The Music of the Night

About this event

Admission to event by RSVP here: Rhythmic sound possesses a unique, seemingly supernatural power to completely bypass human logic. The Music of the Night investigates modern popular music as the primary active receptacle for the exiled, underground spiritual impulses of Western culture; The dispersal of historical and cultural grammars of spirituality, remixed into a crypto-religious, Pop Occult. From the unapologetic, shamanic theology of Jim Morrison to the stark, confessional spiritualism of Van Morrison, popular music has always chased the transcendent. We see it in the full-on, stadium-sized witchery of Florence and the Machine and Taylor Swift's spell-casting with 70,000 participants.. We see it in the sci-fi apocalypticism of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," which riffs on humanity fleeing a dying planet to seed the universe with a new life. And just as frequently, we see it in the dark, satirical folk-occultism -- Warren Zevon’s "Werewolves of London," Jackson's puckish send -up in Thriller, bothmocking our primal anxieties with infectious, howling and zombied choreography. Within this secret catalog, artists operate as modern priests, tech-shamans, and ritualists of the dial. Celine Dion’s "My Heart Will Go On" functions as a grand, high-liturgical invocation of a secularized Gnosticism. Mass media has not killed our drive for the sacred; it has simply updated our machinery. It lives on when Kanye West remodels the stadium experience into the radical, ecstatic preachments of his Sunday Service. It lives on when tech-sorcerers at Coachella 2012 manifest the literal digital resurrection of 2Pac, conjuring a dead prophet to rap before a stunned, flesh-and-blood congregation. Whether it is Travis Scott staging rituals that mirror ancient, chaotic Mithraic mysteries, or The Carpenters delivering the haunted, elliptical horoscopology of "Superstar," the conclusion is inescapable: the divine has not vanished. It has simply found a new beat. Join us, and find for the night the music died -- and returned as something else. ***