Popular Music, Religion, and 9/11
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Popular Music, Religion, and 9/11: Analysis of Two Music Albums
Introduction
The attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 (9/11)
have provoked various collective and personal responses in the US and around the world.
These responses span a range of political, military, economic, intellectual, cultural, and
spiritual acts whose meaning, along with the meaning of the attacks themselves, will
continue to be negotiated over time.
This paper examines two particular responses found in popular culture texts, and
draws conclusions about the relationship between popular culture and religion suggested
by these texts within the context of collective crisis and suffering. The analysis
originates with the question, how do these two texts incorporate religious symbolism in
formulating a response to 9/11? The object of the analysis are two music albums: Bruce
Springsteen’s The Rising released on July 30, 2002 and Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk
released on October 29, 2002. The rationale for selecting these particular texts will be
detailed later in the paper. However, it is important to note at this point that their analysis
is situated within a larger scholarly dialogue on the blurring of the line between the
profane and the sacred, and the increasing intersection between the world of media and
the realm of religion in a number of complex ways.
Media and Commemoration
The scholarly work on media and religion has produced a voluminous body of
literature, which is reviewed only briefly here with a particular focus on work dealing
with media and commemoration. The relevance of this literature to this paper is that it
Convention