pioneers clapped their hands, rhythmically reciting biblical texts. Here for the first time, the
piano and the guitar replaced the organ as conveyor of spiritual feeling. The saved would 'reel
and rock.' In their collective desire to be 'reborn' people would talk in tongues. There is an
unresolved conflict between puritan individualism and a yearning for communalism free of
sexual and economic competition.

TXT: “the very clouds seemed to separate and give way to the people of god ascending to the
heavens; while thousands of tongues with the sound of hallelujah seemed to roll through
infinite space; while hundreds of people lay prostrate on the ground crying for mercy”

TXT: There is an unresolved conflict between puritan individualism and a yearning for
communalism free of sexual and economic competition.

DG: In 1890 the plains indians, having lost their land in buffalo, followed the religion of a new
messiah whose faith was a mixture of christian and native american beliefs. This new messiah
would punish the whites by means of his new faith based on the Ghost dance. If the indians
danced with fervour, and renounced all war and loved all people, the buffalo would return. The
white men would be swept away, the dead would arise and their lands would be returned. As
they danced they sang 'There shall be a buffalo chase, make arrows, make arrows, sayeth my
father. Father I came, mother I come. Father give us back new arrows'.
The Sioux wore shirts decorated with symbols which they believed would defeat the white
man's bullets. To prepare for victory and to receive in a trance more messages from the great
spirit, men, and also women, for the first time, danced in circles. Perhaps the Sioux indians'
Ghost dance, like the Shakers' circle dance was a response to the industrial revolution's
destruction of their family structure and way of life.

PS: “My belief in rock n roll gave me a kind of strength that other religions couldn't come close
to.”

TXT: Rock is the first musical form to be totally commercial and consumer-exploitative. It is
largely produced by adults to exploit a large adolescent market whose consciousness it tries to
manipulate through media. Modelling itself after hollywood, rock takes average teenagers and
moulds them into charismatic rockstars with manufactured cults of personality. Ambiguously
built into rock is a self consciousness by the music and by the teenagers who listen to it that it
is a commercialised form. Thus, it is not taken totally seriously. The listener can discern in its
ironies, such as the song 'Johnny B. Goode', the nature of this compromised position.

DG: 1950's youth class emerges, a generation whose task is not to produce but to consume,
this is the teenager. They consume as not to add to post war unemployment, and liberated
from the puritan work ethic, their philosophy is fun, their religion is rock 'n roll.
Rock mocks parental sexuality and the parental belief that sexual repression and meaningful
work are necessary for personal salvation. Rock heroes are unrepentant fallen sinners.

TXT: 1957. Jerry Lee Lewis, whose cousin was a preacher, was discussing “great balls of fire”,
a song written by a black songwriter that Sam Phillips, president of Sun records, wanted him
to record. Phillips, by having white country boys record black songs, created rock stars such as
Elvis. Jerry Lee believed the song a lewd mockery of a gospel tune about the day of revelation.

(Images of text while conversation is audible in background):

“Jerry Lee Lewis: H-E-L-L!

Sam Phillips: I don't believe it.
JLL: Great godamighty, great balls of fire!
Billy Lee riley: That's right!
SP: I don't believe it.
JLL: It says, Wake Man! To the Joy of god! Only!
But when it comes to worldly music- that's rock 'n roll...
BLR: Rock it out!
JLL: -or anything like that. You have done brought yourself into the world,
and you're in the world, and you hadn't come on out of the world, and you're still a sinner.
SP: All right. Now look, Jerry. Religious conviction - doesn't mean anything - resembling
extremism. Do you mean to tell me that you're gonna take the Bible, you're gonna take God's
word, and you gonna revolutionize the whole universe! Now listen! Jesus Christ was sent here
by God Almighty. Did he convince, did he save, all the people in the world?
I've studied it through and through and through, Jerry. Jerry – if you think that you can't, can't
do good, if you're a rock 'n roll exponent –
JLL: You can do good, Mr Phillips, don't get me wrong-
SP: Now wait, wait, listen, when I say do good-
JLL: YOU CAN HAVE A KIND HEART!
SP: I don't mean, I don't mean just-
JLL: You can help people!
SP: You can save souls!
JLL: No. NO! No, no!
SP: Yes!
JLL: How can the DEVIL save souls? What are you talkin' about?
SP: Yes!
JLL: I have the Devil in me! If I didn't I'd be a Christian!
SP: Well, you may have him-
JLL: JESUS! Heal this man! He cast the Devil out. The Devil says 'Where can I go?' He says
'Can I go into this swine?' He says, Yeah. Didn't he go into him?
SP: Jerry, the point I'm tryin' to make is – if you believe in what you're singin'- you got no
alternative whatsoever – out of – LISTEN!- out of-
JLL: Mr Phillips! I don't care, it ain't what you believe, it's what's written in the Bible!“

DG: The sublimatic [sic] repression of the body, rock sexualises the shaker dance, and the
religious revival of the community. Rock turns the values of traditional American religion
upside down. To rock 'n roll means to have sex, now.

TXT: 'Fun. fun. Fun. Maybe it won't last but what do we care, my baby and I just want a good
time.'

DG: Family life is lived in the fifties, in isolated suburban houses. Family members link
themselves to the outside through radio, TV, and the car. It is through these means of
transport that teenagers, and rock 'n roll, communicate

DG: In the song 'Teenage heaven' [sic]* written by Dick Cochran, a new realm of teenage
afterlife is suggested for Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Big Bopper, victims of a tragic plane
crash which killed them as they were travelling to a rock concert.
[* A new realm of teenage afterlife is actually suggested in Cochran's tribute song 'Three Stars', which is the song
playing at this point in Rock my Religion -SS]

DG: In the teenager heaven on earth, teenagers are teen-angels, their voices androgynous,
angelically beautiful, their bodies are half formed. While adult culture had formerly viewed
children as innocent angels, teens saw the angelic as relating to the ecstasy of first and purest
sexual feelings. Sex was liberated from reproduction and family and social responsibility

TXT:

Rock's creed is fun

Fun forms the basis of its apocalyptic protest.

The saved once looked with hope to Armageddon.

The apocalypse becomes secular doom.

It means mankind's total destruction.

The possibility that the world might come to an end

is taken by teenagers literally.

The work ethic produced the A-bomb.

It must be abandoned.

DG: Death is a way of avoiding growing up. The myth of James Dean is archetypal.
Taking momentary body pleasures to their limit transcends history or death, and the world's
doom
can be inevitable.

DG: The death of her rock idols of the 1960's led Patty Smith to question her belief in rock as a
religion. She was the Mary Magdalene to all the fallen rock idols of the 60's.

PS: “it's sad, it's too bad, that all of our friends can't be with us today” (from: Elegie)

DG: Rock exploits male adolescent sexuality. The electrified guitar, microphone projected
voice, and body of the performer, become phallus symbols. Rock wanted to overturn the
generational power hierarchy, which was ensured in the Oedipus complex. But there was a
paradox; this left no part for the female.
TXT: Rock demands sex now. Without linking it to the old family structure. It glorifies the
unrepentant sinner, but also expresses a desire for a new, non-Oedipally based family.

DG: Rock performances electrically unleashed anarchic energies and provided hypnotic
ritualistic trans-spaces for the mass audience, especially when both musicians and audience
are under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Such shows suggest the transport of the tent
meeting, or the Shakers' deliberate seeking out of the Devil in order to purify themselves and
insure a community with God.

DG: Fast food restaurants and housing developments are laid out parallel to each other along
the highway. The décor of the restaurant conveys the feeling of the national and the rustic.

[sentence inaudible]

TXT: The hippies

DG: Hippies advocate love, as a magic elixir which will unite both heaven and hell. They don't
distinguish between love and sex, as both challenge family definitions of son-daughter,
mother-father. Love as a sentimental romanticism must be replaced with a more open,
universal form.
In living together as tribal families, travelling in outfitted buses, occasionally camping out like
the old Indian tribes in tents, hippies dream of a world before or after cities.

TXT: “We took rides and walks in the unspoiled countryside and partook of the sweet vision of
grass. And all day long the phonograph blared out the music of the new people we felt we
were all an integral part. I felt I was in love with my wife, all the more so because she was not
so much mine alone. And I felt all the more fulfilled and loved that I was not so much solely
hers. I also had a child whom I was coming to appreciate and be comfortable with, because I
did not have to live at such quarters with him, and because the responsibility for rearing him
was not so greatly mine”

DG: Psychedelic drugs at first produce an artificial phantasmagoria of nature, but later this
turns into a Dionysian world of madness and terror. Hippies believed that when one reached
30 or became part of the adult world, one died symbolically. Drugs produced a foretaste of
death, devaluing death. Besides, fear of death had been used by Christianity to enforce its
morality upon.

TXT: Even though the male rock star had absorbed the female seductive techniques of
narcissism and coquettishness, his power ultimately rested on his phallic presence.

TXT: “Dylan: he played... with such urgency. As if he had a stilted lifeline, as if he had a pain
in his nerves, it totally hit me then. Him and his plain jumpsuit. How a guitar rests so
completely on a man's cock” (Patti Smith, 1969)

DG: As an adolescent she became pregnant and despised what it did to her body.

TXT: “Female. Feel male. Ever since I felt the need to choose I'd choose male. I felt boy
rhythms...
Growing breasts was a nightmare. In anger I cut off my hair and kneeled glassy-eyed before
God. I begged him to place me in my own barbaric race. The male race of my choice. In
answer he injected into me all the characteristics of my gender. Sultry. Wanton... bloated.
Pregnant. I crawl through the sand and clay like a bitch. Like a bitch.” (Patti Smith, 1967)

TXT: Morrison thought rock was dead because it had become merely spectacle. The basis of
that spectacle was the potency of the male rock star as 'cock'. What if he violated the taboo
which prohibited exposure of the male member, but, paradoxically made the electrified voice
of the lead singer phallically potent. In Miami, by 'exposing himself' – showing his penis to the
audience – thus exposing the basis of the rock spectacle, he wanted to expose the audience's
corrupt desires. In this ritual, whose intent was to question the mystique of rock as spectacle,
he chose to re-enact the castration complex. Through the star's own emasculation he
expressed his desire to see rock bring about the destruction of the Oedipal order. And, in fact,
when his penis was revealed to the public Jim's potency as a rock figure was immediately
destroyed. His gesture, of showing 'it' destroyed his former aura of phallic mystery. The
phallus had become, and Morrison had become, pathetically physical.

PS: “I think it's really important that us as Americans recognise the fact that we have a lot of
violence inherent in us, you know, it's part of our culture. It's part of our art, the 50's you
know, the great artists, like Pollock, and De Kooning, and that we should like work now, that
wars are over, to not be ashamed to put violence in our art. You know I have a lot of violence
in my art...”

DG: She rejects the simplicities and the false Arcadia of the sixties in favour, as a reality, of an
ambiguity, of urban violence in the seventies. She also accepts that rock and violence must co-
exist. This is the first manifestation of punk rock.

TXT: In the 70's the religion of the 50's teenager and the 60's “counter-culture” is adopted by
pop artists who propose the end of the religion of “Art for art's sake”. Patti Smith took this one
step further: She saw rock as an art form which would come to replace poetry, painting, and
sculpture. If art is only a business, as Warhol suggests, then music expresses a more
communal, transcendental emotion which art now denies.

TXT:

“Hand of God feel the finger.

Hand of God I start to whirl.
Hand of god I don't linger.
Don't get dizzy,
do not fall down,
turn whirl like
Dervish.
Turn God make a move
Turn Lord I don't get
nervous oh
I just move it
another dimension”
('Ain't it strange' – Patti Smith)

DG: During a performance of 'Ain't it strange', Patti, whirling on stage, tripped over a piece of
cable. She landed on her head on the cement floor, 12 feet below. Taken to a hospital, x-rays
discovered broken vertebrae. She was placed in a neck-cast. She was in severe pain for
months. There was a temporary paralysis. Three months later, Patti gave her first performance
after the fall.

All content © Dan Graham, 1984