Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Music

First Advisor

Kane, Brian

Abstract

Scholars have often described the evangelical reception of rock music as a discourse that changes in a positive direction, from the full-sail rejection of rock in the 1960s to the cautious acceptance of the genre as legitimate worship music throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. This dissertation surveys anti-rock texts written by conservative evangelicals from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, observing an alternative trajectory of the discourse. The dissertation shows that an uncompromising trend of anti-rock criticism persists well into the 1980s, especially promoted by preachers and writers (for example, Jeff Godwin and Jimmy Swaggart) who sought to deny the legitimacy of Christian rock music. But rather than simply replicating claims from the 1960s, these later writers had to subtly shift their argumentation in order to maintain a blanket condemnation of a genre that now prominently included rock made by and for devout Christians. Specifically, the dissertation argues that conservative evangelical anti-rockers refocused their arguments away from the music’s human authorship – away from the apparently bad intentions of rock musicians – and toward a more spiritual and affective account of sonic danger that was mostly agnostic toward human intentionality. Anti-rockers achieve this transformed argumentation by suppressing the earlier political-racial associations of rock, adopting a hardline media-determinist stance with regard to rock’s sonic qualities, and invoking the agency of non-human spiritual forces.The final chapter of the dissertation expands outward to argue that this anti-rock discourse gives us a surprisingly fruitful case study for thinking through perennial issues in aesthetics, specifically the role of form, affect, and intention in the experience and interpretation of musical works. Through close-readings of texts by Elizabeth Anscombe, Stanley Cavell, Richard Wollheim, and others, the dissertation shows how indiscernibility is a central issue in both modern aesthetics and the anti-rock discourse, influencing claims about what constitutes the artwork itself (its ontology). The dissertation ultimately proposes a theory of the interpretation of artworks that synthesizes two elements often treated as irreconcilable: authorial intention (what an artist meant by their actions) and an artwork’s phenomenal properties (how it appears to a beholder’s senses).

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