By: Jack Ransom
There’s an old lie rock ’n’ roll likes to tell itself: that rebellion has to be loud.
Turn up the guitar. Kick over the microphone stand. Terrify somebody’s parents. Get yourself banned from someplace respectable. Make enough racket, and perhaps, for three glorious minutes, nobody can tell you what to do.
Ananda Xenia Shakti knows something about that world. Before she was making spiritual music with Love Power the Band, before the yoga and meditation and journeys through India, she was Xenia Holliday of The B-Girls, one of those wonderfully improbable bands that sprang out of punk’s original wreckage. She played the clubs, toured with The Clash during the London Calling period, and wound up singing backing vocals on Blondie’s Autoamerican.
So when somebody with that résumé releases a record called “Devotion,” you might expect either an enormous cosmic joke or one of those embarrassing reinventions where yesterday’s rebel suddenly wants to sell you enlightenment.
Except “Devotion” isn’t either of those things.
The darn thing means it.
And that’s precisely why it works.
The story behind the song sounds like something rock criticism ought to hate on principle. Ananda was at a silent meditation retreat in Andhra Pradesh, India. She became physically ill one night and couldn’t settle into meditation. So she started singing the names of Radha and Krishna, and somewhere in the discomfort a melody began forming around the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra.
She kept singing.
Eventually the physical contraction was accompanied by something completely different internally: expansion, sweetness, peace.
You can roll your eyes if you want.
Then you hear the record.
“Devotion” doesn’t try to convince you of anything. That’s its first smart move. It doesn’t arrive carrying a spiritual PowerPoint presentation explaining the secrets of the universe. It simply establishes a space and stays there.
And stays there.
And stays there.
Repetition is the whole damn point.
Rock music has always known this, even when rock critics pretended sophistication required chord changes. Bo Diddley knew it. The Velvet Underground knew it. James Brown knew it better than practically anybody. Find the right groove, phrase or pulse and repetition doesn’t diminish it,it excavates it.
Ananda applies the principle to mantra.
Love Power the Band surrounds her with an arrangement that breathes instead of bulldozes. Nobody seems terrified that the listener might become bored and run off to another song. Sounds drift into the frame. The rhythm holds. Ananda sings without trying to blow down the walls.
She’s doing something harder.
She’s trusting the song.
That’s increasingly rare in an age when records seem frightened of their own listeners. Everything has to happen immediately because some invisible executive is screaming that you’ve got five seconds before somebody swipes away.
“Devotion” couldn’t care less.
Come in or don’t.
Stay or leave.
The music will continue without you.
Now that is punk.
Not because it sounds remotely like The B-Girls or The Clash. It doesn’t. But because beneath all punk’s leather jackets, cheap guitars and beautiful stupidity was a genuinely revolutionary proposition: you don’t have to become what you’re told to become.
Ananda took that proposition seriously enough to apply it to punk itself.
She walked away.
Think about how weirdly courageous that is. Music mythology teaches people to cling desperately to their identities. You’re the punk girl. You’re the rocker. You’re the rebel. You’re the person who toured with The Clash. Keep telling the story until somebody prints it on a T-shirt.
Ananda kept moving.
Yoga. Meditation. India. Spiritual exploration. Eventually, Love Power the Band and music conceived not as some giant spotlight pointed at the performer but as an opportunity to dissolve the line between performer and audience.
“Devotion” sounds like the inevitable result.
And its most important idea has nothing to do with religion.
It’s that suffering and beauty can occupy the same room.
The song didn’t arrive after Ananda’s discomfort ended. It arrived inside it. Her body was saying one thing while consciousness seemed to be saying another. She describes the experience as the lotus rising from the mud, the expansion hidden inside contraction.
That’s useful even if you’ve never meditated in your life.
Because everybody knows contraction.
Fear. Grief. Loneliness. Addiction. Heartbreak. That 3 a.m. certainty that your life has somehow become a building you’re trapped inside.
Most popular music tells us to escape.
“Devotion” suggests staying long enough to discover whether there’s another door.
The song won’t be for everybody. Good. Music designed for everybody usually winds up belonging deeply to nobody. Listeners who demand constant escalation may wonder when something is going to “happen.”
They’re missing it.
The happening is the listening.
Ananda Xenia Shakti began her musical life in a culture dedicated to tearing things apart. Decades later, she’s making music about putting something back together.
Maybe those aren’t opposites.
Maybe every worthwhile rebellion eventually reaches the same terrifying question: once you’ve smashed whatever imprisoned you, what are you going to build in its place?
On “Devotion,” Ananda finally offers her answer.
Not another wall.
An open door.
