"You Don't Get Away That Easy:" Rethinking the 'Secular' in Secular Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The dichotomy of the ‘sacred’ versus the ‘profane’ continues to inform discussions of religion and public life. In terms of pop culture, this takes the form of a distinction between the mainstream and Christian music industries, relegating ‘spiritual’ music to the latter category and dismissing any reference to spirituality in mainstream music as demonstrating a ‘weak religiosity.’ I argue that an examination of references to spirituality in song lyrics, complemented with an analysis of artist interviews, reveals that music which we deem ‘secular' is not characterized by absence of attention to spirituality, but rather contains a wide range of approaches to the transcendent, echoing Charles Taylor’s discussion of the ‘nova effect.’ In this study, I draw on Taylor’s A Secular Age in a review of songs from the best albums lists of 2017, as provided by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, New Musical Express, and Billboard, focusing on references to spirituality in song lyrics. I argue that a re-examination of lyrics may lead us from skepticism toward spirituality in pop music to anticipation of spiritual encounters and reflections by musical artists of all genres. Kew Words: music, sacred, secular, spirituality
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".