Lent is a season of justice – it is a season of deep reconciliation, of bare bones truth-telling, a redirecting of hungers and longings that have gone astray, but it is essentially a season of justice. As I will tell students as we enter Ash Wednesday that they are called to remember along with Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:19 that they too will “return to the ground from which they are taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Yet going back to the beginning of things – our dustiness – also means that we can allow new things to take root, to grow into full bloom, and perhaps bear fruit in ways we never would have expected. As an exercise of justice, I challenge students to remember that Lent is a call to justice in three vectors:
– justice within ourselves,
– justice in relation to our neighbor,
– and justice with God.
Much of the focus in contemporary Lenten practice revolves around the first turn of justice as a move within ourselves and challenging the priority of the hungers/distractions that have taken us away from our true nature. This is the call to fasting – be it from food, coffee, alcohol, Facebook, television, what-have-you – that people will take on board as a way to refocus on who we truly are before God and others without these things. It is a good practice and an important spiritual discipline to be sure. However, without the call of justice to and with our neighbor (found in renewed acts of generosity, service and hospitality) and in relation to God (found in renewed commitments to deep reading of Scripture, prayer, community worship and fellowship) then merely fasting from caffeine or American Idol doesn’t really amount to much.
One area that I have challenged myself with during Lent has been to scroll through my CCM back catalog and see where God might show up in ways I just don’t expect. For those who know some of my journey, I have had a strange relationship with CCM – the genre known as Contemporary Christian Music – and have come to the point of closing off my imagination to the possibility that God even speaks (let alone stutters) in anything found in the racks of Christian bookstores. I make a point of ‘heresy hunting’ in CCM lyrics as I sit in worship services and struggling constantly with the poor theology found in much of what passes as ‘praise music’. But this year I was confronted by the reality that perhaps my heart, akin to the Grinch, was three sizes too small and when I hear the Whos down in Whoville singing to Chris Tomlin, Stuart Townsend, Matt Redman, TobyMac, David Crowder or whomever, I need to explore what is behind this joy rather than steal all the Hillsong CDs from under the trees in the dead of night.
So I have gone back to my CCM tunes in the dusty recesses of my iPod (filed under ‘Gospel and Religious’ or ‘Religious’ or ‘Inspirational’ genres) and started to listen a bit each day as a form of penance, of desert wandering, and a form of reconciliation. True, some of the music I am finding is fairly cringe worthy in both form and content – the 80’s electronic strings that soar in the third verse is an example – and yet there is still something going on that I have to admit is striving after God in ways I have dismissed. Perhaps is it a sign of my age, but I actually am finding that some of the old Jesus Music stuff from the mid 1970s (Larry Norman, Keith Green, Randy Stonehill) and the Gospel numbers from the early 1980s (Mighty Clouds of Joy, Mavis Staples, Shirley Caesar, Fairfield Four, Blind Boys of Alabama) hold up and frankly musically bury a lot of what is being sold today.
One gem that I had completely forgot about was Larry Norman’s “The Great American Novel” from his 1972 album Only Visiting This Planet. On the song, Norman plays the role of the 60s flower child wandering through 20th century history and watching as history turns a blind eye to justice in favor of the complacent and the powerful:
And when I was ten you murdered law with courtroom politics,
And you learned to make a lie sound just like truth;
But I know you better now and I don’t fall for all your tricks,
And you’ve lost the one advantage of my youth.
You kill a black man at midnight just for talking to your daughter,
Then you make his wife your mistress and you leave her without water;
And the sheet you wear upon your face is the sheet your children sleep on,
At every meal you say a prayer; you don’t believe but still you keep on.
And your money says in God we trust,
But it’s against the law to pray in school;
You say we beat the Russians to the moon,
And I say you starved your children to do it.
The song pulls no punches and has a ferocious, all-consuming commitment to seeking real justice and reconciliation in the realm of lived politics – things that effect real people in real life.
As I scroll through CCM recorded in the 80s and 90s let alone the first decade of the 2000s, I will admit being struck with how… dare I say it… bland… the music seems to be.
Where is the strong, clear, pointed concern for the poor and marginalized?
Where is the longing for justice and the seeing of Christ in the face of the downcast?
Lent is indeed a season of justice. It is a season of reconciliation. It is a season of going back to beginnings and finding what might have been overlooked and needs to be attended to. Sometimes, it means finding in CCM… of all places… a calling to justice and seeing the world anew.
As for me, I was nine hours ahead of my family and friends in Seattle as I was finishing a day of work. Sitting in my office in the Divinity faculty at the University of Glasgow, I received a phone call from Diana saying that “something was happening in New York” and that I should log onto the computer. An hour later I was in my flat watching the unfolding of this decade’s most defining few hours. Nine years later and the aftershocks of 9/11 are still with us. Few events have globally shifted culture in the last hundred years like this and popular music has certainly been re-framed by it. As one could expect, pop music took up the events and aftershocks of 9/11 and painted both with the broad strokes of a Monet and the pointillism of a Pollock by pouring energy and space for contemplation into the violence, the patriotism, the wars and rumors of wars. Perhaps even more so than other art forms seeking to make sense of this apocalyptic moment where what we understand the world to be was shattered before the eyes of millions, pop music in all its immediacy, its primacy of emotion, its desire to communicate quickly and resolutely in a matter of minutes, and its disposable nature and willingness to be discarded for the next 4 minutes vocal exclamation and pounding beat was THE form that has framed what 9/11 was and is for a generation. Sure, the scholarly monographs are being written with its the critical analysis giving arguments for the why and how of such an event and this too will have some effect on how generations will seek to understand those events. But it was the pop song that showed up first and they are the artifacts that show we people were not only thinking… but feeling.
To this end, compiling a list of top albums for this first decade of the new millennium is impossible without seeing pop music through the dust clouds, death, and wreckage of those events on September 11th. Everything that followed those days has some symbiotic relationship to the attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pursuit, capture, and execution of Saddam Hussein, and the reality that all of this is far from being ‘over’.
One last thing to mention is Columbine. On April 20th, 1999 Columbine High School was assailed not by terrorists from another country but from ‘within’ as two teenage American boys entered a public high school in Colorado with semi-automatic weapons injuring 21 people, killing 12 students and 1 teacher. America entered the decade haunted by the reality that all was indeed not well in our land and the fear and anxiety of losing our children in a place that is supposed to be safe – a school of all places – meant that nowhere was safe. Layering this on top of 9/11 made the decade one marked as fearful both within our borders and from without.
So in picking ten albums for the past decade that have marked out a path for pop music and pop culture, it is with the ever-present reality of Columbine and 9/11 that I listened to these albums and think they offer a representative taste of the decade in its anxiety, its disappointments, as well as its hopes and glory. I haven’t listed them in any hierarchal order in part because I honestly can’t put one over the other (with the exception of my top album which is the last entry at the bottom… by the way… spoiler alert… it isn’t Kayne, Arcade Fire, or Taylor Swift… so don’t hold your breath for one of those) so I offer the list as a whole as they have become in my remembrances – they are a ‘shuffle’ play of the decade that saw so much pain, such loss, and many surprises and new beginnings that showed that life isn’t done with us yet.
Once – Music to the Motion Picture Soundtrack
Small things change the world in more ways than we realize. My decade began with starting my first faculty post, Diana starting her PhD program, and my first daughter being born. To say that so-called little things don’t have big impact hasn’t held a newborn infant and realized that the world just shifted under the weight of it all. The indie film “Once” was a small thing that brought big changes as well. Here was a small film set in Dublin where the primary characters were fairly depressed, sad people and nothing sizable happens in comparison to the global turmoil that surrounded its release in 2007 as the war in Iraq continued on. Yet here was a simple little story – Glen Hansard (lead singer of the Frames) played a lost soul busking on the streets of Dublin amidst the heartbreak of lost love and meets Marketa Irglova, another lost soul selling roses in the street who is in a difficult marriage yet yearns for something more for herself and her young daughter. In releasing the film, the trailer pushes you to believe that this is a love story between these two and yet the true story (like love itself) is so much bigger and courageous than that. The song “Falling Slowly” won the Best Song Oscar and the scene in the movie of the two sitting in a music store working on the song is heart warming in ways only a Wesleyan conversion experience can describe. What the album achieves is a simple, deep collection of songs about love lost and found, about a desire to love in a world so damaged that it doesn’t know where to begin, and about the power of creating art as a way through the madness of a world at war with itself.
Radiohead – In Rainbows
We all thought that the tipping point for music distribution was going to come with MySpace – the idea that the grand democracy of the web would allow artists to break free from the record labels and get to the audience directly thereby cutting out the middle man and making music affordable again. It never happened. But what did happen in the past decade was a band offering up one of the best albums of their amazing career for… well… whatever you wanted to pay for it. On October 10th, 2007 amidst a number of email blasts, a simple website offered Radiohead’s latest album – not a single or three song EP mind you, but a complete album – for whatever you could (or were willing to) pay for it. But this wasn’t the surprising thing. What was most surprising was that In Rainbows wasn’t some cast-off collection of B-sides thrown together for a publicity stunt – this was (and is) a stunningly great album. The record industry was knocked silent for a bit waiting to see what would happen next – would Radiohead lose money? Would fans demand this model? Well, Radiohead moved a lot of copies… and eventually sold a lot of physical CDs as well and the fans embraced Radiohead even tighter. Whether people will hold up In Rainbows as a great album on it own remains to be seen, but coupled with the breakthrough of showing that great music can get out to people, can make a profit, and doesn’t have to be stolen (read: burning someone else’s copy or using Bitorrent)
Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker
There was a world before 9/11 and in many ways Ryan Adams’ debut solo album is the bridge from that world and the world we have now inherited. At the turn of the millennium Ryan Adams was quite possibily one of the truly coolest guys in music. Only 26 years old at the time, he was the voice and primary songwriting talent behind the alt-country band Whiskeytown which along with seminal alt-country bands such as Uncle Tupelo and Wilco help to usher in a revival of the Gram Parsons legacy of the ‘cosmic cowboy’ vibe for a new generation. Overly confident, musically gifted, charisma to burn as he blended punk and country and Hollywood stardom into a New Yorker ‘look at me, I’m the center of the earth’ presona – Ryan Adams was simply something to behold in concert. The album begins with an argument between himself and David Rawlings (partner of Gillian Welch – see the discussion of Time (The Revelator) below) about Morrissey’s song ‘Suedehead’ and then leads into the barn burner opener “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)”. This crash of genres – moving deftly from Morrissey to this alt-country hard core twang opener speaks to the mash up of genres that feel so at home for Ryan Adams such as the story that he named the album while in the studio and saw a poster of Mariah Carey who was wearing a T-Shirt that had the word “Heartbreaker” on it. Yet with all this arrogance and swagger, Heartbreaker is exactly what it’s title states – a real album of heartbreak. Songs like “(Oh My) Sweet Carolina” and “Come Pick Me Up” are simply stunning in their lyricism and depth with the latter song being one of the best break up songs written… ever. To hear some of these songs is to be astounded that they came out of this swaggering, mouthy 26 year old punk who just liked being a rock star. In many ways I don’t know how he pulled it off as the subsequent albums over the decade just haven’t touched what this album did. But at least lightening struck this boy when it did. A great album for long haul driving and watching the sun set in the horizon. Pitchfork put “Come Pick Me Up” as one of its top 500 songs and it certainly deserves to be on that list.
Tom Waits – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards
Perhaps it isn’t fair to put a collection of B-sides, unreleased tracks, and music for soundtracks and consider it a worth album for this list. Perhaps. But this is Tom Waits and Tom Waits’ garage is freakin’ gold. Released as a 3 CD set thematically organized around the themes of ‘brawlers’, ‘bawlers’, and ‘bastards’, it is a testimony to Tom Waits’ gift as a songwriter and performer that all these supposed throwaway tracks are stunning in their own right. As a song that embodies the zeitgeist of the decade, go buy ‘Road to Peace’ and put it on constant rotation.
U2 – All That You Can’t Leave Behind
U2 released three strong albums this past decade, but they started the decade in 2000 with one of their most integrative efforts to date. All That You Can’t Leave Behind hit the streets in October of 2000 and launched what Bono said in a number of interviews as their “campaign to reapply for the title of ‘best band of the world'”. The album took the best of the bands’ twenty year history and distilled it down into a series of songs that are both classic and yet move the band confidently into the 21st century. The political power of “Walk On”, the idealism of “Beautiful Day”, the stadium punch of “Elevation” and others blend into a truly potent album and still sounds fresh. What is astounding is that although these tracks were written prior to the events of 9/11, they were the very songs that many people found solace and hope within during the chaos and discouragement of the next few years. Is it a stretch to say that U2 is prophetic? Not for this fan. Just seeing their 9/11 tribute performance where they blend “Peace On Earth” with “Walk On” as if they wrote it for that night is a wonder to behold.
The National – High Violet
For those of you who followed my top ten of 2010, you will recognize The National and their amazing 2010 release as my top pick of the year. As such, it bears repeating that The National really came into their own in the latter part of the decade and while some would place their earlier release – The Boxer – higher, I will stand with High Violet. As I mentioned in my previous post, Matt Berninger who is the lead singer of The National, has a voice and writes songs that get compared to a lot of other artists – Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits to name a few. What I have yet to hear is the comparison to artists found on John Hughes movie soundtracks. Take just about every cut on the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack could be covered by The National and I would venture to guess that Berninger spent a good portion of his adolescence with many of the misfits that populate the Hughes teen film canon. As demonstrated in their last release The Boxer and this years High Violet, The National is a band concerned with coming-of-age
On High Violet, you could also argue that the effect of Tim LeHay’s Left Behind series and millennial fever is part of the back story given the apocalyptic images of floods, bee swarms, and even brain-eating zombies. In this way the album is truly a product of this 9/11 haunted decade. Most of what this conjures up for the listener though is the strange effect loving something more than yourself means in a world that is falling apart at every turn. Given that Matt Berninger became a father during the recording of High Violet speaks to this anxiety of now having to provide and protect a life other than your own. to express the fear of a man who now must put a wife and young child ahead of himself. “Afraid Of Everyone” is what encapsulates this anxiety to perfection. As Berninger sings of being afraid ‘of everyone’ you honestly believe him. And yet the movement of the album doesn’t live in the paranoia of Radiohead nor the burn-the- world-down-and-start-again anthem that is found in Nine Inch Nails. No, with songs like “England” and “Bloodbuzz Ohio” The National sing of being fearful for others and the love that breaks their heart over and over and over again. In short, it is just a stunning album filled with complexity, brooding, wonder and at times quick wit and one of the lasting releases that I can imagine playing again and again.
The White Stripes – Elephant
Here is a serious question: where would popular music be right now without Jack White? I am glad I don’t have to answer that question for a number of reasons, but three readily come to mind: (1) resurrecting the career of country singer Loretta Lynn by producing her album Van Lear Rose which simply buries most country albums and puts some serious post-punk energy into her already storied and passionate gifts as the Queen of Country Music, (2) proving that there were other things going on in Detroit other than Motown, and (3) giving the world the challenge to rip open the studied, boring, factory slickness of the studio album and bring it back to its rawness and immediacy – if it ain’t fresh… don’t bother listening. Like a freakish mutation of The Carpenters from the sweet innocent 70’s, Jack and Meg White took the weird, creepy ‘brother/sister’ act to a whole new level. Take The White Stripes’ album Elephant and the now ubiquitous sounding “Seven Nation Army”. While there are haters and imitators alike, the needed push that The White Stripes offered the decade was a gift. In the end, throw the sound board in the pickin’ river and rip up the stage with your guitar and a drum kit. Elephant sounds like something that Robert Plant only dreamed of but isn’t capable of imagining himself into these days (granted, I like the whole T-Bone/ Alison Krauss move… ) It is both a nightmare and dream but one that we are still not ready to wake up from. Where Ryan Adams’ “Come Pick Me Up” is my vote for the ultimate break-up song for the decade, Elephant gets my vote for the album that gets played once you are fed up and ready to pound your fists against the wall. I don’t know if that is a category… but it worked for me many, many times.
Over the Rhine – Drunkard’s Prayer
Marriage is not an easy thing and anybody who tells you different has watched too many Disney films. Having a marriage survive beyond the first few years these days is something of a miracle and being able to put a song together (let alone an entire album) that gets the pathos and joy of this wild, strange endeavor of intimacy is truly rare. Karin Berquist and Linford Detweiler – the songwriting duo and core of Over The Rhine – have put out some astounding albums over the twenty years that they have been a band, but the angels and demons that they wrestled to the ground in the midst of a marriage that teetered on the brink of oblivion is a wonder and is a gift for the ages. Drunkard’s Prayer is a love letter written in blood, sweat and tears of real love put to the test and facing the darkness before any hope of a dawn. It is a simple, painful, truly drunken romp through a love gone dead and lifeless and two lovers being asked to identify the corpse that was their life. It is an album I want to give to couples on their 10th anniversary, and their 20th, and for every decade after. Like the good wine that was drunk in times of joy and sorrow… it is an album that truly gets better with age.
Gillian Welch – Time (The Revelator)
In a decade that seemed to have lost all its innocence, there was certainly a turning back the clock with the move of alt.country acts like Old Crow Medicine Show, Whiskeytown, Jeff Tweedy, and Wilco to name a few who rose in stature during this decade. Probably nothing launched this movement though quite like The Coen Brothers brilliant film O Brother Where Art Thou released in 2000 but gained a strong cult following once it was released in DVD following the 9/11 attacks. The soundtrack was a bluegrass tour de force produced by T-Bone Burnett to great acclaim and introducing the world to Gillian Welch. Gillian Welch, an orphan born in New York City and moved to Los Angeles at the age of three with her adopted parents, isn’t the person most people would pick as the legacy bearer for bluegrass. But like a pastoral vocation, one doesn’t choose their calling… its chooses them. Having bummed around University of California, Santa Cruz as a bass player in punk bands, it was when she heard bluegrass and Patsy Cline era country that all the lights went on. Her albums take time seriously and if you are not patient, then she is not someone you will enjoy because akin to public transit to can’t rush it and it will come to you when it is good and ready. But Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings (my vote for the best guitarist of the decade next to Mark Knopfler) create a space that is deep yet won’t drown you. Every time I have seen them live (four times now) I have come away feeling like I wanted to be a better person… few musicians do that. Her last album – Soul Journey – came out in 2003 and she is way overdue for another release so lets pray that we get sometime to start the new decade with. But of her releases this past decade, it is Time (the Revelator) that truly stands as a masterwork. Joyous and cautious at the same time, it is an album that takes stock of what is precious and worth loving and holds it before with gentleness and grace. While her previous releases dealt with the internal canvas of a person struggling with being an orphan and the poverty that infects our past both spiritual and economically, Time paints a much larger picture by taking on what it means to be an American in a world that after 9/11 seems so strange. Drawing on such diverse themes as the sinking of the Titantic, Elvis, Abraham Lincoln and the endlessness of time itself, Time is truly the central character in this album and the one figure for Welch that has the perspective to render our momentary frustrations and longings in a context worthy of souls created by God. The ending track “I Dream A Highway” is a universe in miniture: a 15 minute testimony to the movement of time and the grace that will carry us through this life and beyond. This song alone makes Time (The Revelator) worthy of this spot in a top ten list, but the album is strong as steel and worth a listen.
The video below is from an amazing performance in 2004 that Welch and Rawlings performed as part of a BBC in-studio. In this great venue of a church, you get a nice taste of this magical duo and especially Rawlings amazing guitar work:
Sufjan Stevens – Illinois (Come on feel the)
I have to admit feeling like a hipster wannabee putting Sufjan Stevens at the top of my decade list and I went an entire day trying to figure out a way to take him off the list entirely. There is now such a backlash against the Sufjan cult that I just want to run way from all the skinny jeans, blogging, emo, self-reflective indie cool of it. But standing in the rain scrolling through my iPod I kept coming back to Illnois and the wonder of it all. Spin magazine had anointed Sufjan with the appropriate title of “Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school” and perhaps this is the best way to think of him – a mash up of Smith and sanctification peppered with pathos yet dripping with the sublime. His vision of art has been something of seeking beyond the art itself and Illinois captures this madness at its true blinding reality. In an interview in the Grand Rapids Press, Stevens spoke of art in this way:
“Art is … a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation…There’s a fullness of being in the world that takes into consideration the supernatural and the natural, and everything we do and say is evoking and expressing eternal things without even knowing it.”
One of the things I have loved about the career of Sufjan Stevens has been his unwillingness to be pulled into the CCM orbit nor to seek so far into despair as to abandon the very thing that gives life to his art – namely his appreciatation for wonder and mystery in the face of God. As he notes in an interview in Pitchfork around the time of the release of Seven Swans:
“I do have to reckon with the material I’m singing about. And I want to be responsible for what I’m singing about. But I can’t be responsible for an entire culture, or an entire church. I can’t be responsible for Christendom. I think that when people react reflexively to material that is religious, they’re reacting to the culture of religion. And I think an enlightened person is capable, on some level, of making the distinction between the institution of the culture and the culture itself.”
Sufjan Stevens inhabits a strange sub-genre of “good musician artists” who happen to be Christians: (David ‘curse those branches for dropping me” Bazan, Danielson, Rosie Thomas, Ester Drang, and Half Handed Cloud among others) – as opposed to so-called “Christian artists” found only in Christian bookstores. They are different because they are subversive Christian musicians. They do not directly evangelize and they barely even mention the name Jesus. They are not under pressure to convert any souls through their music, only pressure to make good art.
Sufjan signed with Asthmatic Kitty, a small label in Holland, Michigan near Hope College where he attended. After releasing Michigan he went headfirst into his Anglicanism with Seven Swans which began his journey of flexing his “I’m brooding, I’m happy, I’m brooding, I’m happy” style that flew Icarus-like towards the Holy of Holies in one instant and then fell into the arms of a lover the next – melted wings and all.
Seven Swans is a quiet, intimate work, wholly concerned with Stevens’ relationship with God. The ‘Seven Swans’ of the title represent the gifts of the Seven Sacraments of the Holy Spirit, willing to persist in the face of the mystery of God and fully engaged with the world through art and liturgy. Stevens writes as a believer not willing to accept the easy answers, as one who knows the failures of sin, the silence of God and the complications of belief. The work often has the tone of a Lamentation or a Psalm.
Oh the glory that the lord has made /And the complications you could do without /When I kissed you on the mouth/
Tuesday night at the bible study /We lift our hands and pray over your body /But nothing ever happens/Oh the glory that the lord has made /And the complications when I see his face /In the morning in the window /Oh the glory when he took our place /But he took my shoulders and he shook my face /And he takes and he takes and he takes
—“Casimir Pulaski Day”
And in my best behavior /I am really just like him /Look beneath the floorboards /For the secrets I have hid
—“John Wayne Gacy, Jr. ”
“In the Tower above the earth there is a view that reaches far/Where we cede the universe/I see the fire, I see the end/Seven miles above the earth, there is Emmanuel of Mothers/With His sword, with His robe, He comes dividing man from brothers.”—from the Revelation themed “The Seer’s Tower”
As an Episcopalian who is a bit embarrassed by the institutionalization and commodification of most church culture, Stevens stands in line with artists like Dorothy Sayers and Flannery O’Conner, who considered excellence at their craft the primary discipline of a Christian. One gets the impression that Stevens doesn’t want to be a mouthpiece or a preacher, but rather that he wants to be someone who lives and looks for God in the doubts, the stories and the musical movements of the Spirit.
I have mentioned to some that I have not taken to The Age of Adz yet – his latest release that frankly confuses me more than anything. Being a hater of a Sufjan Stevens project is a dangerous game in some circles (those skinny jeans folks will bludgeon you with their messenger bags, chuck copies of The Believer at you, dump a cold Americano on your laptop and cut off your wifi just to add insult to injury) but I am risking vulnerability and ignorance in hopes of finding something redemptive in it since I think that of the artists this decade, Sufjan Stevens provides one of the clearest blueprints for what true artists should be engaged in – art that matters and transcends the rubble of this age and hopefully leaving us with a smile that is only joy when shared with others and we seek for justice and reconciliation.
So… that’s it for the list. So many that should be here and are not.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So wrote Charles Dickens in the opening line to The Tale of Two Cities. And yet this is only the beginning. As the rest of the sentence continues:
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
Written in 1859, Dickens’ novel is set in the midst of the French Revolution as it is breaking out and the story chronicles the hopes and fears of a generation watching this seismic shift occur in Europe from both London and Paris. Many people recognize his infamous opening words – it is a wonderful, paradoxical summary of the human condition and many of us can state without blinking that our lives are summed up as ‘the best of times and the worst of times.’ Yet as the sentence continues beyond what we have become so familiar with. To be sure there is a lot more going on than merely ‘the best of times and the worst of times.’ What makes this age – let alone any epoch of human history – the challenging age that it is and that it is an intermingling of belief, foolishness, wisdom, incredulity, despair and hope as well as the best and worst of times. In the end, we live in and amidst change that is occurring so fast and so furious that we just can’t keep up with it. This is one of the many reasons we turn to music – to give us the sonic height, breadth, depth and simple space to stop, reflect and acknowledge what it means to be human amidst an ever-changing culture.
2010 was a year like many years in pop music – some great releases (the best of times) and some recordings so vile (the worst of times) that the fact that they were actually recorded, some producer gave a thumbs up from the sound booth, and now exists in perpetuity on a server somewhere is a haunting reminder that this is truly a fallen world. But there were albums that rose to the top – ones that offered a way of listening to a world spinning fast and furious with a renewed sense of place and purpose. Also, it is important to note these are ‘top’ albums and not necessarily the ‘best’ albums of the year. Like the tide hitting the shore after a massive storm, not everything that rises to the top is necessarily the best – what hits the shore is just that… ‘hits’. These ‘hits’ are in some respects the flotsam and jetsam of the year. Some of the albums I choose this year reminded me of where I came from and others showed me – perhaps with both horror and wonder – where we are headed. Some were deeply nostalgic and others knocked me off my feet and still have me feeling like the first time I saw a platypus… like some weird alien life-form appearing without being announced. Some of the albums were confessional and others prophetic. Some were just simply great albums to listen to when driving on a warm summer day on Highway 20 near Winthrop and others fit well with the feeling of my favorite coffee shop as twilight falls on a rain night on Capitol Hill in Seattle. So try as you might to find some common thread between them akin to Pandora trying to create some perfect radio station for me, there simply isn’t one. In the words of that great music critic Donald Rumsfeld… it is what it is.
In compiling my top ten albums for the year, I am following the pattern I have had for the past decade on this blog of limiting my number of choices to the year into the decade – top 8 for 2008, top 9 last year for 2009, and this year I get to round out the number with a top ten.
Again, as for the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these choices, like most things in life you can try to distill it down to a number of competing factors but as I have written elsewhere I am more of the belief that music finds us and grabs a hold of us more than we reason and force a feeling for. I have had a lot of music recommended to me – some of it sticks and a lot of it doesn’t. In my younger more idealistic years I would to try and embrace the hipster choices, rush to the hottest indie acts, grab the least hot track from iTunes. Perhaps it is due to age, crankiness, staring down the barrel of 50, or plain old stubbornness but I have found that if it doesn’t connect in the first few listens… then the song and I need to part ways and I need to free up space on the iPod. So what follows are a series of first dates that just kept going – albums that I fell into and keep falling into this year. I don’t think all the tracks are stellar on the albums I chose, but there is enough of a consistent thread joining the project together to consider it a winner. Lastly, I realize that we are increasingly living into an age of the digital single (or ‘dingal’ if you will) where albums really are a thing of the past. I am still a strong believer that artists can do profound work in miniature as well as large canvas. I have a number of singles/dingles that populate playlists and mix tapes that stand apart from albums and that is a great thing, but the album is a special event. As the name recognizes, it is a movement of images akin to a photo album that while offering a collection of distinct images that are distinct can come together in the hands of a musician and be a tapestry showing a story that situates each single/dingle in a context or family. Sometimes only 30 minutes and sometimes over an hour but the album does something that the single/dingle will never do – it gives us a community of meaning-making that both enlarges the single/dingle and humbles it at the same time. Like life, we make sense more as a part of an album rather than as one-hit wonders.
So… onto my 2010 top ten albums:
10 – Glee Cast / Journey to Regionals
Before you go screaming into the comments box, hear me out: no television show has done more for pop music in the last five years than Glee. Seriously. Taking past pop staples and doing mash ups with current acts seemed like a one trip pony at first, but as the show has continued, the way in which Glee is situating the context of teen coming-of-age in the midst of a continuous musical number has more truth than fiction. Most every teenager is essentially a walking soundtrack: rhythms and beats punching through their Mp3 players in the hallways, at the bus stops, walking in the mall or waiting for their girlfriend afterschool, music is identity. Whether it is Fame, Grease, Footloose or Glee, the truth is that we may roll our eyes at such a shameless money machine as this Fox comedy (each single/dingle they sing goes to the top of iTunes sales for the week – the royalty checks for the members of Journey alone much be making for a happy Christmas this year) but the fact remains… the musical numbers are actually really good. Whether the show holds it together beyond this second season remains to be seen (after the ‘Grilled Cheeses’ episode it seems to be losing its luster a bit IMHO) but their first run to regionals and the season finale was as good as it gets. The release “Journey to Regionals” is just an amazing, fist- pumping anthem to idealistic teendom. Yes, these are impossible dance numbers to imagine for a public high school in Ohio. Yes, there is no way these kids could have all appeared in the same school and been called ‘losers’. Yes, Journey songs get a bit tiring and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was done better in the ‘Wayne’s World’ movie. But as an album of optimism that literally (here it comes) twinkles with possibilities… it doesn’t get much better than this:
9 – Kayne West/ My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
What is there to say about Kanye West that over the past couple of years hasn’t already been said? Few people hold the place in pop culture that Kanye does – whether he was the most hated man in America for usurping Taylor Swift’s MTV acceptance speech or now the source of George W. Bush’s *only* disappointment in his entire presidency as noted in his recent interview with Matt Lauer on NBC and in his memoir Decision Points – the man certainly galvanizes opinions. When his latest album was released I had some low expectations but this is a release that is one of the best hip-hop CDs in years. Taking all the celebrity and power issues that were beginning to show up in his 2004 release The College Dropout (some would argue still Kayne’s best album to date) Kanye has pulled together an anthem for the new millennium. Going back to the R&B and Soul sampling that made him the go-to guy for Jay Z, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy lives up to its title by sounding otherworldly and timeless yet so fresh at the same time. With Hip Hop royalty like Rhianna and Jay Z on board as well as serious indie cred by sampling Bon Iver, Kanye West is proving what many critics have argued and record sales show: Hip Hop is the last truly innovative pop music genre alive today. As a genre that can sample the past with dignity (rather than either parody or shameful disrespect as in many current slouching so-called indie bands), bridge every musical genre effortlessly, and move between racial and economic classes yet still remain distinct, it is the last musical superpower on the planet. True, Kanye West is a middle class kid from Chicago and doesn’t have the gansta narrative of Tupac, but he knows his limits and draws into his records the talent and depth of the future as well as the past. As a art performance piece, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is really a wonder. True, he drops the F-bomb like rain in Glasgow in November, but he pulls together pop culture and high culture deftly as seen in his promo video for the single “Power”:
Many people will be putting My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as their number one release for the year for good reason and as a hip hop release is stands toe-to-toe with the best of them.
8 – Florence + The Machine/ Lungs
I only listen to two radio stations with any regularity anymore: KEXP 90.3 and KPLU 88.5. When I lived in Scotland I would stream them to my office computer in Number 4, The Square at the University of Glasgow and get my fill of great jazz and NPR (KPLU) and some of the best indie playlists on the planet (KEXP). I say this to note that radio stations are going the way of the dodo bird and it is getting harder to get exposure to new music from good sources. One example is Florence + the Machine which is a band I haven’t heard too many people talk about but thanks to both an NPR spotlight and hearing a couple tracks on KEXP encouraged me to check them out. Lead singer and songwriter Florence Welch is the daughter of a professor of Renaissance Art at University of London and this influence shows throughout the album. At once blending heavy drums, harpsichord, hand clap loops, Irish Harp, and choirs with at times a jazz time signature and at others a straight 4/4 pop riff, Florence + the Machine really brought a unique sound in their release Lungs that is both instantly singable (try not joining in on “Dog Days are Over” while driving in your car), rhythmically full and pushes us toward triumphant love (“Cosmic Love” has already appeared in numerous TV shows at critical ‘first kiss’ moments for humans falling for aliens (“V”), vampires (“The Vampire Dairies”), or superheroes (“Smallville”). At times the band swerves into Tom Waits territory (which is a good thing BTW) and at others just a simple pop ballad. Overall a really fun album that I doubt will make many top ten lists this year but deserves some respect. This video of “Cosmic Love” is fairly goofy, so I recommend just turning off your monitor and just listen to the track… sometimes (as the Buggles told us so many years ago) video really does kill the radio star…
7 – Bruce Springsteen/ The Promise
OK, OK… the songs were recorded in 1978 and only remastered and released in 2010, but give me a freakin’ break… this is the Boss! To be honest I didn’t take to his last studio release in 2009 “Working on a Dream” all that much (with the exception of ‘The Wrestler” which is classic Boss) and hearing that he was releasing some ‘lost tracks’ that were recorded around the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town was intriguing yet seemed like a Hail Mary throw to get some quick cash at Christmas. But as a hard core Boss fan I caved and picked up The Promise and was simply blown away at two things: (1) that songs he essentially gave away to other artists (“Fire”, “Because the Night”) just sound amazing and fresh now that the Boss has taken them back, and (2) the songs that he wrote during the Darkness on the Edge of Town season of his career were in some ways more mature than he was and that time and they need to marinade these past decades so that the Boss was ready to sing them. Granted, the songs he ‘gave away’ like ‘Fire’ and ‘Because the Night’ are fairly standard, but listening to the title track – ‘The Promise’ – is to be immersed into a world that is haunting and current in 2010: unemployment and underemployment crush the life out of youth and their ideals, hopes for lasting relationships seem to disappear and only the hope of escape is left. Sure, writing a song in your twenties can fill the song with power and anger, but with the Boss now in his 60’s there is now a wisdom and hopefulness in his voice and performance amidst the doubt and despair that is something few grown-ups today seem to offer the next generation. Having the Boss share these gems thirty years after they were first penned is to be introduced to long time friends who can at once remember the pain of youth and yet have lived through it into a sobriety and solidity that comes from weathering life’s storms well.
This performance of ‘Because the Night’ was taped during Bruce’s appearance on the Jimmy Fallon Show last month and he is backed by the Roots who, for my money, take the song to another level:
6 – The Black Keys/ Brothers
Whether you are a fan of Quentin Tarantino as a director and auteur, he certainly gave pop culture a reminder that 70’s soul and funk deserves to be canonized – if radio stations have forgotten about it, then his soundtracks were going to raise the funk from the grave. One of the things you feel very quickly with The Black Keys is both the homage to 70’s funk acts and the seamless sense of immediacy in the tracks – like this is a first take and the raw energy is front and center – that only Jack White has seems to pull off. Dan Auerbach (on guitar and vocals) and Patrick Carney (on drums) who make up The Black Keys had a strong outing with their Danger Mouse produced 2008 release Attack and Release. In the Pitchfork review of Brothers earlier this year, they noted that while Danger Mouse only produced one track on the album, his fingerprints are still all over Brothers – the quasi-dirge vibes riffing a deep scratchy Delta blues sound blended with Parliament-era falsetto funk vocals from Auerbach and then brought to a froth with some funky, quirky blended bass lines and rhythm grooves from Carney is just amazing. You so want to be in a nice venue when these guys crank it up and the album captures some of that lightening.
5 – Gil Scott-Heron/I’m New Here; Roky Erickson/True Love Cast Out All Evil
I suppose I am cheating a bit by putting two albums under one as tied, but part of my indecision is the similarity in their relative authoritative distinctiveness [translation: you just can’t say “No” to either of these guys]. Of all the albums that came out this year that spoke of redemption and rebirth just by virtue of coming into existence, these two releases – Roky Erickson’s True Love Cast Out All Evil and Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here – both have equal claim. Both Roky Erickson and Gil Scott – Heron are legends whose careers have influenced generations yet careened off the road after falling headlong into LSD, Heroin, Booze and everything in-between. Erickson is credited with coining the phrase “psychedelic rock” during his time with the 13th Floor Elevators; Scott – Heron was a formative spoken word performer in the 1970’s that many consider to be the Godfather of Rap and cited alongside Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson as one of the most important figures in modern R & B and Hip-Hop. Both essentially disappeared from recording for the past two decades with only the occasional release or track sample but this year saw both not only returning with a full length treatment of their work, but releasing one of the best records of either of their career. In the case of Roky Erickson, his producer Will Sheff worked through over 60 songs that Erickson had written in the past 20 years and boiled down the tracks into a 14 song compilation of southern gothic and folk rock that, while under 60 minutes, is truly gripping. The proper artist designation should have Erickson coupled with Okkervil River on the record label since they are the backing band on every track and give all the songs control and depth. But Roky Erickson is the preacher of the day in these songs and when he sings “God is Everywhere” you believe him. Gil Scott – Heron’s I’m Not Here is a similar testimonial to endurance and coming through the ravages of prison and drug abuse without any fanfare or triumphalism but with a voice that is a cracked, smoky baritone with tread marks and battle scars, he sings with a conviction and humility that breaks your heart even while you are grooving to the beats. Lonliness and anxiety fill songs like “Where Did the Night Go” where sleeplessness only adds insult to injury with the fact that, as a poet, he can no longer verbalize his love in a way his lover can understand. It is as if he has awoken like Rip Van Winkle into a world that no longer speaks his language nor understands what it is to be human. This is brilliantly done on the amazing track “New York Is Killing Me” where he laments that he lives in a city of “eight million people, and I didn’t have a single friend.” Of the stunning tracks on I’m New Here, his electronica-addled cover of blues pioneer Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” is the stuff of Grammys. This is a song of wrestling with the demons that haunt so many but few have the courage to face let alone acknowledge as companions in this journey through life. Gil Scott-Heron’s cover speaks with the authority of one who not only looks the Devil in the eye, but also holds his head high and swears by a God that is larger and more profound than simple answers and easy redemption – the ending spoken word response at the end of his cover of “Me and the Devil” is chilling and hopeful at the same time. If more churches preached the way Gil Scott- Heron or Roky Erickson embrace their shadows for the sake of the light… then perhaps they wouldn’t be so empty.
4 – Neil Young/ Le Noise
Neil Young + X + Daniel Lanois + a lone Gibson guitar = ? It is like a math problem where the X factor could lead you into despair, angst or greatness depending on what divine intervention moves into play. Rather than go back to either his Crazy Horse days, Grunge grandfather or folky balladeer stance, Lanois introduced Neil Young to his inner Jack White and stripped him down to a fuzzed out Gibson guitar and wailing voice left alone in a noir-era LA mansion. The result could have been a car crash… but the X factor tilted toward the sublime and Le Noise is a force to be reckoned with. With the polished anger of a wild man who has wandered the labyrinth of his mind for a bit too long, Le Noise comes off as John the Baptist kicking over his amp and declaring ‘Behold, here comes the music that will take away the sins of the world!’ Lanois is a genius producer – his work with Bob Dylan, U2 and others gives a sense of his ability to work with huge egos and bring out the best in them. Le Noise is a short outing at just under 40 minutes but that is also its strength – it doesn’t overstay its welcome and leaves you restless for more.
3 – The Hold Steady/ Heaven Is Whenever
As Craig Finn stated in relation to the band’s 2005 album Separation Sunday, much of their music is about real people finding real redemption. In a world where religion promises a life to be found beyond this one and humanitarians and politicians alike can spend a lot of time and energy blaming everyone for the ills of society yet never get beyond the rhetoric, Finn believes that rock and roll may be the last chance for kids today to find not only a reason to live, but the force to do it. In an NPR ‘All Things Considered’interview, Finn called many of his songs “a prodigal-daughter story… it is about a girl who grew up in a religious background and goes off to try to find something bigger, better, or something she’s missing. And [she] has a lot of experiences and ends up coming back, not only to her family and to her town, but to her church.” Heaven is Whenever continues this narrative and picks up many of the battered and bruised characters Finn has acquainted us with in the past Hold Steady releases. True, Heaven is Whenever is a bit more polished in comparison to their last album Stay Positive or Boys and Girls in America, but make no mistake… the Hold Steady are still the best bar band you are going to encounter. With all the swagger of a honky tonk and the guilt of Catholic school gone bad, The Hold Steady play simple tunes with sing along choruses that play well for the working guy ordering domestic beer and nachos yet draws characters, images and metaphors from such deep wells as Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, the Rise and Fall of The Roman Empire and most of the Torah and Pastoral Epistles. Craig Finn looks like just another CPA, but he sings with the wisdom of disappointment that never stops looking for light in the darkness and the literacy of a Don DeLillo/George Eliot mash up. Heaven is Whenever is not their best album, but is still buries a lot of what was released this past year. Take the single ‘The Weekenders’ for a spin and see what I am mean:
2 – Mumford and Sons/ Sigh No More
When your parents are John and Ele Mumford, the leaders of the UK Vineyard Church, you would think that such a child would either end up as a drug addict, some raging atheist given over to free market capitalism, or a safe church leader following in a parents footsteps. What doesn’t often come to mind is the vocation of “It Guy” in the alt-folk-rock scene and moving millions of units with a debut album that name checks not only God but Shakespeare and Steinbeck as well. Marcus Mumford has certainly defied labels and the band’s debut album is a wonder. Sure, he is in line with Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, and other neo-folkies and as such Mumford and Sons can be seen as merely riffing on an already fading trend. But just listen to Sigh No More and you will quickly realize that this is something more. The lyrical depth is truly amazing, the arrangements are both quaint and surprising, and Marcus’ voice offers the dust bowl scrap and grind of Grapes of Wrath with the whimsy of an public school head boy sneaking out for fish and chips and seeing the dirty streets at 3am for the first time.
This version of “Awake My Soul” was recorded live on tour and is a fitting celtic-tinged affirmation of the need for a soul to be wide awake in the world of wonder:
1 – The National/ High Violet
Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, has a voice and writes songs that get compared to a lot of other artists – Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits to name a few. What I have yet to hear is the comparison to artists found on John Hughes movie soundtracks. Take just about every cut on the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack could be covered by The National and I would venture to guess that Berninger spent a good portion of his adolescence with many of the misfits that populate the Hughes teen film canon. As demonstrated in their last release The Boxer and this years High Violet, The National is a band concerned with coming-of-age
On High Violet, you could also argue that the effect of Tim LeHay’s Left Behind series and millennial fever is part of the back story given the apocalyptic images of floods, bee swarms, and even brain-eating zombies. Most of what this conjures up for the listener though is the strange effect loving something more than yourself means in a world that is falling apart at every turn. Given that Matt Berninger became a father during the recording of High Violet speaks to this anxiety of now having to provide and protect a life other than your own. to express the fear of a man who now must put a wife and young child ahead of himself. “Afraid Of Everyone” is what encapsulates this anxiety to perfection. As Berninger sings of being afraid ‘of everyone’ you honestly believe him. And yet the movement of the album doesn’t live in the paranoia of Radiohead nor the burn-the- world-down-and-start-again anthem that is found in Nine Inch Nails. No, with songs like “England” and “Bloodbuzz Ohio” The National sing of being fearful for others and the love that breaks their heart over and over and over again. In short, it is just a stunning album filled with complexity, brooding, wonder and at times quick wit and one of the lasting releases that I can imagine playing again and again.
So… that is my list for 2010. In case you are wondering, I do realize that Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire and many, many other favs are not on the list. I am certain that they will find space on other lists and I doubt their lack of mention here will hurt their fan base or their year end sales. As I said in the beginning, these are ‘top’ by virtue of floating up on my shoreline… and I am so glad they did.
I would love your thoughts and comments and even hear your top albums of the year.
One of the most difficult things about being a pastor is death. No… strike that.
One of realities of being human is death.
No… strike that as well.
Here, let me try this: one of the hardest things about being ANY human is knowing what to say and think about death.
Better… we will go with that and move on.
Today I officiated a memorial service for a 30 year women who died of a drug overdose. Her life was difficult in numerous ways but as testified to by family and friends, she always wanted to become more than her circumstances. She had two children – a 16 year old and a 4 year old. Her parents were divorced and remarried. Her husband speaks very little English. All of this came pouring into the meeting room at the church as we planned for this memorial service. They had been recommended to our church through a series of connections. As we sat and discussed the service, her father pushed a stack of CDs over to me with track numbers. “These are songs that she liked – ones that remind us of her and that she loved to sit and listen to,” he said. I looked them over: Sarah McLachlan, Mariah Carey, and… Metallica. “Have you heard of them?” he asked. One of the tracks he choose was “Nothing Else Matters” from Metallica’s 1981 “Black” album. “These are going to be great,” I said “these will be… awesome.”
“Nothing Else Matters” is a slow burner to be sure. Written as a goth ballad, Metallica’s lead singer James Hetfield wrote this song with only one hand strumming an Em chord while he was on the phone with his girlfriend. Since he held the phone with one hand (remember, this is 1991 and no bluetooth and cell phones were still the size of minivans but at least down from the monster trucks of the 80’s), he plucked the four open strings of a standard Em chord with the other, which eventually made up the first two bars of the song. It is a song of separation and a deep desire to get closer written with one hand holding onto the connection to what keeps him alive in this life and using the other to grasp at whatever will turn our longing, our hope, our love into an anthem large enough to fill stadiums. It is a song written so as to not forget what it means to be alive, and to give that gift of life to others through love and faith. The song is about longing for something more and seemed to fit perfectly for this memorial service. As the family and friends came into the fairly standard church sanctuary, more than a couple or eyebrows were raised as the Metallica tune filled the pews and spilled across floor under the alter and to the foot of the cross that hung on the wall. Tears started to flow as “Nothing Else Matters” became more than a metal ballad but a song of anger, promise and release wound up in chords and bars and rhythm. The open casket with this young women’s body lay there as the song continued on:
Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don’t just say
and nothing else matters
Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us, something new
Open mind for a different view
and nothing else matters
never cared for what they say
never cared for games they play
never cared for what they do
never cared for what they know
and I know
So close, no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No, nothing else matters
As the song ran its course, arms covered with more ink than a stack of comic books were rubbing their eyes and waiting for something beyond James Hetfiled’s simple tune as we looked toward the cross that hung over that casket. “Nothing else matters” opened the way for “something else” must matter amidst all this sorrow.
When people ask me what pop music has to do theology, it is in moments like these I wish I could bottle up and hand to the cynics. People get married, celebrate graduations, drive across the country and bury their family members to simple pop songs. People continue to seek after something that surrounds and empowers their lvies and for this reason I don’t believe in the post-Christian jargon some are used to evoking – I have yet to see that era truly in full bloom. However, the notion of the ‘after-Church’ world is certainly true. Granted, the ‘after-Church’ folks could truly benefit from the deep traditions and meaning found in the ancient church made new in their midst. But when death comes screaming into your world people will act like a proverbial drowning man at sea and will grab the most stable and recognizable thing found floating by.
For millions of folks it won’t necessarily be the hymnal in church pews but the song on their iPod that reminds them of hope, faith and love. These crazy songs make sense out of the chaos of life in ways so many other things shoveled at people never does.
I have a picture in my mind of this young women listening to “Nothing Else Matters” as we gathered there and perhaps wishing that as her family and friends gathered in this place they would write one more verse of that song with their very lives – that verse being lives lived in remembering her laughter, her love of the sunshine, her passion for music, and what it means to live out this love with others and in the presense of God who lives with us now.
As the service continued I read aloud of Psalm 23 and Romans 6: 3-9 and spoke of Paul’s promise that death dies and life will truly live at the end of all things and do hope that these words of promise got a grip on folks as they sat there. But I can bet that an old 1991 metal ballad is finding new life tonight for folks and hopefully there is a new verse being written in the lives of this family in deep mourning. That “something else” does matter, that we can reach out not with one hand restrained but embrace each other with both hands fully and experience an even stronger embrace of God’s grace and mercy.
Some would say that Metallica came to church today. But I think the gathered were ‘churched’ by James Hetfield and the band in ways we have yet to see the fruit of.
Like so many people this year, I have been swept up into the world of Lisbeth Salander and the Millennium Trilogy of the late Stieg Larsson that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Needless to say, the books follow a fairly predicable pot boiler thriller formula akin to a Scott Turow, Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy novel: an innocence protagonist is thrust (whether by chance or fate – you choose which *you* think organizes our lives) into a deeper world of deception and intrigue than typically meets the innocent eye. In the midst of this awakening to the darkness of the world that lurks just below the surface, the hero’s journey takes on the classic bildungsroman tradition of German Romanticism where a gathering of companions occurs to assist the protagonist in their journey of self discovery, healing, and building of courage to take on and overcome the evil (“All the Evil” as its called in The Girl Who Played with Fire)that only they are equipped to deal with. In the midst of this journey, the protagonist will face a choice – either to run from their fated journey toward redemption of both world and self and try to remain in their seemingly safe world that existed prior to being chosen/thrust into this dark world…. or they will choose to face down the dragons, the beasts, the evil of the self and world and risk losing everything – life, love, hope – in the name of redemption. It is a tale as old as time to be sure and this latest iteration found in the world of a Swedish cyberpunk computer hacker and a washed up magazine journalist is written in the well-worn genre to be sure.
But there are thousands of thrillers published every year – what has made this trilogy such a global hit?
I think in many ways one of the reasons is that Lisbeth Salander (in addition to being one of the most evocative female protagonists in popular fiction – a mix of Alias’ Sydney Bristow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly’s River Tam with photographic memory and serious ink) has ripped the curtain back to show our worst fear in the 21st century and exposed the truth of the world in which we live: there is no such thing as forgiveness as we had previously hoped or even imagined because now that our lives exist in cyberspace, our sins can never, ever be erased. Lisbeth Salander is the bearer of the apocalypse in so many ways: the idea of ‘starting over’ is a novelty of an age where people could forget their past by burning a box of letters from old lovers, throw away pictures, move to another state and begin again. To think that only 20 years ago the quaintness of a movie like 1991’s City Slickers offered up a world where after your life had spun out of control you could have a “do over” and start again – new life, new love, new future. That world is as antiquated as Western Union delivering a telegram to your door. In the Millenium Triology, Lisbeth Salander shows us the truth: there is no “do over” as we might have imagined. Everything you have ever written online is always there, every picture uploaded and tagged, every whimsical thought benignly put onto Facebook, every video caught on a phone and loaded onto YouTube, every email pinged back and forth sits on a server somewhere as a ticking time bomb just waiting for a person to hack into it and pull a file together.
In his July 19th article in the New York Times entitled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting“, Jeffrey Rosen shows us the unforgiving landscape of the digital age in all its starkness:
[The question for all of us is simple:] how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.
Strangely enough, one of the comforts I find in all this “exposure” is that it is long overdue that we learn that, in the end, forgiveness is ultimately never about forgetting. As someone who came through 80’s evangelicalism and its view that God forgave us in a way akin to a divine Etch-A-Sketch: we ask for forgiveness and that prayer somehow shakes God up and down vigorously and leaves a clean slate so total that somehow God can’t ever access our past ever again. From Aristotle’s view of the soul as the ‘unscribled tablet’ from “Περί Ψυχῆς” (De Anima or On the Soul) through to Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes and John Lockes’ Tabula Rasa and onto City Slicker’s mantra of the “do over” there is a perpetuation of forgiveness as equivalent to forgetting. To be honest, perhaps that is the true prayer of our hearts – that what we desire isn’t forgiveness anyway but merely forgetting on the behalf of God and others. How many of us choose to move on from the regrets, losses, flame outs in our lives with a ‘year zero’ approach – never speak of the past again… this is the new day…
Forgiveness is something so much more profound than mere forgetting. For one reason, forgiveness means we are forever changed in our redemption where mere forgetting is leaves us in the sameness of our brokenness. Sure, we make a break with the past in forgetting, but we are still the same without any deep and abiding shift in who we are and therefore only ready, willing and able to make the very same mistakes and errors over and over in some sick and twisted version of Bill Murray’s 1993 Groundhog Day (which coming out only a couple of years after City Slickers signals to me that the “do over” mantra perhaps didn’t have the purchase we had hoped). But forgiveness never forgets but is rehabilitating and unflinching in its gaze upon all that we have been and become and never lets us settle on the ease of walking away from our past nor merely getting everything back ‘as it was’ after we say “I’m sorry.”
[SPOILER ALERT]
This was the genius of Jeff Bridge’s Oscar winning turn as “Bad Blake” in last year’s Crazy Heart. As a drunk and relationally derelict fame-faded country singer, Bridge’s Bad Blake burns through bottles of whisky and serial relationships as an attempt as ‘forgetting’ as forgiveness over and over and over again. Yet when he stumbles into the relationship with a young women and her son whose love not only won’t allow him to forget his past, but also shows him that life worth living will cost him more than his own self-despair and loathing. When tragedy hits and causes a reckoning, Bad Blake loses everything but instead of trying once again to forget he begins the journey of forgiveness that alcoholics know in ways that so-called sober folks can only guess. To stand up at AA meetings week after week and introduce yourself as an alcoholic is an act of forgiveness and the furthermost thing from forgetting as it gets. Like a communal Lisbeth Salander, AA meetings hold up evidence of where and what you have done and we stand before the collected evidence and acknowledge that while the fact of our failings remain, the bigger story is the faith of forgiveness that wraps its arms around our failings with all the blood, sweat and tears of our past included and walks it into the light of day. The fact that Bad Blake ends the film without the girl he loved because the damage done was too great is a testimony that forgiveness also means we don’t get the world as we wish all the time… but healing and redemption is still worth it.
Let Lisbeth Salander dig away… what is forgotten can still be forgiven.
Few things scream pop culture like “Glee” – the Fox television show that just finished its second season. Set in a fictional Ohio high school, the show is essentially a mash up of Le Boheme, High School Musical, Fame, Grease, Happy Days, Saved By The Bell, Flashdance and Bring it On set to a K-Tel greatest hits 8 Track. The story is as old as Tristen and Isolde and its Elizabethan redux Romeo and Juliet: outcasts driven by a passion for the arts are marginalized by society and this exclusion fusions a collective that will not only conquer the culture, but will become culture itself. Add to this a never ending search for meaning, love, and a good dance number and you have the makings of some pretty demographically hot TV property. From a monetary standpoint, Glee has become the poster child for mass market penetration: rebooting pop songs with new voices (cover songs always work) and virtually tapping into the immediacy of this ‘new song’ by making the song available immediately on iTunes, the show has found a way to sell at multiple angles and thereby ensuring a media presence absolutely unparalleled in current television (as I write this 3 Glee collections sit in the top 10 albums on iTunes). Yet to dismiss the series as merely a money making scheme conjured up to feed the nostalgia needs of 40-somethings (most of the music trends toward the Gen X era… guess someone figured out we still have purchasing power and weren’t slackers after all…) is to miss a more profound hunger that Glee is meeting, albeit in a pop mode which means that it is never complete and always needing to be recast.
It is the hunger for anthems and ballads.
Rock music and its cousin pop music primarily fall into two distinct categories: the Anthem and the Ballad. Anthems are the rallying cry of the 75, 000 person stadium concert pumping fists in the air while standing close enough to the speakers so that our ears bleed like stigmata. This is usually the lead single for the album and its track listing is often second or third – this is the “are you with us or against us?” track. This is the “We Will Rock You”, “We are the Champions“, “Born in the USA“, “We’re Not Going to Take it Anymore”, “Baba O’Riley” [fill in the blank]. It is the music that grabs us by the shirt and shakes us like a dog tearing into a T-Bone steak after not eating for days. This is the soundtrack to the commuter on the highway fist pumping the roof of their Prius, the iPod jogger speeding up the hill, the base thumping of the Honda at the stoplight. Anthems speak about movement, of getting out of here, ending the nonsense job and taking a risk for a change. In short, Anthems are bigger than we will ever be and we want to be part of something that big. Ballads on the other hand are essentially the song of the heartbreak and remind us just how fragile we really are: this is the simple Casio tone keyboard of Yaz’s “Only You“, the pining piano and synth of Howard Jones’ “No One is to Blame“, the Sinead O’Connor cover of Prince’s “No One Compares to You” or Michael Stipe’s ode to agnosticism in REM’s “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts.” Somewhere between the Anthem and the Ballad is where many of us find ourselves – reaching for the confident booming volume and backbeat of the Anthem and the painful quiet of the Ballad. Yet while this is true for millions (see what the top singles are from week to week and the sales figures don’t lie) is not often acknowledged openly. In places of work, in our homes, in (yes) our churches – life is to be lived in control, measured, under wraps, and it is to be very, very predictable. Basically, while we secretly listen to Anthems and Ballads in our cars, our iPods, and on our computers like the one you are reading this blog at this very moment… life is lived from moment of Muzak to another. Devoid of passion, not risking surprises or unbridled emotions, millions fain a life in front of others that is merely a whisper of the Anthems and Ballads that are the soundtrack of the true, original story.
But Glee gets it and turns it up so we can’t avoid it…
Lesson from all this?
“Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey is more than an old recycled pop song for the Gleeks… it is actually truth in ways Steve Perry probably had NO idea it would be. To admit not only liking but loving that song and its Glee version is tantamount to cultural suicide in some erudite circles (try suggesting a Journey sing-a-long at a university faculty meeting… see how THAT goes!) But the hunger for more than this plain life of Muzak continues on… and so will shows like Glee.
Doubting Thomas? Feel like you can just be the cynic and deploy all your well phrased post-structuralist firepower on all this and remain unscathed?
There are just some things that when you encounter them, you go “Oh…yeah… that is just so weird that it must be divinely inspired.” For me, those things include the Smokey Bacon Maple Bar at Frost Donuts in Mill Creek, genre defying movies such as Repo Man, The Big Lewbowski and The Princess Bride to name but a few, and anytime either a banjo or ukulele gets some serious truck in a song. To the latter point, Amanda Palmer’s recent announcement in Paste magazine that she is slated to release an EP of Radiohead covers played on… wait for it… the ukulele (!) just warms the heart of this 60’s boy from Honolulu to no end. On her blog post for February 22nd she put it rather missionally:
“A Radiohead ukulele cover album might just have to be what I do to Shed The Past and Find God… Some people ACTUALLY find god and record christian albums. I just find Radiohead.”
Johnny Cash’s career is one for the ages – a story with the resonance of Moses: his grandparents immigrated from the Glasgow shipyards and he was born into poverty in the land of promise as the son of a share cropper yet gifted with a voice that could sing into the poverty in all of us as well as beyond that poverty into something more. He was a mentor to Elvis and a bad boy before thugs got record contracts. His early career was truly the all-american success story – he was more than famous – he defined fame itself in early days. He crossed genres and mediums – scoring hits on the pop charts as well as country chards, had a long running television show and did film work. Then in the 70’s as disco took hold and moved us into the 1980’s, Cash’s currency began to wane. It was through the revisionism of Rick Rubin – the wunderkind producer par excellence – and his American Recordings series in the 1990’s that brought Johnny Cash back to us with a holy vengeance. Like a junkyard dog who refused to die without sinking his teeth into you one last time, Rubin turned Cash loose on tracks by artists as diverse as Nine Inch Nails, Neil Diamond, Sheryl Crow, Soundgarden and Tom Petty to rip the songs part with his sharecropper growl and claim them for himself. Of all the haunting covers he recorded with Rubin over the next decade, none captures Cash’s gift like Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat and Trent Reznor’s Hurt (which won Cash a Grammy for the song and video). The Mercy Seat sounds like a lost track from the At Folsom Prison sessions – a stark, raw final exclamation of a man on death row in a electric chair. Hurt is one of the most ‘human’ songs to be recorded in popular music and is one of the few examples of the video medium serving the song as opposed to distracting or covering up a bad song with dance numbers or CGI (Click through to the video and take a moment to see what I am talking about).
The release this week of Ain’t No Grave marks what is being said to be the final installment of Rubin’s American Recording series. Ain’t No Grave is the sixth installment and is a welcome close to this incredible series. Granted, the tracks are obviously a culling together of reminders from recording sessions past (the five CD American Recordings Box Set that was released a few years ago is an example of how much surplus material Rubin still had just laying around the studio).
Thematic CDs are nothing new for Cash – Columbia released a 3 part series (Love, God, Murder) a few years back to ride Rubin’s American Recording success. That Rubin culled this collection to identify Cash’s thoughts on death, loss, and life after the grave is poignant to say the least. The only original tune on the collection is “1Corinthians 15:55” which holds that iconic verse “oh death, where is thy sting?” Cash sings from this space as someone in the throws of the end and resting in the promise of death as opposed to denying it. It is truly haunting to hear these songs knowing that Cash is no longer singing this mediation upon death – these songs are the preamble to his embrace and a call to confidence in death for a generation that is terrified by it. Having lost his wife – June Carter Cash – just years prior to these recordings and knowing that the end was coming, Rubin reflects in the February 17th Rolling Stone that these tracks were born from confidence and not fear: “He didn’t really have fear and he already was dealing with pain,” Rubin said. “I think he had acceptance. When he knew he was going to die, he was calm and matter of fact about it, and … that was it.”
It really is a wonderful, honest, clear reflection on life and the gift of death that reminds us to take stock of what we have and the God that awaits us both in this life and the life that is yet to come.
This weekend I am rounding out my first rough (read: ROUGH) draft of my book project on theology and popular music entitled Your Neighbor’s Hymnal: What Pop Music can teach Christians about Faith, Hope and Love. The book is under contract with Cascade Books and I hope to have it ready for press by June 2010. If you are familiar with Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs, then you will be familiar with the way the book will flow – I am tracing the themes of faith, hope and love through 52 pop songs (a song a week) and seeing the way the artists and the culture have framed these three Christian virtues. If you have songs that you feel need to be in here, post your suggestion and what you feel this song/artist has to teach us about faith, hope and/or love. You might get your song in the book and name checked!
a redirecting of hungers and longings that have gone astray, but it is essentially a season of justice. As I will tell students as we enter Ash Wednesday that they are called to remember along with Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:19 that they too will “return to the ground from which they are taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Yet going back to the beginning of things – our dustiness – also means that we can allow new things to take root, to grow into full bloom, and perhaps bear fruit in ways we never would have expected. As an exercise of justice, I challenge students to remember that Lent is a call to justice in three vectors:
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