During the pandemic lockdowns of the past three years, the shared experiences of religious music-making took place in digital spaces as never before. Through social media posts, interactive live streams, and algorithmic recommendations, artists and performers assembled and engaged their congregations in ways that exploded, expanded, and reconfigured institutional boundaries. This panel explores three such instances in which music and religious practice intersect with three of the most important New Media platforms of the past decade: TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram Live.
This presentation follows the virality of a playful song post made in May 2021 by music artist Naje, #golaydown. Sung unaccompanied in a call-and-response structure, the original song by Naje quickly went viral on TikTok and has since received over 900K views. Using viral musicking, digital antiphony, and collaborative music making as frameworks, I will analyze both the original post as well as popular memes using the original song/sound. The appeal of the song can be attributable to the song's theme of rest resonating with multiple audiences, the sound exhibits the call-and-response form of a spiritual, and TikTok's Duet feature makes it easy to add melodies to the original. In conclusion, I explore what #golaydown and virtual spirituals may contribute to transformations and transmissions of old and new spirituals in the digital age.
As with all popular music, Christian worship music has undergone a format revolution in the past half-century. Originally sold in physical records and paper songbooks and gradually integrated into Christian recording and publishing industries, most listeners now get their worship music fix through popular streaming services. Spotify even maintains a current “WorshipNow” list for nearly a million subscribers that promises to provide access to "the pulse of today's modern worship music." Obviously, these tools provide new opportunities for fan-worshippers to customize and expand their auditory worship experiences, but they also offer new platforms for worship music to circulate outside of the institutional church and interact with broader popular music ecosystems. In this paper, I begin to theorize the new patterns of circulation brought about by the “celestial jukebox” (pun intended) of cloud-based streaming and examine the material and theological effects of “interpassivity” as it relates to worshipping in contemporary media.
The shelter-in-place order of the pandemic was a blessing to recording artists who saw the marketplace open in an energizing way. Simultaneously to fans’ delight, soul music singer Gladys Knight and R&B artist Patti LaBelle agreed to engage a social media phenomenon called #VERZUZ, bringing to the Instagram platform music that has been the soundtrack of our lives. As seasoned touring tastemakers, Knight and Labelle exemplify gastromusicophysics in their business ventures expertise producing food that makes people want to sing. #Verzuz is an American webcast series of musical duals ideally between peer-performers, created by producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, riding the wave of increased virtual concert broadcasts. In this talk, I provide a degustation of issues revealed by the ingenuity practiced by touring musicians formed in the gospel music tradition like restaurateur Mahalia Jackson and her successors Knight and Labelle to establish the crucial contributions of touring tastemakers at the intersection of musicogustatory and sonogustatory production in commoditized mobility.