Page - 12 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

12 | Natalie Fritz and Anna-Katharina Höpflinger www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 7–20 In this issue, we focus on popular music and define it as part of popular culture. In everyday language, popular culture is still placed in tense rela- tionship with something called “high culture”. In this context, popular cul- ture is associated with a mass and globalised market, while high culture is associated with an educated and/or, depending on the perspective, bourgeois context. But as John C. Lyden points out, it’s not that simple.11 Even if one wants to retain such a simple dichotomy, one must recognise that its tran- sitions are fluid: “Jazz might have begun as a popular art form, but it soon became so sophisticated that the majority of the population lost interest in it, and now it is primarily played and studied more in academic settings than in nightclubs.”12 We take popular music to be part of popular culture. Popular music is thus a form of cultural communication. It can legitimise power and dominant dis- courses, but it can also question them – which is especially interesting in relation to religion. The inclusion of references to religious texts or persons is not at all unusual in many popular genres, but because these references have been separated from their original context, we, the audience, perceive them differently or may even miss cues when we hear a song for the first time. But still, even if unconsciously, we learn a lot about the cultural and religious background as we listen to popular music of all sorts, be it from the sound, the melody or the lyrics. Popular music can transmit not only emotions and a sense of community but also religious knowledge, knowledge that leaves diverse traces in differ- ent times and places. In the end, whether we extract religious meaning from popular music and what that meaning is depend on our background and on our capacity to contextualise symbols, motives and narratives – and also on the media used to convey these references.13 The complexities of these interrelations of religion and popular music are illustrated by an analysis of our example: the music video for the song “Big God”. 11 Lyden 2015, 13. 12 Lyden 2015, 13. 13 See Belting 2011, 9–62, especially the discourse about the difference between image and media.